mattgadient.com

Recently grabbed a couple “50W” led flood lights. Electrically hazardous, missing screws, and mislabelled drivers – what’s not to love?!

Here I adjust the pH of water used for watering plants grown indoors. Tap water + pH meter + vinegar/citric acid.

Looking at the little Atom MAV nano, and an in depth guide for soldering to convert this quadcopter from “Mode 4” to the more common “Mode 2” controls.

The Air Hogs almost-indestructible “Helix Ion” quadcopter – a quick look.

Running LED’s from a simple bridge rectifier: a look at my little project.

Collecting data from Bridgelux/Cree datasheets and the Cree tool, and figuring out what’s the most efficient way to go… within reason.

A look inside (yet another) E27-based grow LED… this time, a mid-priced model that looked cheap from the get-go, and despite being advertised as 15W, only pulls 3W from the wall.

Opening up another UFO grow light. This time, a 130W grow LED that uses 132x1W leds (SMD5630). I take a look at the internals, measure the voltage, make comparisons to previous leds, etc.

A look at a couple grow LED’s that fit in a standard light socket, and are heavily over-rated.

A look at the “guts” of the Galaxy Hydro 135W LED grow light. Here’s hoping for some tasty tomatoes!

You know what they say: Buy cheap, buy twice! But in this case we might be able to just fix it.

I compared the performance of PHPNG to the default PHP 5.5.9 that comes with Ubuntu 14.04LTS. The results were impressive.

I decided to give WebP a shot on a Ubuntu 14.04LTS VPS running nginx. Here’s the process I followed, and the results!

Trying to find a WordPress lightbox that didn’t require JQuery was nothing short of a nightmare. So I put together my own!

Nginx has a great directive called “gzip_static” that will serve pre-gzipped content. Here’s how I set up a VPS to generate pre-gzipped versions automatically.

I ran some quick speed tests against 4 common DNS providers from 12 locations, and put together the results.

While trying to convert from a Unity Terrain to static geometry, I ran into the issue of extracting and manipulating the splatmaps. I put together a tool to make it less painful.

Thinking about trying to desulfate lead-acid batteries with epsom salt? I’ve gone through some of the background behind it and the process here.

CDN’s are pricey, but with a little work, you can set up a few cheap VPS’s as edge caches and roll your own! I’ve gone over one possible implementation here.

A look at DISQUS and WordPress from a speed perspective – if you’re looking for fast page load times, you might be surprised at the results.