Category: Tech

I picked up a Chromebook a week ago. It was a bit under $250, has touch, a lit keyboard, a reasonable trackpad, HDMI out, USB3, an SSD, run ChromeOS and also Android apps, and the screen can flip all the way around so it’s in tablet mode.

I’ve only played with it a little, but it’s reasonably snappy and seems to do a huge portion of what I use computers for.

I’ve been playing with Termux so I can have a reasonable Python environment, and I think I’m going to try some Django development on the device itself…

Amateur Radio operators compete and often keep track of how far away the people are that they make contact with. In the late 50s, folks created a grid system for Europe so people could quickly transmit approximate location. In 1980, amateurs began to adopt a new system, the Maidenhead Locator System, which describes a world-wide grid system.

I found a fun Google Maps dealie that shows you the Maidenhead Locator System overlaid a more traditional map.

I read quite a bit. One of the tools I use is “Library Extension“, a Chrome plugin that adds a little box to Amazon and Goodreads, showing the availability of the book, ebook, or audiobook at your local library.

Many libraries offer ebooks now, which can usually transfer right to a Kindle. It’s really slick!

Currently, Arduino 0017 doesn’t work in 64 bit Linux, including Ubuntu 9.04. Arduino includes a copy of libRXTX, which is for 32 bit systems. Ubuntu only offers up to librxtx 2.1 something as of August 2009, and that doesn’t help either.

There’s a pretty quick way to get everything working–even the Serial Monitor!

The solution is to download Arduino 0017 for 32 bit Linux. Extract the files, and remove lib/librxtxSerial.so and RXTXcomm.jar.

Download rxtx-2.2pre2-bins from the RXTX folks. Extract the files, and copy RXTXcomm.jar and x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.so to the Arduino lib/ directory, basically replacing the two files that came shipped with Arduino 0017.

Doing this doesn’t enable any other java application on your system to use the newer RXTX libraries, but that isn’t a problem for me. I’d much rather keep the rest of my system using packages from the repositories. The Arduino devs seem to be completely on top of the problem and the Ubuntu devs are aware as well.

I recently installed Linux on my Macbook with Boot Camp. I recently decided to use a virtualization solution instead, and wanted to get that space back. When I ran Boot Camp, it wouldn’t combine my partitions together, possibly because I put Linux on there, instead of Windows, and it changed the partition type.

Using this article, I fixed it and successfully combined everything.

IF YOU FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND YOU LOSE ALL YOUR DATA AND YOUR MOM MAKES YOU MOVE OUT, IT IS NOT MY FAULT.

If you decide to do what I did, please understand what you’re doing. Please read all applicable man pages, and have recent backups.

I booted into the Mac Install CD, and opened the Terminal. Using gpt show disk0 and diskutil list /dev/disk0 and diskutil info /dev/disk0, I confirmed a little bit about how my disk was being managed. My Linux partitions were /dev/disk0s3 and /dev/disk0s4, which corresponded to gtp indexes 3 and 4.

I used gpt remove -i 3 disk0 and gpt remove -i 4 disk0 to remove the gpt entries.

I ran diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 limits to find out how large I could make the original partition. I then tried to run diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 *maximum size* but diskutil told me it couldn’t resize it. I rebooted, back into the cd again, and ran the diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 *maximum size*. It succeeded, I rebooted, and I had my space back.

Dear internets,

I would like to be able to print index cards on my Samsung ML-1740 in Linux. It can be done in Windows. Have any of you ever gotten this to work? I’m not averse to writing code. I’ve written a CUPS backend in python. It wasn’t that bad.

I’ve looked far and wide for this, and have only found one lonely mailing list post of a solution that doesn’t really work right.

You’re my only hope!

The Nokia 770 is the best ebook reader I have ever used. I use FBreader, a very versatile reader for Linux. My favorite feature is screen rotate. This lets me use the 770 sideways in my hand, and I can use my finger change pages with the up-down rocker.
In these pictures, the scratches on the screen are on a cheap screen protector. The real screen doesn’t scratch that easily, but I’m paranoid anyway. The screen is a bajillion times brighter, but the flash washed it out.

I’ve read ebooks on a Palm IIIxe, a Palm IIIc, a Treo 600, a Treo 650, and a Nokia 770, and the 770 is the best ebook reader I have ever used. I would have bought it simply as an ebook reader. I’ve used the Nokia 770 to surf to Baen Free Library, grab an ebook off there, and read it, all without an extra computer.

The 770 is better in almost all ways than a paperback. I never lose my spot. I don’t need to turn off the light to go to bed, as the screen is backlit. I can fit more paperbacks than I could fit in a house on a single memory card. The 770 fits in a single hand, and I can change pages with the same hand. The screen is beautiful.
The only real downsides are the fact that the Nokia 770 uses electricity and costs more than a single paperback.

Summary in photos:

My Treo 650 arrived today! It’s a free replacement of my Treo 600 that no longer makes or takes phone calls. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with the new Treo, but because it has Bluetooth, I should be able to interface the Nokia 770 and the Treo 650 easily. This means that if I’m somewhere without free Wifi, but I get cellular signal, I can easily bridge the cellular signal to my Nokia 770 through the wireless magic of Bluetooth.

I’ve been meaning to post this except of a comment I ran across on Metafilter, but I wasn’t really sure how to introduce it. The setup is that there was a post on a video from the 70’s about ARPAnet, the precursor of the internet. A Metafilter user, loquacious, posted the following. The complete comment can be found at the original post.

Even in today’s realm of nearly pervasive computing, I’m still constantly astounded. I’m barely old enough to remember Pong. I sort-of remember the dawn of personal computing. I’m old enough to remember what 75 bps/baud felt like. Yes, I know that BPS != baud, but for the purposes of that particular modem and this argument, it’s fine – especially when confronted by the 9mbit cable modem currently providing my connection. I even remember the first single file in excess of 1mb I ever downloaded. At 300 bps/baud. With interruptions and download resuming, it took something like 2-3 days. My parents were furious when they got the phone bill that month. It was a local ZUM 3 zoned toll call. That 1mb file cost our household over $500 USD! And I don’t even remember what it was!!

And yet… for years now, people throw away working computers so powerful I would have chewed off at least one of my own limbs just to possess them, way back when. Though I jest easily, I jest not about such important things. Twenty years later it’s still difficult to even comprehend the fever that gripped me back then. Even now I go all clammy thinking about how potent those feelings once were. I am using such a throwaway computer now, and I have a few more such machines I use besides. Interestingly, it’s still faster than the modern WindowsXP laptop issued to me by my work!

I now carry around a now nearly ancient – and also thrown-away – Palm IIIC that has an order of magnitude more storage then my family’s first home computer. In fact, it’s nearly equatable in feel and power to a Mac Classic 512K. But in color. In my pocket. With, again, an order of magnitude more default storage space. This now obsolete device contains a dozen novels, assorted maps and transportation schedules, and dozens upon dozens of applications ranging from music creation tools to document editors, various utilities, a very complete interactive star chart, painting/art programs, numerous games, and even an infrared meter/detection tool – and more besides.

I also carry a rather bottom-of-the-line portable phone that has better graphics, a better display – in color rather than green monochrome, more CPU and more memory then my family’s first computer. That talks wirelessly. To most of the world. Much or all of it through varieties of packet switching networks. (And yet they still won’t let me connect to the internet, browse via WAP, send a proper email, or simply do an old-school data modem connection from it. Hrmpf. I use Cricket. No frills.)

People now routinely buy – at toy stores! – what were once astronomically expensive, experimental supercomputers, now packaged in slim, small, brightly colored enclosures, simply to play silly, inconsequential little games on. Rather than, say, simulating nuclear explosions on. By all means, play on! Chess? 😉

I have nearly immediate access to more information then I could ever hope to consume or even glance at – even in a hundred lifetimes. Or even a thousand. In fact, even excluding all the boring stuff, more interesting text and data is created or transcribed and uploaded every day then I could consume in n number of lifetimes.

Barring catastrophe, I will never, ever again experience what it feels like to read every Sci Fi novel, every technical manual, every art book at the rather large central library that I spent much of my formative years growing up in.

Barring catastrophe, I will never, ever (truly) again experience what it means to be unable to communicate with someone, regardless of physical distance or time of day. Excluding the internet itself as a channel, but including the internet simply as the container for many channels, I have at my fingertips half a dozen ways of communication with a vast number of people. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands if I want to expand this to include the myriad number of ways of sending information to and receiving information from a recipient. Without even touching my stand-alone, battery powered phone.

Even without a computer and connection of my own, the cost of entry would be absolutely nothing at all if I just schlepped myself down to the local library.

—–

Amongst all this I’m still intensely aware of all of these things. They do not fade readily into the background as a much as a “given” (in the so-called civilized world) as running water fades into the background. As electricity does. As breathing itself does.

And sometimes I wonder if all this pervasive computing and connectivity will ever fade into the background for me as a given, taken for granted metabolic state, as it probably does for those just a bit younger than I.

And yet, this connectivity is already as essential as breathing is to me. Without it I would not have my current job, this apartment, even the computer itself which I now use. (Thanks you craigslist!) I wouldn’t have immediate access to transportation schedules, which maintain my job. Access to vital weather information, which helps me maintain my health and my job, and enables good planning. I haven’t touched a paper phone book in years.

I wouldn’t have entertainment. I wouldn’t have the art and music I enjoy. I wouldn’t be able to pick and choose the minds I find fascinating to interact with. I would be but a fraction of who I am today.

The internet has literally saved my hide from certain doom – if not at least prolonged discomfort – at least a dozen times. It has enabled the seeking of shelter when it was needed most, the provision of economic viability, transportation, communication, and so much more.

I would even personally argue that I owe the internet my very life – via the convoluted, twisting paths of life itself, with it’s occasionally fatal levels of frustration leading to ideations of self harm and hopelessness – upon which once a frightened call in the dark was answered so long ago, not merely by one concerned soul, but dozens upon dozens bearing not only firm, kind wishes – but bucketfuls of wisdom, strength, and love.

There is no price for such a thing. It cannot be valued, bartered, bought or sold, or even given away. The very concept and abstraction of price becomes meaningless in the face of it.

I have a hard time comparing, say, the mechanical printing press and this nebulous, cloud-like concept we call the internet. They do not sit rationally or comfortably together on the same scale in my mind. While one begat the other, one now dwarfs the other with such complexity and massiveness it is as crude a comparison as relating a simple wheel or lever to something as fantastic as a (yet) fictional faster-than-light starship.

And yet I still revel in it, awash, even drowning in such fantastic knowledge and access that – even if it were to vanish entirely, right now – my mind would gibber and reel at the incredibleness of it all for the rest of its days, forever changed. Leary was right! PC+internet > LSD!

Thanks, nerds and hackers everywhere. Have you ever been properly thanked? Or was the fact that the whole world pretty much just ran off with your countless inventions and started using them with gusto thanks enough for you?

Thanks DARPA/ARPA, and even the DoD. Thanks for letting the genie out, and making sure it couldn’t be put back in. Thanks Bell labs, thanks Xerox-PARC. Ma Bell? AT&T? G’way, you malingerers! Stern, strict great-grandfathers though you may be, a pox on you! Thanks MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Cruz and everyone else. Thanks Apple, Intel, and even Microsoft. Thanks, Linus Torvalds. Thanks, Wozniak. Thanks, Lee Felsenstein. Thanks, Google, and it’s long-lost batty great aunt who once lived in a dorm closet, Yahoo. Thank you, thank you, thank you CERN. And thanks to all the countless others I’ve missed, both large and small.

You probably won’t be able hear me among the riotous, delicious cacophony you’ve enabled, but… Thanks for everything.

posted by loquacious at 4:59 AM PST on March 19

*nods*