Not a lot has been happening recently. I've been trying to sort out my 3rd Year Project work as I'm fasting approaching the deadline and currently it's not working properly! More details on this will follow once it's completed.
I've almost finished collecting parts to built a headphone amplifier to test some of my new found soldering skills. All I'm missing is a couple of 1K resistors, some 3.5mm jack plugs, a bit of variboard and a case! Oh and a switch.
As someone pointed out to me the other day, I have actually got a ready built amplifier from my first year when I did the compulsory PIAE course. We soldered a couple of components onto a PCB. I'll dig that out when I'm at home. If I can find time to use an oscilloscope I may even put up a comparison.
I've also been playing with my eee trying to find a distribution that works really well. Having only a limited SSD I've tried the standard Asus *nix and it was crap, think I had Xubuntu and didn't really get on with that (maybe trying again soon), Ubuntu NBR, EaseyPeasey and I'm about to try installing Ubuntu from the alternate cd so I can install only the stuff I want. Watch this space!
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Monday, 22 February 2010
VW Split Screen Rat Look Van
I've finally found the time to upload the pictures I took in 2007 at the Stanford Hall VW Show. There's 3 pictures on my photostream at the moment and I believe these are the best of them, the other 30 were not upto scratch at all!
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Earth Wallpaper
A few weeks ago I stumbled across this and it worked ok for a little while but then it stopped working properly. It would only update when logging on or restarting. Frustrated I looked through the comments to see if anyone else had had similar problems. One helpful commenter (john72carter) put the following:
the script looks overly complex.
why not have a basic script like below called by crontab every 15min.
btw you need to reflesh the background (hence the last line of the script) otherwise whats in ~/.gnome2 doesn't get displayed.
you might also want to add a call to the script below at startup rather than waiting for the next cron run to update the stale image
#!/bin/bash
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
So this is what I set out to do.
First I created a new script called "earthwallpaper.sh" with the following in:
#!/bin/bash
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
Then I had to find out how crontab works. Put simply it's a method by which scripts can be performed hourly, daily, weekly or monthly just by putting the script in the right folder.
The folders are stored in the /etc directory and are: cron.hourly, cron.daily...you get the idea.
I put my script in the hourly folder.
So far so good everything seems to be working a-ok! Big thanks to john72carter, a much simpler way of achieving the same effect.
The Mercator project is pretty interesting. Aside from mapping the current daylight hours around the world it also updates the cloud patterns every 3 hours from weather satellite data.
the script looks overly complex.
why not have a basic script like below called by crontab every 15min.
btw you need to reflesh the background (hence the last line of the script) otherwise whats in ~/.gnome2 doesn't get displayed.
you might also want to add a call to the script below at startup rather than waiting for the next cron run to update the stale image
#!/bin/bash
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
So this is what I set out to do.
First I created a new script called "earthwallpaper.sh" with the following in:
#!/bin/bash
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ~/.gnome2/mercator.jpg
Then I had to find out how crontab works. Put simply it's a method by which scripts can be performed hourly, daily, weekly or monthly just by putting the script in the right folder.
The folders are stored in the /etc directory and are: cron.hourly, cron.daily...you get the idea.
I put my script in the hourly folder.
So far so good everything seems to be working a-ok! Big thanks to john72carter, a much simpler way of achieving the same effect.
The Mercator project is pretty interesting. Aside from mapping the current daylight hours around the world it also updates the cloud patterns every 3 hours from weather satellite data.
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Electronics and Things.
A little under 3 years ago I purchased a ASUS eeePC 701, the first one to come out. It's got a 4GB SSD for completely (I think) shock proof working and pretty extreme speeds, 512MB DDR2 RAM (now upgraded to 1GB) and a Atheros WiFi card.
It didn't take long for people to start taking these apart and adding bits and bobs. Unfortunately I've never had the stones, since I don't want to brick it. However, my soldering is getting a lot better and recently I've been thinking up ways to use this skill. So perhaps it's time for my eeePC to go under the iron...
Particular inspiration has come from IVC WIKI and more recently the F00's blog.
The first is an excellent resource and extremely well documented, the second only lacks a little information but provides mods that are a little less mainstream.
Currently the list of mods intended for my eeePC are:
It didn't take long for people to start taking these apart and adding bits and bobs. Unfortunately I've never had the stones, since I don't want to brick it. However, my soldering is getting a lot better and recently I've been thinking up ways to use this skill. So perhaps it's time for my eeePC to go under the iron...
Particular inspiration has come from IVC WIKI and more recently the F00's blog.
The first is an excellent resource and extremely well documented, the second only lacks a little information but provides mods that are a little less mainstream.
Currently the list of mods intended for my eeePC are:
- USB HUB for Memory stick {Backtrack 3 or 4}, Bluetooth dongle, GPS and a link back.
- iPod hard drive: I've got a dead 30GB one around here somewhere!
- touch screen w/ sylus mod (the latter is only a possibility at the moment)
- external antenna connector, leaving the internal one intact if possible
- LED for lighting the keyboard (something my ThinkPad has that can be really useful)
- FM Transmitter built just below/left of screen maintaining the LCD for station reading
I may also implement a few of these on my other laptops, but not all of them!
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