MindSuburbia

Spiderman helps the bat

MindSuburbian — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 15:58:02 +0000

In Summer, we have a lot of mosquitoes, mainly because they’ve been proliferating in our area, but also because we are near to a stream of water and it’s much easier for them to survive.

We’ve been using insecticide products to keep our house surroundings safe, but it’s a loosing battle because mosquitoes are very hard to eradicate and because you’d have to make all the neighbours using those products.

For the moment we are using mosquitoes net for the inside of the house, but the outside at disk an agonizing pain every time.

That’s why we started thinking about bats: they can eat a lot of insects every night and are a bio-friendly solution.
All the stories about drinking your blood or hanging on your hair are just rumors, so they are perfectly safe and they almost don’t make dirt.

Italian bat strains are very small and very friendly, so you just need to put a wooden bat house on a wall or on a tree, that has good visiblity from the sky and you’re done!

Today I wanted to install a bat house on the walls of my house.
The guidelines say it has to be a safe place for our local bats to settle there: at least 2.5m from the ground.

Unfortunately the house also have to remain as far as possible from metallic objects, and I didn’t have a proper ladder to go up 2.5m+ and below the roof.

The only solution was to go up the little piece of roof over the first floor and use a ladder someway to go upper.
After all it was too dangerous (a ladder on a roof?), so I actually had to ask the Spiderman to hang on the wall, go up a couple of meters, drill a hole and fix the bat house where all the requirements where met:

Easy to clean and maintain
Safe for the bats
Easy to watch
Far from metallic gutters and from the ground

And there is the first bat house of the neighbourhoods

Hope someone finds it useful!

Microsoft SSL certificate expired?!?!

MindSuburbian — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:32:42 +0000

I couldn’t believe my eyes! This morning, after a Windows update, I discovered that the SSL cert of one of Microsoft subdomains is expired!
https://go.microsoft.com

The italian popup below states that it couldn’t connect because of an SSL cert problem (I’m not sure why it tried that url, but it must be because of the windows updates).

So I checked again in Firefox, and that was true!

Firefox warning needs no explanation…

Is it that big companies sometimes forget about details? Or that anyone can make mistakes?
Cold confort, but better than nothing!

iPod Touch 2g multitasking fever

MindSuburbian — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:56:10 +0000

Are we just unlucky, iPod owners, or is Apple throwing bad jokes at us?

I used to have a nice iPod 2g w/3.1.3 firmware and little features
When I updated to 4.0 the expectations were high: backgrounds (is this even a feature? I’ve been using backgrounds on my 40€ cellphone for ages!!), BT keyboard and of course multitasking!

No, these are not supported on iPod 2g

Well, just jailbreak… And voila!
You need to enable the feats either via redsn0w or editing yourself the N72AP.plist navigating to the folder
/System/Library/CoreService/SpringBoard.app/
and changing the multitasking key to true:
(just google “enable multitasking ipod 2g” for details)

multitasking

Result: 4.0 just sucks and iPod is really sluggish (yeah, you’re thinking: that’s your problem, since you jailbroke), so I went back to no multitasking

…until 4.2.1 (nah, 4.3 has not been released for 2g)

Now guess what? It seems the iPod2G is working decently, even with multitasking enabled.
The problem is that… multitasking itself is not working! Why?
Because every time you want to pass from an app directly to another (i.e. you touch an url in your email to be opened in Safari), the Springboard crashes!

Well, after a lot of searching, it turned out that the multitasking is working as expected, but the new Springboard is calling a infamous OpenGL ES 2 function for showing the so called Fast App switch animation, which, guess what, is not supported by iPod 2G and just make it crash!!

Yes, that stupid flip of the screen needs a new OpenGL ES 2 function: surprised? I guess someone put it there right on purpose!

Anyways, not without glitches, this problem can be overcome adding (not changing) the following key:

opengles-2

This tells your iPod that you have OpenGL ES 2 even if it’s not true, but will save it from crashing the Springboard app.
The downside are that, from time to time, you may get some strange lines on the system buttons. At least this is what someone reports on the forums, and it seems it usually happens on landscape mode.

Well, you know what? After a couple of days of usage, I’m really happy with that! It’s not sluggish, I can use multitasking, it works as expected and I still have to see one of those lines!

Happy multitasking everybody! (jee… it’s Windows 3.1 stuff! )

Tabula rasa

MindSuburbian — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:03:26 +0000

Tabula rasa is a phrase meaning “without prior knowledge”. It comes from ancient Latin: then it was use to write on natural wax tables, and they were erased melting wax and havig them plain again.
Being a tabula rasa means then “untouched by knowledge”.

What a perfect example is a newborn: he or she does not even have the knowledge of his or her own limbs!

That’s a hard time for the infant, but sometimes we should think back at that condition with our minds and realize that we often are in similar situations without even knowing it. We are most of the times in fact: that’s life and we should be prepared all the time to put our efforts in something we’ve been doing since when we were in the womb of out mothers. Learn.

When the cat eats fish…

MindSuburbian — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:46:20 +0000

Last week I had to buy a new PC (no, I didn’t come up with the excuse that mine was too old, too slow or decided I deserved one ).
So I got a new minitower with a pretty nice hardware and a brand new LCD screen with double luminosity, faster response, etc.

Even after a lot of fine tuning monitor, resolution, gamma correction, etc, the look and feel was quite strange, so I decided to search for some optimizations and I discovered this Cleartype font switch.

Cleartype uses the way monitors are built to create a smoothing effect with sub-pixels calibration (the R, G and B of the RGB).

As one may read on the net, Cleartype is something you hate or love: since it uses single R, G or B pixels, you might end up with multicolor fonts (where the source is single color, typically black). This behaviour may be very annoying to sensitive people, so much that they have nightmares from Cleartype setups

What I did was a very innocuous move: I run the Cleartype tuner of Windows 7 and turned the switch on.
After a few hours I started seeing red halos around characters, with a general effect of an unfocused screen.

I then decided I didn’t like at all this red-ish font corners and just turned off the switch.

“Oh my god! What’s this?!”
The fonts looked so grainy I couldn’t read!
After that, the rest is a nightmare…. I couldn’t possibly imagine a simple switch messed up all Windows settings…

Or it’s just me that got used to smooth chars and couldn’t ho back?

Madness

MindSuburbian — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:09:52 +0000

Quando pensi di essere l’unico sano di mente al mondo, è in quel momento che rischi di diventare veramente pazzo. Allora tieni duro, perché presto tutto diventerà chiaro!

E’ più pazzo chi ha chiuso il gate nella foto, o chi ride guardandolo?

When you believe you are the only mentally sane on Earth, there’s the risk you really become mad. But don’t worry, soon everything will be clear.
BTW, is the one who closed the gate the most mad, or who’s laughing at the picture?

Catena moderna: tenta la fortuna!

MindSuburbian — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:14:44 +0000

Sembra assurdo, ma grazie al fatto che i mezzi di comunicazione internet sono gratuiti, le catene di sant’antonio proliferano a dismisura.
Eccone una magari non troppo fresca, ma di sicuro effetto su Librigialli.org
Vuoi vincere un iPad WiFi? No? Steve sta volta ha superato se stesso? (sono ironico!)
Vabeh, è sempre un aggeggino di moda, fintanto che la concorrenza non si sveglia con qualcosa di più sensato (poter telefonare, no? slot per schede di memoria, neanche morti?)

Partecipa anche tu! Sì, proprio tu che leggi basito questo post! Tanto che ti cambia? Catena più, catena meno…
Ecco il link per esteso:
http://librigialli.org/vinci-un-ipad-di-apple-16gb-wifi-con-librigialli-org-scopri-come-fare/

Samsung E700 finally working

MindSuburbian — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:08:02 +0000

Oh my! This cell phone is driving me crazy!
In the past years I started a kind of war to make it work again: the flex got broken and I tried everything i could…
I ended up buying a new fully featured display board: with time passing, the price has become quite cheap and mounting the spare, was a 5 minutes job.
Here’s a sample picture.

So with less than 15 Euro and 5 minutes job, I’m using the cell phone again!!!

Update: …but it’s not over yet! After some days the display started working like at 16 colors (instead of 65k). I’ll keep posting updates!

Samsung E700 final repair: flex switch failed! (0)

Samsung E700 final repair: flex switch failed!

MindSuburbian — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:31:14 +0000

Hey, it was back in 2006, when I first posted about my Samsung E700 poor man’s repairing.
Back then I was able to make the poor phone flex work for another couple of months.

Now here’s a new curious story: how I tried the flex switch.

When you need most your mobile phone

I was riding my bike back home with my good old Motorola C650 when I dropped it without knowing that.
It turned out it was smashed by some vehicle some time later and a man doing jogging found it.

Crazy enough he tried to use it, but nothing was showing up on the display.

Hey, what the hack is this story about? That’s insanely out of topic!!

Yes, I know, but if you want the real thing, you’ll have to read thru this…
So: finally the wise man put my SIM back in his phone and called the “home” contact.
Yep, I definitely answered. I wasn’t even aware I had lost the phone! Anyways to cut it out my phone came back into my hands! Thanx Marco!!!
I guess it wasn’t much of a gain, keeping a not working mobile!

I was really happy because I got back my 15EUR worth of calls on my SIM and the phone, though broken, seemed still usable.
After a cose look, it seemed the display was broken, so i thought: just try to place a call just to be sure a display switch will do the trick.
Nope, the phone does not place nor receive calls: I don’t think that a new display is a good idea!

But…. BUT! Hey, I got that nice E700 back in my closet, waiting for an extreme repair!!!

The real thing
I decided it was time to get my E700 back to work, so i ordered a new E700 flex (without displays) and I tried to unsolder the main display and to solder it back on the new flex.

Failure
Yep, I failed!

First of all the external display: it is just stitched on the board. I don’t know you, but i’ve seen tens of electronic caluclators and the always have this absurd way of stitching the display or the solar cells: that’s the same on the external display.
The bad thing is that you’ll never get your stitched contacts back! They just get disintegrated

No problem, the main thing is the internal display, or i’ll never be able to use my phone again.
Well the display has a nice soldered couple of contacts for power, so with wathever solder you have, you’ll be able to detach that.
The real problem is when you try to unsolder the data contacts: impossible, you risk to end up with a cut out piece of plastic.

Well I wanted to try anyways, so I started soldering everything and found a decent status to test: nothing. Pure black (except for the white backlight leds).

Conclusion
First: don’t even think of doing that if you don’t have the right tools

Second: even if you have the right tools be aware that anything could go wrong (expecially with the stitched external display). For the internal display here’s what may go wrong (in order of probability):
- wrong unsoldering: contacts broken
- wrong soldering: solder may damage your phone
- defective flex: you might to the thing perfect, but something’s not working

Third: you could just simply buy a complete display spare for less than 15EUR and just connect it (after having read my guide on dismounting the phone )

Happy bidding! Can’t wait to try my spare…

Samsung E700 finally working (0)

Clone your Ubuntu server 8.04 LTS disk

MindSuburbian — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:27:26 +0000

It always happens: your HD fills up and you have to move everything to a new, bigger one.
Well, yes there are clone tools, but sometime you just want the damn thing and of course you don’t need to install software or find that special CDROM or DVD-R with what-was-that-program-name? ….

Moreover if you have a virtual machine you want to clone, you probably wouldn’t need a 12GB disk for everything, so you start minimal with a 1GB disk for little apps and you want to use the basic setup for all your VMs, keeping vmware-tools and stuff like that.

I know everybody who has done that once in his/her life, knows the procedure, but sometimes you forget a command and thigs just blow up!

So here is a list of commands – for my own convenience – everybody may use.

1. If you are cloning to a new machine, you may want to have your sshd get a new key pair, so just run

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* dpkg-reconfigure -plow openssh-server

2. Then change hostname, check DNS, hosts, etc

pico -w /etc/hostname ... pico -w /etc/resolv.conf ... pico -w /etc/hosts ... /etc/init.d/hostname.sh

Also check for your fstab for wrong mounts (or add new if you plan to add a separate partition) and change the static ip if using one
pico -w /etc/fstab ... pico -w /etc/network/interfaces
…but if you do those, be sure you check software configs like Apache and stuff like that, before asking “why that doesn’t work anymore?”

3. Now setup the new disk (you have properly installed as secondary)
fdisk /dev/sdb
And create your partitions (don’t forget to add the bootable flag)

Here we’re assuming there are only a primary and a swap partition.

4. Setup filesystems
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 mkswap /dev/sdb5

5. Copy everything
mkdir /mnt/second mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/second/ cp -ax / /mnt/second/.

6. Now set up GRUB and fstab
blkid /dev/sdb1 cd /mnt/second/boot/ cd grub/ pico -w menu.lst blkid /dev/sdb5 pico -w /etc/fstab

7. Next init the grub setup
grub-install --recheck /dev/sdb umount /mnt/second
…just to be sure the device.map is updated

8. If you need to configure anything, just run
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/second/ mount -t proc none /mnt/second/proc mount -o bind dev /mnt/second/dev chroot /mnt/second

9. Ensure the new device map is ok (this is the command after chroot, but you don’t need to chroot to edit device.map)
pico -w /boot/grub/device.map "(hd0) /dev/sda" shutdown -h now

10. Now let’s do the trick with the Grub console:

Boot
Press ESC at the Grub prompt
Press c to enter console

Then write
root (hd0,0) grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 setup (hd1)

11. Now shutdown and swtich the hard drives: yes, I know this sounds strange, but I always get “Grub Hard Disk Error”, so just do it

12. Boot again and enter Grub console again, then:
root (hd0,0) find /boot/grub/stage1 setup (hd0)

13. Now you may shutdown and remove the old hard drive and you’re done

14. If you use this HD in a different VM, be sure either to set the correct MAC address as the original (not recommended) or make Ubuntu use the new MAC address as eth0. Just
pico -w /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
And search and change eth1 to eth0
Usually it’s the last line

16. Don’t forget to check for changed things like
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/mailname (postfix)
/etc/postfix/main.cf

17. Ubuntu 8.04 seems to hang on the resume device: to speed up the thing you’ll have to
blkid /dev/sdb5 pico -w /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
insert the correct UUID of your swap and then rebuild initramfs
update-initramfs -u

18. End

Kodak Zi6 first impressions

MindSuburbian — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:22:52 +0000

I’ve done a couple of tests on this ultra portable video camera, and I’d like to report them here.

First of all I was right in my previous post: the video is not high quality in poor lighting conditions.
The clips are quite fluid at 60fps, but there’s a lot of noise.
On the other hand, there’s a big jump in quality, when being outdoor in the sunshine: noise becomes very little and one may appreciate the 720p 60fps on a big screen (I tested the Zi6 on my 37” Samsung).

One thing that left me helpless is that my T5600 notebook can’t handle correctly the 60fps stream: VLC just shows a couple of still images every 2-3 seconds. All fine if you connect the Zi6 directly to the TV set.

I also wanted to use the macro switch on the lenses and it turned out that you have to be really close to stay on focus: so I just took a picture on a still object. It was something like 2cm close.

It takes nice 2048×1536 (3Mpixel) images, but the sensor has still the same noise problems of the video function (it seems like it interpolates, as the picture is not very sharp)

My conclusion is that this is a very nice gadget, because has HD and 60fps, it’s really handy and portable, so that you can bring the Zi6 with you all the time and be ready to shot in a couple of seconds from extracting to being operational: you’ll never loose a face expression or a sudden event.
On the contrary, the Zi6 cannot be used as a professional video camera because of the noise and the poor quality in low light conditions, does not shows important information, like remaining recording time and space on the display and does not have advanced settings like shutter and color (white balance) adjustments and zoom lenses (only fixed focus).

Anyway, the price around 100-150 euros puts the Zi6 in a mid-low end user level and so, perfect for a pocket video camera!

Apple App Store restrictions

MindSuburbian — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:04:15 +0000

A couple of weeks ago i had this nice idea of making an iPhone app that could run DHTML in a self contained form, comparable to a standalone app (with local storage).

Now it turns out Apple does not allow apps to run external (unapproved) code, as happened to the soon to be released C64 emulator (which includes a BASIC intrpreter).

Here is the excerpt from the iPhone SDK Agreement:

“3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

Well, now the remaining options are that either this hypotetical app becomes a tool to build unmodifiable apps to be submitted to Apple like the cited NimbleKit by VolnaTech, or it must claim that the app would only store actual websites that would be anyway be available thru Safari (online only).

I guess something could be done. But this is only an hypothesis

Not the winning, but the taking part… and win!

MindSuburbian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:54:04 +0000

Last month I came across the crazy DreamHost API contest and decided to give a try with my Google Gadget for DH API.
Well, to be honest, at the moment of submitting (very close to the deadline), there were just a dozen API tools and a part from the buzzing iPhone & Co. apps, nothing really extraordinary (though very useful).

The day after the deadline, i was quite surprised to see a dozen more apps, with nice and rocking features, so I just stopped hoping of a reward for my gadget.

Now it turns out that the DH guys were so impressed with the efforts everybody put into this competition, that decided to give a $100 DreamHost credit to every participant!

Notice the Account Service Credits payment method, revealing the source of the $100

So, even if $100 credit is not a grand-prize, I have to admit I’m very impressed by this move: thank you to the DH guys!

DreamHost API contest: DH PS Charts (1)

Storytelling rewards

MindSuburbian — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:30:58 +0000

This winter Kodak released a nice idea called Kodak SnowStories.
They wanted to celebrate snow, while promoting their brand (and products), asking for stories from all around the world.

Well, since i had already created my story on the snow, I decided to put it in a better form, select a couple of pictures and post everything in the SnowStories website, along with a link to my YouTube video (see my post).

Well, it turned out that I eventually won the 2nd prize for the March competition: a Kodak Zi6 pocket video camera!
I now have a better way to record my videos!

The Zi6 only arrived last friday, so no more snow stories for the moment.

This little device is everything but complicated:

2 buttons: record/playback mode and play on the right, stop or delete on the left
a mini-joystick for changing mode (still, vga, HD, HD@60) and zooming or forward/rewind and vol up/down when in playback mode
a macro vs landscape switch
an SDHC card slot
and of course the power switch

It starts in less than a couple of seconds and it comes with a soft pouch and a wrist lace: you can keep it in your pocket, ready for every situation.
You also get a couple of rechargeable AA 1200mAh batteries and a mini AA and AAA charger.
Fully featured for the TV set too: an HD component output and a composite+audio cables… no need to buy anything else, though a big SDHC is recommended

A nice trick is the retractable USB connector, so that you don’t need an SD card reader nor a cable to connect the Zi6 to the nearest computer: just push the front button (a reflecting button useful for self recording!).
Of course the full set of accessories will save you some battery charge vs some more pocket space used, but you can just buy one of those direct SD to USB readers for a couple of bucks (China-made of course! ).

The direct USB connection will show up in your computer with two removable disk partitions: one for the videos, another for the windows software (yes, only windows, but at least you won’t need drivers for copying the videos). And yes the 128MB internal space will become unavailable when the SD is inserted, though will be sufficient for a couple of minutes video at most.

The resolution is 720p (half-hd) and there is no focus nor zoom (it’s a fixed set of lenses), but a nice option is to capture 720p@60fps, which gives an extremely smooth video (H.264 format, .MOV files).

The setup is flash-fast. Only three options: date, sounds on/off (for poweron/off and recording start/stop), output mode (NTSC, PAL).

The only downside is that there is a lot of noise in dark conditions (and there’s no night light), so I guess it’s not good at all for professional use, but it will become very useful when nice smooth recording is needed for a smaller format (capture in HD and post-produce SD videos).

Another little note is that you can’t see the remaining space nor recording time left (only battery level), but you should be able to record almost two hours with HD definition on a 4GB card, plenty of clips for an HD gadget!

After all, not that bad for a snowman story

P.S. The SnowStories website has locked the contents right after the end of the competition (don’t know why), anyway I guess I’ll start writing some stories from time to time, just in case…

Develop iPhone Apps faster?

MindSuburbian — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:44:35 +0000

I really don’t understand if Apple and iPhone is all about being trendy and trashing your money (for the customer) and becoming popular and rich with iBeer and iFart (for the developer), or actually doing something useful (well, there must be something useful that gets you rich )

Anyway, it turned out that if you can’t write in Objective-C (and here please allow me to be a bad boy: if you really can’t, i would suggest you go doing something different than a programmer), you may now write iPhone Apps with HTML and Javascript, for a mere $99 using this NimbleKit by VolnaTech.

The whole story feels like it doesn’t fit at all to me!
Having just noticed that you may write DHTML fully featured apps using OpenLaszlo or some DHTML libraries/toolkits, it just p*ss me off to see that if you want to make money, you must buy this $99 tookit (seems to me a kind of a bluff).

Hey, I mean no offense to the VolnaTech guys: they’ve been very smart and very hard programmers to make this possible. And I see nothing wrong in making money from your hard working, especially if we’re talking about the iPhone App Store (you can make thousands from iBeer!).

But please, let me explain these simple facts:

iPhone does not support Flash (among the thousand other missing features), and this is ok, cause Flash may be so nasty with CPU, battery and users, that it’s not a very bad idea. But this make one think: why that? Something to do with the fact that you will buy Apps?
to develop something for the iPhone you must pass thru a Mac, thru a $100 fee and thru the Apple approval (yes, we’re good guys and do not want to jailbreak). Seen the above doubt?
iPhone Safari has a native support for DHTML

Now, the only really missing thing for making a DHTML app on iPhone is the offline mode (with the local data storage): otherwise one may just make a 320×240 web page with almost anything possible in it and the result will be exactly the same app as a real one.
Well, given that i don’t know if a DHTML Safari app can handle multi-touch (sure there is a way), of course I don’t know a way to interface the GPS and the Webcam with a web-page (but who knows… maybe there’s a way)

Well, I do not have a Mac (so don’t have XCode and the iPhone SDK), but my idea is: make a simple iPhone App FOR FREE (and even if it’s not for free, jesus, not for $99, but $7.99!).
Make this App in this way:

a builtin webpage server
one Safari frame
a virtual XML storage
something like a JavaScript API for interfacing iPhone hardware

This will make it possible to:

write a DHTML application
add an XML file for keeping data of that (read-writes will be done on the local storage someway)
wrap it in a special XML/ZIP/manifest/wathever
deliver it to our DiPhone (DHTML-iPhone) App for offline execution and local storage

Easy eh? …and almost free too!

Now i guess Steve is not paying me for this… (well, maybe he read my previous idea)

P.S.
Ok, for the moment you might just try to make an online DHTML app (without GPS, webcam and local storage) and I belive it will work great

MindSuburbia

Spiderman helps the bat

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