mattgadient.com

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 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.

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.

When using RF (Constant Quality), setting slower speeds in Handbrake results in smaller files. Except when it doesn’t. Details on the confusing mess that ensues is in here.

There are many possible causes of 502 errors in Nginx and I look at one of them. If you recently set it up to proxy over HTTPS, the proxy_pass directive probably contains the issue.

I wanted a way to quickly purge the Nginx fastcgi cache from within WordPress, and quickly threw together a plugin that does the job.

De-noising in Handbrake has historically been one of the tricker aspects to delve into. Here I delve away, giving examples of what different settings mean and do.

The concept of “RF” values can be tricky for a newcomer to wrap their head around. I break it down here with screenshots at various settings, a video, and a full explanation.

Aimed at v0.9.9 but helpful for all versions of Handbrake, this guide is aimed at those who want to understand what each of the options actually do and when you might want to use them.