Michael J. Hammel - The Graphics Muse

Google oversearch

mjhammel — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:31:22 +0000

I’ve just read that Google has signed an agreement with Twitter to include tweets in their search results. Now, I think Google has done some pretty clever things so far such as Google Maps. But while I have no problem with Google adding features like this to their search engine, it doesn’t mean I want [...]

Reviewing disk labels, problems with USB attached drives and running wires through walls

mjhammel — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:06:56 +0000

I’ve been having problems with my external USB drives used on my MythTV backend. The drives are no longer being recognized on bootup. This started happening after I added additional 500GB and 1TB drives to the system when there was already a 500GB drive. All of the drives are USB attached MyBooks. The 1TB drive [...]

Ryann struts her tennis stuff for EWU.

mjhammel — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:01:53 +0000

My kiddo is off to a good start at Eastern Washington, where she’s playing tennis on scholoarship. She did great in doubles (that’s her in the photo) this past weekend to follow up an even better run in singles the weekend before. Go Eags!

Tracking software projects

mjhammel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:34:52 +0000

I stumbled upon an interesting site today: ohloh.net (recently acquired by SourceForge). I haven’t had a chance to look through it much yet but I noticed that the GIMP developers were listed in it. Actually, it was Martin Nordholts blog that pointed me to it. I’m preparing a new release of XNotesPlus, completely rewritten in Java [...]

Building GIMP from source

mjhammel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:06:13 +0000

I’m in the process of revising my last book, The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects. It will take about a year, I’m guessing. To make sure its meaningful a little longer than the last version I’m working from the git repository. Git is the replacement for cvs and svn that the GIMP developers have recently [...]

Getting new phones: argument for the Palm Pre = Linux support (but only if you sign your paycheck over to Sprint)

mjhammel — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:49:04 +0000

My daughter is heading off to college shortly and I’ve been informed that mother and daughter will be communicating via text messages. I disabled text messaging on my and my wife’s phones to prevent unwanted charges from dorks sending unwanted messages. Now I have to turn it back on. Oh joy. This means enabling text messaging [...]

VMware Server 2.0.1 on linux 2.6.29

mjhammel — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:27:12 +0000

Another kernel upgrade, another VMware failure. This gets old. It used to be you patched using the vmware-any-to-any patches but these appear to have dried up. Now we have a new patching mechanism: google till you find someone who fixed the problem. Fortunately, someone fixed the problem for VMware Workstation (Krellen) and someone else (DutchTechies) [...]

More Peek Research

mjhammel — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:51:33 +0000

My Peek isn’t expected to get here till Saturday and I haven’t ordered the USB-to-Serial cable yet, but I will soon. However, while I wait for all that I’m digging into the links on the elinux.org/peek wiki. The link to the TI site for the TCS2310 (the main chip with the ARM7 processor) sometimes takes [...]

Peek ordered, learning about the hardware

mjhammel — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:40:58 +0000

I placed an order for a gray Peek from Amazon. The gray Peek’s are$2 less than the colored ones. Who needs a colored one for hacking? Anyway, it should arrive by Saturday. In the meantime I’ve been watching the videos and scanning online resources to learn about the internals of the device. I think if [...]

Upgrade addendum: other packages of interest, configuring a Wacom Bamboo and a Logitech keyboard

mjhammel — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:45:43 +0000

My previous posts on doing Fedora upgrades cover most of the topic but I realized there were a few things I left out. Installing additional applications The first thing has to do with some useful applications that Mauriat Miranda doesn’t cover on his excellent Fedora installation guidelines. xpdf - a simpler pdf viewer than acroread gnumeric - My preferred [...]