Category Archives: cool gadgets

mouse gestures

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I once thought mouse gestures were weird and crackful. A good way to hide away functionality and make things difficult.

Well… I’ve started using them. Currently I’m using Epiphany as my web broswer (although there’s enough nice firefox things out there that I may switch at some point… if i can get my saved passwords across). The mouse gestures here (naturally) use a different bloody button than the package I’m using on firefox (right button is more logical as laptops generally only have two. or one).

But talk about useful and fast. even just back and forward. maybe integrating this with a pop-up display of what actions you can do (for learning them) would really seal the deal.

MemberDB election-results performance on new laptop

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So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V – nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).

Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – which was very good).

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.

The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.

The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 command” error too often – so abandoned that and futzed around with a private net and NFS to xfsrestore /home.

Go to bed, awake later to find /home on new laptop (with an extra 23GB of free space!). I had to, of course – rebuild those essential packages for x86 instead of ppc – namely wesnoth.

oh, and cleaning out the ppc binaries from my mysql bk trees and doing a x86 build (I also had to change my CC from ‘ccache distcc powerpc-linux-gcc’ to ‘ccache distcc i386-linux-gcc’). One thing is for certain, it’s quicker at building things – even if the fan ramps up a bit when doing so :)

MySQL builds pretty quickly when you have a 2.8Ghz P4 and a 2.13Ghz Pentium M building it.

Anyway, set up all the apache foo for hacking on the LA website and MemberDB today. A load of the elections-result page on digital (the LA server – dual PIII 1.133Ghz) takes about fourteen or fifteen seconds using PostgreSQL as the database.

I previously reported that using MySQL (InnoDB tables) I got about twice the performance on my old laptop (1Ghz G4).

Well, on this one (2.13Ghz Pentium M) I’m getting the page loading in under three seconds. Sweet. Maybe I won’t go ahead and try to optimise some of the queries :)

(the query cache is probably coming into this – but i did do the query several times – so it’s not as if there’s any unfair advantage anywhere).

I’m using the 5.0.12-max-beta gcc dynamic build as downloaded from mysql.com for these runs. All other packages (apache2, php) are as shipped in Ubuntu. The my.ini file is as-shipped (err.. i think so: no query log, no binlog, slow query log enabled and some paths changed)

Full iPod’s Lament

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Well, it’s happenned – my ipod is full. Not so much full, as overflowing. There’s now a bunch of music that just doesn’t fit.

The good news is the 60GB ones are less than $600 – which is about what i payed for this when I bought it (wow, was it 18months ago… maybe).

The added battery life would be welcome too – esp when travelling.

Don’t Buy MSI

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Not yesterday sunday, but the sunday before that (i.e. now 8 days ago) I bought an MSI Mega 180 case to use as a mythtv box. Not only was it DOA, I still do not have it. It’s expected to come in the day after tomorrow. That is TEN DAYS since i bought the thing.

What seemed to be a well priced and suitable box (PCI slot and mini-pci, so i can use the mini pci for wireless – yay. also space for two HDs) is proving a pain in the arse – and I haven’t even used it yet.

I am very close to getting very annoyed.

RT2500 wireless PCI card on Ubuntu

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Got the two cards today. Ordered from i-Tech (mob in Sydney, had it delivered here). Were $59AUD each (plus shipping, which was $15 for the two of them).

Really painless setup!

One was for the Ubuntu system my mum uses, the other for the Windows system my brother uses. Well, the Ubuntu setup was easier than the windows one (try to get Windows to tell you the MAC address of the adapter… well… *of course* it’s under “Support” – where else would it be?).

I got the drivers from CVS from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com as the CVS ones have a few more fixes (makes it easier to build for one).

I got the following packages:
build-essential
cvs
linux-source-(whatever version it was).

cd /usr/src
tar xfj linux-source-whatever.tar.bz2
ln -s /lib/modules/the-right-version-number/build /usr/src/linux-whatever
cd /usr/src/linux-whatever
cp /boot/config-whatever .config
make modules

(as long as it builds the first few you’re fine and can ctrl-c the rest)

then i got the CVS drivers and built it like their docs say (make with the -C parameters).

depmod -a

then used the GUI tool to set it up (the Ubuntu one). The ralink graphical utility (install the kde-devel package to build it) lets you monitor link quality etc.

so, success!

iPod Versus the Cassette

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rather funny – and true….
iPod Versus the Cassette

but i still love my ipod – even if apple are being assholes with their attitude towards people who want to interface with parts of it (think FairPlay, Real).

even though i’ve never liked realplayer – they should be able to compete.

new headphones

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Today (well, *technically* yesterday, ’cause it’s 2:30am on sat now) my new headphones arrived in at work. From Grado Labs, Alessandro Music Series One.

Pretty good so far.

Having to go through my iMic on my desktop PC as the built in sound has too much noise (you hear this high pitched tone with the headphones).

knew that imic would be useful.. :)

relocate pc?

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Although it’s real good having a nice fast computer under the desk, the breeze from the fans is making my feet cold.

Needs an exhaust fan too – don’t like it only having one at the front (to cool hard drives) and the power supply’s (two).

Whoever the idiot was who decided that the graphics chip should face AWAY from the airflow inside the case should be twacked on the head. That’s where the biggest lot of heat is in my box – right beside the graphics card – because there’s sweet FA airflow around it (well, excluding the little fan on the chip there).

my old free open diary account finally got deleted – just after i downloaded it (WITH NOTES!), so now i may go update my free open diary import script to import notes as well. now that would be cool……

1/2 busted CF reader :(

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from the ‘not-so-cool-anymore gadgets’ dept.

Well, i’ve been having some problems with it, which I can no longer really put down to linux usb mass storage drivers, Michael’s USB key worked flawlessly (with pretty flashing light), so it’s probably the CF card reader that is giving in the ass.

darn. have to buy another sometime.

plus, my camera worked fine (in fact, better than the CF reader i think) so maybe it’s time for a nice, decent, good CF card reader. Pity, i liked the physical design of this one.

hp laserjet 4m plus

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new(est) gadget. Got it on sunday. Prints pretty well, in the process of getting it to work via parallel port – possibly investigating getting one of those jetdirect cards so i can just plug it into my network.

CUPS is just freakin cool. Printing from Linux and OSX to it no worries.

wish it had a duplexer, but not that fussed atm – maybe later (if one is really cheap).

i need to buy paper too.

I have been really tempted to see what would happen if i sent the game-of-life (as written in postscript) to it…. but maybe that’s just plain too scary.

new ipods

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well, there’s new ipods out. i still want one, but haven’t yet justified spending a few hundred (read MANY hundred) dollars on what is a music player. A portable cool one at that, but it is just a beefier version of my current mp3 player…

if the ipod had a recording capability (that was properly in there, not a seemingly hidden feature as in the new ones) then i may be more inclined to get one – recording lectures/talks etc would be really cool then…. although, i could just do that with my laptop now…. urgh.

although bootlegging with an ipod would be rather cool.

NetBSD Alpha

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got it booting! got it nfsmounting / and have a console up.

It is thought of some that I won’t be able to get X going under NetBSD. I’ll give it a try (there’s some almost-docs outh there). If it doesn’t work, then maybe I’ll just have to settle for headless stations, or try another OS.

It looks like I can get a hobbiests license for OpenVMS from HP. This could be cool too. Sholud be able to get X11 going on it and connect to my debian box.

64MB ram should be enough for some tasks :)

On a down side, it looks like one of the screens doesn’t work. Hopefully it’s just a fuse or something. Hopefully it doesn’t explode while i’m fiddling with it too….

Could get Digital UNIX/OSF/True64 and run it too… basically I just want an X terminal with this lovely big screen :)

A linux port could be (sort of) possible… apparently there’s some TurboChannel support in the kernel for MIPS, just not for alpha. If what I’ve been told is correct, and NetBSD just feeds IO through the firmware (for console output), then I should be able to get linux to do the same trick so I don’t have to use a serial dongle to get a serial terminal going.

There is a start on Debian/NetBSD, which could be interesting, but currently it’s only one guy hacking. I’ve offerred to test at least :)

DEC3000/300LX

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I got 3 of these babies today (being really yesterday). Apparently they’re 125mhz Alphas with a min of 16MB RAM.

Apparently I can run True64, OpenVMS or NetBSD on them. Some people have tried to get linux going, but I haven’t found any success stories as of yet.

I’m tempted to put NetBSD on and play with it a bit… Another UNIX box can’t hurt, even if I just use it as an X terminal to a Linux box (they’ve got lovely big trinitron screens).

Was hoping to use them as Linux test boxes, but it looks like that’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth….. looks like it’s back to the P150….