News Archives

September 10, 2018
I bought some Xilinx Spartan 3 and Spartan 6 based FPGA boards a few years ago. I have finally started doing something with them. I have added an FPGA notes section to my wiki to hold information about my successes and failures while I learn to work with FPGAs and how to control them using VHDL.
May 19, 2018
Every now and then I would think about getting a 3D printer. I would start researching available printers. After reading about the various printers, and all the possible issues with them, and the time it can take to learn to use them effectively I would talk myself out of buying one. However, this year my family didn't know what to get me for my birthday so they offered to buy me a 3D printer. After looking around for a while I found a deal on a printer that needed some minor repairs. I will be writing about some of my experiences with a 3D printer in my wiki.
March 8, 2018
My Patreon page was launched on March 6, 2018. Today, March 8, I received my first donation.
July 13, 2016
I was updating the news on this page and decided to check my BlackDuck profile (formerly Ohloh). On July 8 I made my 1,000th commit to Open Source projects. The real number is higher but BlackDuck doesn't count changes made to branches.

Commit number 1,000 was made to the Open Simulator project. The changelog entry was: 
    commit 21de9162258057a59cf42acad89938b353c02d6f
    Author: Kevin Cozens 
    Date:   Fri Jul 8 16:04:36 2016 -0400

        Fixed the order of two file names used in a warning.
February 20, 2016
Today was a very bad day. The beloved family cat who adopted us about ten and a half years ago died this morning at 11:20am after a two month month illness. The family is feeling completely and utterly shattered. I have created an album in my Flickr account containing pictures of Ash that I have taken over the years. I have removed the pictures of Ash from the Gallery section of this site as the Flickr album has more pictures of him.
January 9, 2016
I have completed the development work on my AVR Programmer for Raspberry Pi project. The last things I need to do for this project are to write up some documentation, and to make available the version of avrdude_gui that I have been using.
July 7, 2015
I have added a second project to the Hackaday website. The project is a GPS Receiver for Nikon D3100 Cameras.
June 28, 2015
I have added my AVR Programmer for Raspberry Pi project to the Hackaday website.
May 10, 2015
Fixed the links in the main navigation bar of the sub-pages of the software section of this website.
February 22, 2015
I have started working on the design of some hardware that will let me program AVR microcontrollers using the SPI interface on a Raspberry Pi. I was using a USB based AVR programmer but the AVR microcontroller it uses has gone bad. I can fix it but to program a new microcontroller requires a programmer. This sounds like a catch 22, or a chicken and egg situation, but I can break the cycle by using the Raspberry Pi I have sitting on my workbench.
April 28, 2014
I was out for a walk by a local pond recently when I saw an unusual object. As I was taking a picture of it another photographer saw me and we got to talking. He was interested in seeing the pictures I've been taking. After talking with him I decided to post some of my photographs to Flickr.

I was told Flickr is used by a lot of professional photographers (not that I am a professional). I found out I already had access to Flickr as I have a Yahoo! account and Flickr is tied in with Yahoo!. The size of the files generated by the camera would very quickly cause me to run out of the disk space I have available for use by this website. Flickr will allow me to upload thousands of pictures.
January 2, 2013
Today I finally took the plunge and joined those other photographers who have gone digital. I have used a 35mm SLR film camera since I was in high school. I have looked at digital cameras over the last few years but the point and shoot ones were just "toys" to me compared to what I was used to using and the SLR ones were out of my price range.

Digital SLR cameras have come down in price and the image resolution, in terms of megapixel counts, has gone up. Their image quality is now close to that of 35mm film. When my family offered to cover the cost of a new digital camera for Christmas, plus a couple of entry level digital cameras being on sale over the holidays I found myself the owner of a new Nikon D3100. I've always used Canon for film cameras so this is my first time I've owned a camera that wasn't made by Canon. After I've started using the camera to take pictures I may put add some of them to the Gallery section of this website.
July 13, 2012
Updated this page and the About Me page.
June 29, 2012
Updated my links, hamlinks, and bookmarks pages.
June 14, 2012
This past weekend I wrote the final exam for the 6.002x course I started on March 5. The sample final exams we were given weren't nearly as scary as the sample midterm exam. I still don't feel I could have done well if we only had the suggested three hours for the exam.

154,763 students registered for the course. Only 10,547 people attempted the midterm exam and only 9318 passed it. At the end, 10,262 students attempted the final exam, 5,800 passed the final exam, and 7,157 got a completion certificate for a final grade of at least 60% overall.

I did well on the labs, homework, and exams and managed a 92% overall for the course. This is the highest grade I've ever achieved in formal education. I was quite pleased with my results. The math got intense at times. Weeks 5 and 9 in particular had some killer math. The course is going to be run again in the fall. If your math skills are a bit weak, or you don't know calculus, you will most likely find this course very tough.
April 29, 2012
This past weekend I wrote the final exam for the 6.002x course I started on March 5. The sample final exams we were given weren't nearly as scary as the sample midterm exam. I still don't feel I could have done well if we only had the suggested three hours for the exam.
March 17, 2012
Added an Education section to my list of links.
March 5, 2012
Today is the first day of the 6.002x Circuits and Electronics course being run online as part of MITx (MIT's new online learning initiative). The pre-requisites are Physics, Algebra, and Calculus. I have always liked math and took Functions, Calculus, and Algebra in my last year of high school, and used Calculus in some classes at Ryerson. I may get to exercise my math skills in this course.
February 29, 2012
An email from one of the mailing lists I am on mentioned an upcoming circuits and electronics course being run online by MIT. The course starts this coming Monday. I signed up for it today. It might be a good refresher of information I already know and for what I may have forgotten.
February 23, 2012
Added a Hardware section to this website.
February 18, 2012
Updated the wiki software used on this site.
February 4, 2012
Updated/fixed the gallery section of the website.
January 10, 2012
Updated the SWL & Ham Radio links page.
January 7, 2012
Updated the Tons of Links page.
November 3, 2011
Updated the utilities scripts on the GIMP Extras page.
October 21, 2011
Updated the page of domestic and international radio links.
April 1, 2011
Added a download and news page for the gimp-perl section of this site. Minor update to the Tiny-Fu download page.
February 26, 2011
Added the start of information on gimp-perl to the software section of this site. Minor update to the About Me page.
February 15, 2011
Updated the Tiny-Fu FAQ page.
March 7, 2008
Added the Sony ICF-2010 headphone jack repair page to the collection of information about the Sony ICF-2010.
January 17, 2008
A page page was added with information on diagnosing and fixing the ICF-2010 front-end FET problem. A few images have been added to the Ash section of my gallery.
November 26, 2007
The TinyScheme page of this site has been updated. I also added a link to a section of my wiki where I plan to add documentation about TinyScheme.
November 23, 2007
I recently obtained dumps of the PDB API from all GIMP releases starting with the 1.0 version. I am using these dumps to update my script which updates Script-Fu scripts. In particular, I had previously been lacking some information about the PDB API in GIMP prior to the 2.0 version. I have also updated the "About Me" page and added information about the Open Source projects I work(ed) on.
November 10, 2007
There have been several updates and some new content added to the pages in the Script-Fu section of the wiki.
November 5, 2007
The pages in the Tiny-Fu section of this site have been updated. There is also news about the start of work on version 2.0 of Tiny-Fu.
November 2, 2007
Added some new entries to the Other Scripts table on the GIMP scripts page.
September 17, 2007
Added a Script-Fu script which matches the colours of one image to the colours of another image. Details about this script can be found on the scripts I created for use with GIMP page.
August 2, 2007
Fixed a few broken navigation links and links to the pantone.gpl and bootableusb.html files. A minor change was made to the web server configuration and some .htaccess files were added to allow Perl scripts to be retrieved from this site without having to change the filename.
July 8, 2007
Updated some links on the pages in the Links section of this site. I also fixed links to the Script-Fu/Tiny-Fu Perl scripts.
April 7, 2007
I have added a page to the Linux section containing the steps I follow when making a USB key bootable.
April 3, 2007
A new version of the OQP Contest Logger is now available. This update is mainly of interest to users who will be operating as either a mobile or a rover.
March 29, 2007
Today marks the official launch of the gallery and wiki sections of my web site. The links to both sections can be found in the navigation bar located in the header portion of all pages. The new sections have little in the way of content at the moment but this will change over time.
March 27, 2007
A new version of the OQP Contest Logger is now available. If you use this software during (or after) the contest, you MUST download and use the new version for this years running of the OQP.
March 18, 2007
I have installed a wiki on this site and will be using it to create documentation for several of the projects in which I am involved. I updated the download page for the OQP Contest Logger. The Script-Fu update script has been updated.
March 11, 2007
The big change today was the splitting of the GIMP scripts page in to two separate pages. One page lists only those scripts I have written and the other page lists only those scripts written by other people which I have updated. I also added the GIMP 2.2 script I wrote which changes the colour palette of an indexed image.

In terms of non-GIMP related changes, I updated the links to the official site for the Ontario QSO Party in the pages for the OQP logging software.
March 4, 2007
I have been working on other projects for a while so there has been nothing to report until now. I am preparing to add a gallery section to this site. I plan to use it to hold items ranging from pictures of the family cat, QSL cards I have used, 3D model files and renderings, to photographs I have taken. I just completed the changes to the theme system so it fits in better with the overall look of this site. I plan to launch it soon. Its exact content will depend on what I think will be of interest to my family and friends.

For those of you interested in matters relating to GIMP, I made a couple of minor updates to the script which is used to update GIMP scripts. You can download it from the GIMP Extras page.
January 21, 2007
A little while ago I made sure all of my web pages passed XHTML 1.0 Strict validation. Last night I decided to go the next step and updated the pages to pass XHTML 1.1 validation. It was interesting to see some of the minor errors in HTML markup that were flagged by the extra level of validation.
January 10, 2007
The modelling tools and the rendering tools pages have undergone some cleanup. The POV-Ray information was moved to the rendering tools page and some erroneous/misleading comments about it were fixed. I also added information about some other rendering tools.
January 2, 2007
In the wee hours of this morning I removed all of the content from my old host. I left behind pages which will redirect visitors to the same page on the new host (ie. where you are now). I moved the download information for the OQP Contest Logger software to a separate page. Finally, I made yet another minor adjustment to the style sheets to reduce the amount of white space in the side menus.
January 1, 2007
Happy New Year to one and all!

This site sees a new start for a new year. It is now found under its own domain name on a new host. It makes way for all sorts of things that I can do now that I could not do on the old host.
December 30, 2006
I was finally able to spend the time to go through the rest of the pages on my web site and check that they all pass XHTML 1.1 validation. Any pages which did not pass validation were altered as necessary. This also lead me to realize that the page on installing GCC under IRIX had gotten lost. I was able to recover the contents of that page from the web archive so it is back once again in case anyone still finds the information useful.
December 28, 2006
After a couple of months of looking around the Internet for domain name registrars and Canadian web hosting services, I finally registered a new domain and copied my pages to a new hosting service.
December 18, 2006
I finally finished updating the "About This Site" page. I also made a minor change to the "Welcome!" message on the main page for this site.
December 13, 2006
Updated the list of SIOD Functions used in GIMP. Fixed the formatting of the 3D Models page. Fixed XHTML validation errors in the Graphics section pages. I will be reviewing the rest of the pages on this site for valid markup and correcting any problems as time permits.
December 2, 2006
More changes to the style sheets. All pages with lists are now formatted better than before. Fixed up the radio pages. Some minor updates to the main collection of links.
October 30, 2006
I have updated the Author/info links on the GIMP scripts page. I will be reviewing the scripts listed on that page shortly to see if they work with the 2.2 and current CVS versions of GIMP. Updated the style sheets to improve the look of the tables on the GIMP scripts page.
October 15, 2006
There has been an exciting development regarding the Tiny-Fu project. See the announcement on the Tiny-Fu main page. The web pages in the software section have been cleaned up. No more pages with three left-side menus.
September 30, 2006
A minor update to use more generic names for the image files which are displayed at the top left corner of each page and are used as an icon for the different sections of the web site.
September 25, 2006
The Tiny-Fu pages have been updated. Information on the new 1.1.0 release for use with the 2.3/CVS versions of GIMP has been added.
September 20, 2006
I have continued to make some adjustments to the main style sheet. I added some additional information to the style sheet to improve the look of certain HTML elements. Additional minor changes have been made to the style sheet to improve the look of the site and to fix a few minor issues when the site was viewed with Internet Explorer.
September 6, 2006
The pages of my web site have been converted over to the new design. Some restructuring of the links and software pages is planned to take advantage of the new site design. This should improve load times of certain pages as well as improve the access to information of certain sections.
August 13, 2006
I decided to break the style sheet I was experimenting with in to two parts. One part contains the basic style information while the other contains only colour information. I have been making some adjustments to the style sheets and I am mostly happy with the way the sample pages look.

The big job of converting over approximately 40+ pages to the new design has begun. I expect to discover that some additional work on the style sheets will be needed as they probably won't provide layout information for some of the HTML elements I have been using on my web pages.
August 9, 2006
Two days ago, web site while surfing the net, I stumbled across the Any Browser Campaign web site. I originally found this site on the 23rd of October in 2004. I had bookmarked the site and then forgot about it. For several months I have been wanting to redesign my web site but I had no overall idea as to a new design. Re-discovering the "Any Browser Campaign" web site gave me the inspiration I had been lacking. It made me realize just what it is possible to do these days with style sheets. I also liked the idea behind the "Any Browser Campaign" since it has always been one of the basic ideas I have tried to incorporate in to my web site.

One of the goals for the new design was to use a layout which would allow me greatly improve the organization of the software section of the site. After some addition exploration of the "Any Browser Campaign" site and a few of the sites they linked to, I have come up with the basic design for my site. Another decision I made early on was to use the old colour scheme in the new site. I also had the idea of providing some form of icon at the top of the pages which would change as a visitor to the site moved from one section of my site to another.

I have created two test pages to allow me to make some adjustments to the style sheet information to fine tune the new look for the pages. Once I am happy with the basic look I will begin the work of converting the existing pages on my web site to the new design.
June 10, 2000
This entire site has been restructured and given a fresh new look. I feel it looks much better than what I had before. Also, the new structure makes it much easier to add additional content in the future.