Tonight, I’m proud to say, I’ve returned to childhood. Let me explain. OK, fun over, back to work. For the last year I’ve been wanting to purchase an Arduino, for no other reason than to play with. Like a kid. My Arduino arrived two days ago. This is a story of problems, but not the pull-your-hair-out type, more the… like when you run out of gas in the middle of Sydney. Going to your Christmas dinner. In your friend’s car. Long story.

For this you’ll need: an Arduino, an LED, a USB cable, and the Arduino software. Get the LED, and plug it in to your Arduino. Plug in the long end to pin 13, plug the short end to the GND. Plug in the Arduino into your laptop. Go to Tools->Serial Port. Choose the USB port that appears. Take the code from the BlinkingLED tutorial and paste it in to the arduino like so:

I’ve been looking for a simple, no-hassles GPS display program for Linux, and I believe I finally found one: TangoGPS. My requirements were quite simple; I needed something that would talk to gpsd, and display a dot on OpenStreetMaps. I’ve been able to do this in other programs (even in 3d in WorldWind), but I wanted something to download the maps for me, and GTK+ would be a plus. TangoGPS was easy to install (apt-get install tangogps), and on my test ‘drive’ home tonight on the train, worked a treat. See related screenshots.

I closed my eyes, imagined being 16 again, focused on driving on the right-hand side of the road, and set off. I had just returned from Hawaii for Ian’s wedding, and what a fun, fast-paced trip it was. I left work a few minutes early on Thursday and went straight to the airport, where I boarded my 6:00pm flight to Honolulu. The flight was slightly bumpy, and I tried to sleep. My airline of choice was Jetstar, which was mediocre as always (imagine flying EasyJet for ten hours), but I knew to plan ahead.

I’ve received this error a few times when working with pytz: Error reading file '/usr/share/xml/iso-codes/iso_3166.xml' In short, install the ‘iso-codes’ package in Ubuntu/Debian. I’m sure this is covered in the manual that I didn’t read, but I’m sure others didn’t read it too. apt-get install iso-codes

After writing about compiling a new kernel for the Vortex86DX, I’ve had quite a few people email me asking how I installed Debian in the first place. The installation is actually quite straightforward, but it involved several quirky techniques. After doing another install I decided to keep track of the process of installing Debian 5.0 on my eBox-3300. The following guide assumes a few things. First, you are currently using Linux and a debian variety (although instructions could be altered if using Windows). Second, your USB shows up as /dev/sdb. Third, your eBox-3300 has the HDD set in Native mode. Forth, you are patient.

Status: ✅ My house is cold. I want to start playing with simple electronics before starting Operation Field, so have created Operation Cold House. This is just simply sticking a temperature sensor onto an Arduino, linking that up to my little home “server”, and uploading that to my website. I’ll display some nifty graphs, too, and link it to Pachube. Stay tuned. Update: Complete! The proof is in the pudding. I now have a personal website from home (sorry, not public) that displays the daily and weekly temperature at home. The process is basically like this: my little Arduino gathers the temperature, and is polled every minute with a python script via cron. This script then sticks the time and …

I’ve had this issue happen to me several times, and I’m finally writing myself a note to fix it in the future. There seems to be an issue with downloading VMWare Workstation (.bundle). I first tried it with Firefox, but it just died at loading it into /tmp. Next, I tried it with Lynx, but alas, it tried to download it as a text file. Ahah! The quickest solution I could find is to right click the link, save as, and save it as a zip. Rename it to .bundle when you’re done.

Update: I’ve written up a short tutorial on the method I used to install Debian 5.0 on this device. A few months ago I purchased the eBox-3300 from WDL Systems. The system was promptly shipped, and there were no “gotchas” from WDL. The little box fit my exact needs - it is small, and built very, very well. I flew back to Australia and, after some trial and error, installed Debian 5.0 on it. For quite some time I was just using the vmlinuz file provided by WDL, which was provided by ICOP (DMP). This worked well, but there were two issues:

I’ve hit this problem a few times, and figured I’d leave a note for myself how to fix it. Ubuntu 8.04 seems to hiccup sometimes (on a VPS) for generating the correct locales. In particular, I get this error, a lot: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). Normally I just do ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’, but with 8.04, this doesn’t seem to do squat. The solution is to edit the /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file, and insert the correct locales (it will …