Stop ACTA!
ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.
ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.
More on ACTA:
New "Leo Search" version released
I updated my Firefox extension for searching the Leo.org database some minutes ago. I added no new features, just made it compatible to the newest versions of Firefox.
You will find the Download here. In some days it will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leo-search/.
Have fun... ;)
Evaluating DS1626
I got some samples from MAXIM some few days ago. Since I was busy studying other stuff I had no time to give them a try. Today I tried the DS1626 Temperature Sensor.
It was very easy to setup in the Arduino environment using the SoftwareSerial library. One problem I had was, that I was not able to write the temperture to my LCD display. I could not figure out why this happens. The LCD code didn't worked anymore when including the SoftwareSerial header without using any functions of it...
Another problem for me was, that the DS1626 is being delivered in a SOP8 package and I for the first time needed to solder SMD. I used an adapter for SOP28 to DIP28 conversion because I wanted to place the IC on my breadboard. I soldered it successful and it worked right out of the box... ;)