Cheshire Engineering Corporation

08/18/2022

40 years in business. 8/18/82 !

06/16/2017

A friend damaged a USB thumb drive accidentally. There were files on the drive that were valuable to him, so making some effort to recover them seemed worthwhile. The damage was entirely mechanical. Something had whacked the drive while it was inserted in the front panel USB slot of a PC. The whack was hard enough to break the USB A connector off of the drive's PCB. [ 931 more words ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2017/06/16/broken-usb-thumb-drive-data-recovery/

05/19/2017

Once again the criminals have managed to make the news with a piece of software that damages your PC. It even has a catchy name (or two or three since their seems to be some disagreement): WannaCry, WCry, WannaCrypt, or Wanna Decryptor. As with Heartbleed, Shellshock, POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption), and several more since, the problems got enough visibility outside of the tech community to make people worry. [ 965 more words ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2017/05/19/should-i-cry-about-ransom-ware/

Once again the criminals have managed to make the news with a piece of software that damages your PC. It even has a catchy name (or two or three since their seems to be some disagreement): WannaCry…

04/21/2017

Like many of us, I have an old laptop just laying around that works mostly just fine, but is a bit long in the tooth and perhaps is still running Windows XP. Of course, I could install Windows 10 on it, but that would cost money and it isn't clear that the result would be a pleasant experience. So I decided to try installing Linux. [ 1,658 more word ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2017/04/20/refreshing-old-hardware-with-linux

Like many of us, I have an old laptop just laying around that works mostly just fine, but is a bit long in the tooth and perhaps is still running Windows XP. Of course, I could install Windows 10 o…

04/05/2017

Back in the days of yore, when computers had front panels of switches and lights and core memory was actually made of ferrite cores, an editor seemingly designed for writing editors came to life. Amazingly, it is still alive and can be used on modern Windows, Mac, and Linux systems today. In those early days, computer makers did not always worry about data interchange, and representations for text outside of the Roman alphabet, numerals, and a few punctuation marks. [ 1,245 more word ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2017/04/01/ancient-tools-the-teco-editor-vs-utf-8-text

Back in the days of yore, when computers had front panels of switches and lights and core memory was actually made of ferrite cores, an editor seemingly designed for writing editors came to life. A…

02/17/2017

Like many people who cook, often the result is a pot full of something that needs to be transferred to one or more containers and then stored. Which leads to the obvious questions: How many containers of what sizes do we need? This might seem off-topic for an engineering company, but there is a role for software to play in making this question easier to answer, and I think I've found a clever solution that might help others. [ 960 more words ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2017/02/17/pan-rulers-or-how-to-store-that-pot-of-soup

Like many people who cook, often the result is a pot full of something that needs to be transferred to one or more containers and then stored. Which leads to the obvious questions: How many contain…

12/28/2016

Cheshire Engineering would like to wish all our customers past, present, and future the best of success in the new year.

07/27/2016

As a step in our ongoing effort to refresh our company image, we have updated our logo from informally using the Cheshire Cat, to a deliberately designed image that reflects our focus: Our logo draws on the many interesting projects that straddle the border between the real world and the computer, or the interface between analog and digital. The symbol used is closest to the schematic symbol for an opamp, but could stand for any of several of the key electronic components in the path from a real phenomenon to a digital measurement. [ 132 more words. ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2016/07/27/new-logo

As a step in our ongoing effort to refresh our company image, we have updated our logo from informally using the Cheshire Cat, to a deliberately designed image that reflects our focus: Our logo dra…

07/22/2016

Let's use a key pair to access a server at DreamHost with SSH from Windows. As another quick note about our recent experience with moving some web hosting to DreamHost, I want to provide an anecdote about SSH and remote access to servers. My hope is mostly that what I learned can inform others who find themselves with a similar mystery at DH or elsewhere. [ 1129 more words. ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2016/07/21/fun-with-dreamhost-ssh-tera-term-and-keys

Let’s use a key pair to access a server at DreamHost with SSH from Windows. As another quick note about our recent experience with moving some web hosting to DreamHost, I want to provide an a…

07/05/2016

I've mentioned before that Cheshire likes to use Fossil for version control. Most of our need is for internal use only, but occasionally it is handy to have a server under our control that hosts a repository. After a recent move to hosting at DreamHost, I decided to find out how difficult it would be to host a fossil repository on their server. [ 2072 more words. ]

I’ve mentioned before that Cheshire likes to use Fossil for version control. Most of our need is for internal use only, but occasionally it is handy to have a server under our control that ho…

05/05/2016

For a personal project, I needed a device that could play distorted audio and take cues, as described by a previous post. With hardware selected and some idea of what the function is to be, it is time to write some firmware. I used the Teensy Audio library and a new synthesized signal source for the primary signal path. Recorded sounds came from uncompressed 16-bit PCM WAV files stored on a µSD card via the… [ 1768 more words. ]

http://curiouser.cheshireeng.com/2016/05/05/basic-firmware-for-an-audio-player-with-effects/

For a personal project, I needed a device that could play distorted audio and take cues, as described by a previous post. With hardware selected and some idea of what the function is to be, it is t…