Computing

Currently we are all stuck in front of webcams, at least half the time. I do have a laptop—a gift from a kind friend—and it does get used, but the rest of the time I am sitting before two old monitors (one of which recently had to be repaired) and a lovely cherry keyboard: and no webcam. No matter: I’ve a cheapo usb-thing and it works fine. I’ve also an old phone handset from an 80s landline wired into two 3. [Read More]

Can we take a moment to remark on how wonderfully useful PdfJam is? Behind the scenes it’s just LaTeX. Thus you might be surprised to notice that pdfnup --nup 1x1 --paper a5paper --no-landscape image.png Is an excellent way to turn an image—say, a bunch of screenshots of a page which you concatenated with convert image1.png image2.png image3.png -append image.png Into (say) an a5 pdf, ready to be turned into a full-length pdf with [Read More]

Since this has, alongside other things, occupied a whole day, I thought I’d put it up here in case anyone else tries. Back in the day KiCAD had a python scripting console. Currently that would be very useful: but it’s implemented with gtk2, and everything ships with wxwidgets compiled against gtk3. So we have to compile wxwidgets, which is fairly straightforward: get the sources compile—except it’s not a ./configure, make, make install job: rather a python script calls other python scripts, and so on. [Read More]

The internet in Durham, which was allowing me to use the workstation there remotely, has gone down; support tell me to ’turn it off and on again’. But obviously I can’t do that remotely. Ah well, it wasn’t really needed. But what if it were? I’ve run servers over unreliable wifi links with good uptime before, with a failsafe script which rebooted everything if it couldn’t ping the gateway for too long—and looking at the logs, sometimes it was needed. [Read More]

Embedded Linux is currently all the rage with little boards like the Pi running a full-fledged Debian just to flash a few LEDs. Now certainly, the Pi would find uses here, but it’s hardly cheap. What is cheap—or even free—is defunct wireless routers. They, too, are embedded systems running Linux. Unlike the Pi they have on-board wifi and an ethernet switch; the cpu isn’t usually too bad either. I also picked a few up for £0. [Read More]