Cranial Trauma

Desire post test

Toker — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:14:30 +0000

Got the new desire. Also got a smoke machineand lasers…

It must be true; I saw it on telly!

Toker — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:26:54 +0000

For years now, I’ve taken to the phrase “But it must be true; I saw it on telly!”. Depending on circumstance… well, you can imagine.

You can probably also imagine how delighted I was to come across the Dan&Dan song “The Daily Mail“.

All of his video’s are clever as well as funny -fantastic ideas and brilliant execution -I’d very much recommend checking out his other work.

In a similar theme to DanAndDan (playing with yourself, that is) I also found the following extremely amusing. Well executed and lovely self depreciation

(if you’re not one of those people easily amused, I implore you to watch at least 1:20seconds before you make up your mind).

This is what you get for paying

Toker — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:58:23 +0000

Not that I’m advocating piracy at all, but the recent Ubisoft DRM Fails and the not so recent events that saw people who had bought a legitimate version of Spore downloading and installing cracked versions just to get it to work do make me think….

[solved] E17: Cursor problems & no Screen Flip

Toker — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:03:26 +0000

After crippling my system (don’t update libjpeg when every single one of your GUI based apps is built against it) I found myself having to reinstall E17.

Two major issues seems to jump out at me, though both are easily fixed.

Screen Flip Stops Working
Xorg starts eating up tonnes of memory.

1. Not really a bug, just a change to be aware of. If you now want your standard screen flipping, you have to enable it both as a module and also then configure it in settings. so:

Open Modules (Settings -> Extentions -> Modules) and make sure the Settings – Edge Bindings module is enabled.

Once it is, open the Edge Bindings Settings pannel (Settings -> Input -> Edge Bindings). If you don’t find anything configured, then hit “Restore Default Bindigs” to set things back to normal. Done.

The other problem that seems to have reared its head is with the Enlightenment cursor, or rather the e17 cursor being affected by a bug in Xorg.

The easy fix is to disable the e17 cursor: Settings -> Look -> Mouse Cursor:
Change Cursor Settings to Use X Cursor.
(Some people have reported that disabling “Idle Cursor” also resets memory consumption back to normal).

Backlight on the g1

Toker — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:35:07 +0000

I’ve been using the g1 for a few months now on a daily basis, and for the most part I’ve been quite happy with the screen and have never had to change the brightness settings.

I was a little upset when trying to give directions earlier in bright sunlight, as I was squinting quite a lot.

My upset was quickly replaced by amazement as I realied ILd been running for 3 months with the screen brightness turned to 0%; change it to 30% and it was bright and readable again. Fantastic!

Truth be told, as screens go, its almost too bright, I keep finding myself reading in bed and wishing I could make the screen dimmer, but it looks like -15% screen brightness (would not only suck all of the light out of the world, but also) is beyound easy reach.

-as a side note, its quite hard typing on the g1 when you’ve but off the end of your finger chopping onions

Kernel Update Kills Raq

Toker — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:19:34 +0000

A week or so ago, I started playing about with the Raq in the hopes of being able to quickly get it doing something (and preferably hidden in a cupboard and not on the desk next to the bed).

I quickly got ahead of myself, and in the process of trying to update it managed to completely screw it to the point where all it would do is display Kernel Panic on the LCD Screen. Turns out that by updating the kernel on the eeprom, it can no longer boot its OS.

If I understand correctly, then the boot sequence for the Raq3 goes like this (when booting from the hard disk).

Decompress + Load Stage 1 kernel from the eeprom.
Initialise the LCD Screen and buttons.
Allow the HDD to spin up and stabilise.
Decompress + Load Stage 2 kernel (from specified boot partition)
Continue standard bootup…

There are some interesting things to note about this. For a start there is no bootloader (eg lilo or grub) as you would need on most hardware as it is built into the eeprom. The eeprom on a Raq3 is limited to 1024k making it quite hard to fit a modern kernel on it, which leads to some interesting issues.

The Raq3′s built in OS uses a customised version of RedHat and boots a linux-2.2 (iirc) kernel which is completely obsolete and has been for quite some time (we are currently at 2.6.29-r1, see this for some idea of context), which then passes off to a linux-2.2 stage 2 kernel on the hard drive.

The latest possible kernel for the eeprom is a linux-2.4.24 kernel, which is still obsolete in terms of current features, but has the power to let us do something clever. There is a sourceforge project you can get this latest cobalt-rom (2.10.3) release (containing the afformentioned 2.4 kernel) but bear in mind the project was last touched in 2003.

When I updated the eeprom to the 2.4 kernel, its quite obvious that it would freak out when trying to load the 2.2 kernel (stage 2). -Or is it the 2.2 freaking out at being loaded by a 2.4?

It was at this point it got shelved for a couple of weeks whilst I flailed about the great intertubes trying to find a fix.

One thing became clear; The only way out is up!

The Raq3 -an introduction

Toker — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:30:38 +0000

So I got gifted a Sun Cobalt Raq 3, and before I had the chance to see it, I thought I was onto a winner.

Cobalt sounds cool, and hey, its a 1u Sun box, surely its gotta be ace!

Turns out to be a 498mhz K6-2 (apparently it was a 300 as default), a very strange boot sequence and a bodged version of redhat 2 (iirc) which I don’t care for.

Anyway, after trying to update the firmware and managing to brick it, I’m in the process of trying to get gentoo on it.

Annoyingly, there are no k6-2 stage 3 builds, so I’m currently creating a recent one and am hoping to post it shortly.

I was looking at nagios (ah, gcc has just re-built itself. That took long enough) which is what set me off on wanting a proper server, and I only want nagios as I got gifted a cisco 2900 to play with.

So, its been busy recently. And I’ve been trying to teach myself protools and re-wire a studio. Too much smoke, not enough sleep

Updating udev

Toker — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:18:57 +0000

After fudging with partitions, sometimes the computer will make me reboot before I get dev nodes.

There has to be a way of forcing udev to rescan the partition layout. I need to find out how.

iPod Boot Codes

Toker — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:05:35 +0000

After showing off my G1, a friend of mine came round with an iPod Touch (8GB) that he got to play with.

It seems its already been jailbroken, but to be honest we have no idea whats going on with it. One thing that is evident, is that the battery indicator shows whatever it feels like at the time.

I figured the device would have a diagnostic menu that might shed some light on what the battery is actually feeling, but after much googling, it seems that there isn’t a Diagnostic Menu on the new iPods at all.

For those of you with an older ipod (with buttons on it) there is a fantastic boot-menu key sequence over at command-tab.com which is well worth bookmarking.

still alive…

Toker — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:07:35 +0000

but sadly not eating cake.

Sorry i’ve not posted in a while. Been a little busy with some php stuff and also I got myself a HTC-Dream running Android.

I love the thing, completely and utterly (except for the lack of ram and crappy battery).

I would have posted about it sooner, but 1,000 words into my description of the user experience -written on the G1 whilst in the bath- I managed to hit cancel, and it kinda fucked me off.

But hopefully I should get round to posting something soon.