The life and times of a saggy cloth cat
Archive for the ‘Cool things’ Category.
Fantastic footage of the last ever night time landing of a Space Shuttle. STS-130 safely makes it to the ground, and the night time situation allows for great footage of the jets of flame coming out the APU exhausts at the tail root. The flames happen all the time, but are usually invisible during the day. Similar footage of STS-9 can be found over here.
Recently I’ve been looking at getting a computing device into the Land Rover. Short of buying a full sized 7″ touch screen, I opted to go for a slightly cheaper £20 4×20 LCD display. This was more to be proof of concept, and give me a starter to work on, before I decide whether or not to put a full sized screen in.
Ultimately, I purchased a SmartieLCD module from Ebay. It arrived, I plugged it into my laptop running Windows at work, and it worked first time. Now it was time to get it working with LCDProc!
Earlier on I had spotted that SmartieLCD in Windows used the Matrix Orbital DLL file. Sadly, when using LCDProc in Linux, Matrix didn’t work at all. It was time to go looking
Enthused by http://lists.omnipotent.net/pipermail/lcdproc/2009-July/013021.html, and manufacturers documentation, I decided to check out the CVS copy of LCDProc. The last ‘release’ was back in 2007, so if I was to get anything recent it would have to be from CVS
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@lcdproc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lcdproc login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@lcdproc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lcdproc co -P lcdproc
Having a look around the source files indicate that Sure Electronics displays were supported, but not enabled by default. A simple ./configure flag would enable them, so it was time to get compiling. Firstly some support files have to be installed first.
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev autogen automake
After that, kick off the build process, and enable Sure Electronics support at configure time.
sh ./autogen.sh
./configure –enable-drivers=SureElec
make
sudo make install
Now that the software is installed, LCDd needs configured in order to send data to the LCD display.
sudo vim /usr/local/etc/LCDd.conf
In here, a few parts need changed -
driver=SureElec
DriverPath=/usr/local/lib/lcdproc/
Edition=3
Contrast=200
Brightness=480
And that’s it! Execute /usr/local/sbin/LCDd, and you should get a Clients: 0 and Screens: 0 on the LCD display.
All is good!
Word is that the Matroska container format will be officially supported by DivX 7. Surely a good thing, as Sony have a deal with Divx to provide decoding software for the PS3. Maybe this will spell the end of having to transcode those ubiquitous MKV files for use on a PS3. With a due date of around January 2009, how long before the PS3 officially supports the MKV format? After that… roll on 1440p support 
Continue reading ‘PS3 and Matroska? Could be soon…’ »
One day to go before Christmas, and the UK government have made an astounding contribution to the OpenStreetMap project. It will shortly be announced that through collaboration with the Department for Transport, Traveline, and OpenStreetMap, most of the NaPTAN and NPTG datasets will be offered to OpenStreetMap as a one off bulk import, with the possibility of updates in the future.
This means the import of up to 350,000 geocoded public transport access points, such as bus stops, ferry terminals, trains stations, etc, along with the import of up to 50,000 geocoded place names in a hierarchical format.
Once again, a big thank you to the DfT and Traveline for this massive contribution, and to the OSM Foundation for making it all possible.
A year ago Matthew Dillon went into some detail about the new HAMMER filesystem. It’s now reaching stability, and will hopefully be sent forth in the upcoming v2.0 release of DragonflyBSD. All the interesting bits can be discovered here and here. A few features to note, though, are…
1 Exabyte of storage
Online data migration, replication and evacuation – multi-master disk replication across WANs anyone?
Logical data retention policies – ie you can have block level replication to a remote site with large slow disks, but with a lengthy data retention policy
Inbuilt volume level and file level versioning and snapshotting – just mount up or request a version number, and you get a snapshot from that time. A bit like MS VSS.
Inbuilt reblocker for defragging, expansion and contraction.
PF linked connection state recovery – keep those TCP links alive throughout a router reboot.
These are just a few of the features, read the documentation to find out the rest. It may turn out to be a ZFS killer, but anything with replication like this sounds good to me. Now we just need to wait for it to be ported to Linux, assuming Zumastor and Tux3 don’t rule the roost by then For what it’s worth, there’s some info on Tux3 and HAMMER features and ideas at http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Comparing_HAMMER_And_Tux3
It’s probably already been covered, but my 30 seconds of Google-Fu hasn’t turned anything up so bear with me…
Take one OpenMoko phone, a geolocation service like Fire Eagle, an online celltower database such as CellDB, and some code to use those lovely d-bus bindings, and you could have a location reporting service that’s easy on the battery and mostly precise in urban areas. If your area isn’t covered by CellDB, then run around with the OpenMoko GPS reciever online for a while to report celltower locations, and you’re sorted.
Use all of the above to create services like Socialight, location based Twittering, rough geotagging for photos (courtesy of Flickr and FireEagle [both Yahoo companies]) , pre-emptive OSM tile downloads, Asterisk routing – you could even implement ex-girlfriend logic to it all, if she were to have a similar device
Well, I’m sure someone has thought of this already, but I thought I would commit ideas to storage just in case. Once my FreeRunner arrives, I know what I’ll be working on
Migrated to OES on Linux, and missing out on that menu driven dsrepair fun? Fret no more, as DSRmenu will nicely wrap up the CLI version of ndsrepair, and put it into a nice menu driven system for you.
I’m so easy to please Dad surprised me today with a new toy in the garage, a 1Kw portable generator. Ideal for transporting to friends houses and sheds for working on stuff.
Just discovered a lightning talk by Robert Scott on the future of the KDE geo aware desktop. He touches upon how applications will soon support location awareness, mapping, photography and suchlike. KDE4 should be interesting for those of us with a GPS receiver
A while back I mentioned Hadoop as The Next Big Thing. Looks like demand has been high in the intervening months, and the Yahoo Developer Network has recently announced a new blog all about Hadoop. An open source Mapreduce implementation with a scalable, clustered and highly redundant storage system? Yes please… Now you can keep up to date with your favourite RSS reader.