A few days ago, the blower motor on my Carrier Weathermaker 9200 furnace stopped working. Luckily, this model of furnace provides quite a bit of debugging information printed on the inside of the door. It was very straightforward to test the blower motor and confirm that it was not the source of the problem. After a bit of poking around with a multimeter, the only remaining possibility was the blower motor relay.

This furnace is …

Today I was watching a video on using Vim as a Python IDE when a comment about the health benefits of Vim caught my attention. Oddly enough, one of the reasons I decided to learn Vim was because of hand pain. After switching to Vim full-time, I have experienced less pain and could not imagine going back.

One additional step I took was to remap the left Ctrl key to Caps Lock. This has made …

The following are instructions for installing Qt and compiling a demo application using the MinGW toolchain:

1. Download the Qt 4.8.4 libraries installer here.
2. Run the installer. If a warning message about the version of the w32api.h file appears ignore it and continue the installation (my install is version 3.17 and appears to work fine).
3. By default, the installer does not add the Qt toolchain to the PATH. Instead, it provides a …

When writing large documents with a text editor, it is sometimes useful to zoom out and get a high-level view of the file (I believe Sublime Text has a feature called minimap that does this). This functionality can be added to gVim with a simple vimrc addition (to my knowledge, this will not work with regular Vim).

Add the zoom out command with the following: noremap <Leader>zo :set guifont=courier_new:h4<CR>

Add the …

While browsing YouTube recently, I stumbled upon a video about a great third-party Python module called Docopt. It greatly simplifies writing command-line utilities; instead of writing custom logic using the standard library optparse or argparse modules, you simply write the usage docs for the utility and Docopt handles the parsing. Check out the documentation; there are some great examples that really showcase the power of this module.

Recently, I had a need for a very lightweight static website generator. The idea was to have AsciiDoc and Pandoc handle the markup to HTML conversions while the generator would simply apply the HTML content to a Jinja2 template. The result was PopPage, a simple command-line driven website generator. It plays nicely with native Windows batch scripting and I plan on providing a few examples in the GitHub repo shortly.

Received my first Raspberry Pi the other day. I ordered two Model B devices from Newark and, despite the high demand, received them in about a week. My intended use for the first R-Pi was to serve as a mini-HTPC for my basement TV. I tried both Omxplayer running on Raspbian and Raspbmc. I was very please with the performance of both; they were able to stream videos from my NAS with no issue. Unfortunately …

Opening a scratch buffer in Vim can come in handy. The following vimrc addition works well: nnoremap <Leader>sc :e scratch<CR>:setlocal readonly<CR>

It is especially useful in combination with the run shell command shortcut once Vim is configured to change to the directory of the current file with the following vimrc addition: autocmd BufEnter * execute "chdir ".escape(expand("%:p:h"), ' ')

The advantage this named buffer has over the [No Name] buffers created …