I have two computers at my desk and I share a set of speakers between them by running the line-out from my Windows machine to the line-in on my Linux machine. This setup was working beautifully until I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10. After the upgrade, I could record audio from line-in or a microphone, but I couldn't hear it over the speakers. After some serious digging, I found out that one of the Pulseaudio modules was not loaded by default. As it turns out, it was the loop back module that is responsible for making the line-in and mic inputs play back on the standard output (speakers). Anyway, here are the simple steps to fix the problem...

While I was in the process of setting up the website for my new contract business, I had a need to convert my company logo into a format that I could import into Pro/Engineer. I originally created the logo in GIMP as a regular black and white image, so I knew that converting it to vector format wouldn't be very hard. To handle the conversion to vector format, I employed the open source application Inkscape. After a few tries, I was able to extract a clean DXF image that imported into Pro/Engineer without issues.

I have had a wire feed welder and a stick welder for a while, but hauling them around every time I wanted to weld something was becoming a real chore. I decided I needed a welding cart, but none of the ones I could find online would hold both welders. I tossed around the idea of just fabricating a whole cart from scratch, but then I realized that I had an old deer stand stashed under the house that would make a perfect platform.