Shane Rutter Blog

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  • The Defender D90 Project

    The Defender D90 Project

    I have a Defender D90 shell on a Vaterra Ascender chassie but it is starting to look a mess, partly due to me leaving it last minute to spray and build the truck just before the RRCI Scale Nations 2015 August meet up. We were still working on it late into Friday night ready for the morning.

    As you can see we managed to get the truck running and it looked good, this didn’t last very long. It turns out spraying 6 lays of under coat, spray and lacquer all within about 5 hours does not allow the paints to adhere correctly.

    As the shell is designed to fit a SCX10 the wheels didn’t align up perfectly leading to quite a bit of rubbing, I learnt a lot that weekend and have since decided it’s about time I redo the whole truck. I will be posting up regular updates on my progress which will hopefully be of interest.

  • UPS modification getting rid of the annoying beeping

    UPS modification getting rid of the annoying beeping

    I connect a UPS to a generator allowing me to safely power my sensitive electronic equipment (laptops) when in remote locations, generators are not perfect and occasionally the power fluxuates causing spikes, over and under voltage issues. To resolve these issues and make it safer for my sensitive devices I use a UPS which provides a cleaner and more reliable energy supply. When a under voltage occurs the UPS boosts the power using the battery, when this happens (which is often) the UPS beeps for an extended period (indicating it is using the battery, which I don’t really need to know as it’s only for a couple of seconds normally).

    (more…)

  • Knowing your Generator (Unstable, Over & Under Voltage)

    I take a small portable generator with me when I am using my RC cars this allows me to charge batteries and run power tools such as a dermal or soldering iron for onsite repairs which comes in really handy. I like to be prepared when I take my cars out, nothing worse than driving to the RC track to be heading home 15 minutes later.

    Don’t just plug anything into your Generator

    A lot of people don’t understand you cannot simply just plug anything into a generator for example laptops and printers. Especially not into the cheap generators like mine. (more…)

  • Northants RC Club Official Website

    Northants RC Club Official Website

    I have always been into RC vehicles and I am lucky to have Northants RC right on my door step. Its a RC club dedicated to the members with the intention of providing a safe and friendly environment to partake in this sport. The club and land are in development but we already have a challenging track suitable for a range of off-road vehicles. (more…)

  • Its been a while

    Its been a while

    Its been a while since my last post. More like a couple of years, time does fly. I am returning to blogging but this is going to be more of a personal blog related to my various hobbies and geeky activities (don’t worry there is still going to be plenty of coding and developments). I am currently redeveloping the website giving it a brand new look and cleaning up the previous posts. You can expect to see the first major post with in the next week which is quite exciting. (more…)

  • Combine multiple files into one using Windows Command Prompt

    Combine multiple files into one using Windows Command Prompt

    Combine multiple files into a single file is very simple on Windows as long as the files you are wanting to combine are text (binary). Its not possible to merge multiple images, videos and other none binary related content using this method. Here is the Command Prompt (cmd) command we will be using to achieve this. (more…)

  • SEO: Finding commenatable blogs via Google

    SEO: Finding commenatable blogs via Google

    Google is one of the biggest search engines with billions of pages, you enter in some keywords and it will find related pages. Google has some advanced search commands which allow you to refine your search results, I will be showing you how to refine your search results down to just blogs which you have the ability to leave a comment. (more…)

  • PHP: Show PHP errors messages for debugging code

    PHP: Show PHP errors messages for debugging code

    Need to easily debug some php code? simple add the following code to your script to enable PHP error reporting and display error messages. This allows you to quickly debug without making configuration changes to servers PHP configuration.

    It is good practice to hide error messages for security reasons, error messages could be used by hackers to gather information and vulnerabilities.

    This code is provided as it and may require changes to work for your needs.

  • CSS: Useful CSS Selectors

    There is a range of fancy stuff you can do with HTML and CSS but a lot of developers are not aware of the little tricks you can do with CSS which results in developers using alternatives such as JavaScript or PHP when CSS can achieve the same results, sometimes even better as its less code to be written and downloaded by the client.

    Time after time I notice websites which have used JavaScript to achieve something like a menu when most of the time simple CSS selectors such as :hover could have been used resulting in a 100% CSS menu which works the same.

    Here is a must read article which outlines some of those hidden CSS selectors which make development a lot easier and faster. Did you know you could use regular expressions in CSS as I didn’t.

    http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/the-30-css-selectors-you-must-memorize/

  • Making Internet Explorer development easier

    Internet Explorer (IE) also known to some as Internet Exploder or the worst browser on the internet causes headaches for a lot of us developers. IE has what I would call a lack of tools or features, IE7  lacks the abilities to show images with a alpha channel which is something we take for granted these days, this is just one of many features used on modern websites which us developers have to combat against due to IE limitations.

    The main issue is that people are still using IE7 and IE8 which are very out dated, both of these versions of IE don’t support many of the new technologies meaning us developers have to be careful which normally results in hours of extra time writing code specific for each browser version so that the pages render correctly.

    Thank fully people have realized these issues and have written some JavaScript libraries we can use to try and fix / add features to IE to make development a lot easier.

    HTML5Shiv

    A great library I use often which adds HTML5 support to IE8 and below.

    http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/

    IE7-JS

    Tries to fix various issues with IE7 so you can spend a considerable amount less making sure your website renders correctly in IE7.

    http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/