For those of you who have picked up a tablet, but have yet to pick up a nice case, here is a quick hack for you. I’ve taken a paper feed tray, a PCI slot cover, and a standard dell usb keyboard and screwed them all together. I covered all the screw heads and rough edges with hot glue, and I sit here now typing a comfortable 80+wpm on my tablet. As I’m running a kernel that supports USB host mode on my GTablet, I simply plugged it in via USB and found a way to attach the tablet to the back of a keyboard (screws and hot glue). Fun, and it works great!
As someone who hacks up every console he’s ever gotten, my PS3 has been rocking a Linux enabled CFW for some time now (remember that tutorial I did way back on turning your Linux PS3 into a cross-compilation powerhouse?). As such, I’ve gotten the banhammer from Sony PSN networks, and if I want to play some multiplayer games with my PS3, I’m out of luck except for LAN play. This is fine, as there’s always tunneling applications such as Xlink Kai, or so I thought. It’s been quite a while since I last looked into XLink Kai. This article was originally going to be titled “Xlink Kai Arm Port”, however the XLink Kai developers have decided to close source their project. That’s their prerogative and if they feel it contributes to the quality of their project it’s within their purveyance to do so. That said, it just doesn’t jive with me. One can argue the effectiveness of closed source solutions but at the end of the day Xlink Kai would have had a fully working ARM port working on all the billions of Arm devices today if they had left their source open, because I would have ported it this weekend.
In case any of you have been meaning to pick up a Pixel Qi display and install it into the best possible netbook out there, allow me to save you the trouble. Now that I’ve got a top-secret e-Ink project in the works, I’m letting go of my Samsung N210 netbook that’s got a Pixel Qi screen installed (the one featured in my third book Hacks..). It’s fully loaded, stacked, and just like you’d get straight from the factory…except that there’s a frikkin Pixel Qi screen installed! It’s the only one I’ve ever seen for sale on eBay, ever. Spread the word if you know any cutting edge gadget loving folks that don’t fancy cracking open a screen bezel.
Hacks is a collection of my most popular tutorials, scripts, tweaks, Zipit Z2 work, and source code. Within these forty some chapters reside some of my most interesting work, and certainly some of the most viewed tutorials and hacks on the Internet today. Featured on Hackaday, Engadget, Make online, and hundreds of other blogs and forums, these hacks are meant to enlighten and entertain while providing the reader with concrete examples and launching platforms for future work. Whether you are wanting to reorganize your desktop, reboot your modem, port software to a new platform, administer a Linux box, or just entertain yourself on a lazy sunday, you’ll find something of interest in the chapters ahead. At just over 200 pages on most eReader devices at 1.99$ it’s a terrific bargain and an excellent reference guide. I’ll be updating the permalink page (top left in my WordPress theme) when the Amazon and B&N links go live sometime this evening or tomorrow morning.
Hacks is a collection of my most popular tutorials, scripts, tweaks, Zipit Z2 work, and source code. Within these forty some chapters reside some of my most interesting work, and certainly some of the most viewed tutorials and hacks on the Internet today. Featured on Hackaday, Engadget, Make online, and hundreds of other blogs and forums, these hacks are meant to enlighten and entertain while providing the reader with concrete examples and launching platforms for future work. Whether you are wanting to reorganize your desktop, reboot your modem, port software to a new platform, administer a Linux box, or just entertain yourself on a lazy sunday, you’ll find something of interest in the chapters ahead. At just over 200 pages on most eReader devices it’s a terrific bargain and an excellent reference guide.
My second eBook, Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster – A Practical Walkthrough is now available for purchase online. This 60+ page tutorial walks one through the creation of a fully distributed compilation system. With practical advice and heaps of source and script examples, you can pick up this helpful eBook at Amazon and Barnes and Nobles sites and be using your own custom distributed compilation system within hours. I’ll be updating the permalink page (top-right on my WordPress theme) with shopping links once the shopping pages go live. While I remain hard at work at Discursive Labs and on a number of other projects, my next eBook project will most likely be a large collection of my hacks and this eBook should keep your e-reader in use till then.
My second eBook, Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster – A Practical Walkthrough is a collected volume of my article series of the same name. Throughout the 6 in-depth how-to articles, I’ll take you through the process of building a fully working cross-compilation distributed build system. The canonical example is of building a distributed ARM to X86-64 cross-compilation cluster. This system is also generic enough to apply to most any compilation environment, while remaining powerful enough to outperform all but the most advanced compilation systems. With source code examples provided and easy step by step instructions, this 60+ page instructional eBook is a valuable introductory and practical resource for those interested in distributed compilation, cross compilation, low power computing clusters, and so much more. It’s also one terrific bargain, and an excellent reference.
As some of you have pointed out to me, the links to the free review copy of my eBook “Life For Free – The Chronicles of a Nerd Saving For A Startup” have gone down. Due to an increase in demand I’m putting Live For Free back into print and it’ll be available online at Amazon and Barnes and Nobles stores initially, with more stores to follow if things go well. If any of you have purchased it, please do leave an honest review and rating. It’s invaluable for me to know how my books are being accepted as well as for others to know what they are getting into. I’ll update the LFF permalink (top-right corner in my WordPress theme) to contain purchase links to various bookstores as it comes up. I’ve decided to price it at 99c, hoping that it’ll be an easy impulse purchase from your Kindle or Nook.
Here’s a fun thing I came up with for those Steam users out there. Ever wanted to use an SSH client in the middle of a Steam game? I’ve got an arm based server running constantly at my house (4 watts average power usage) doing menial chores like downloading and file serving and queuing up print jobs, playing music, etc. I prefer to SSH into a screen or byobu session, start a long task, then disconnect and check back later. If you’re relaxing at home playing a game in Steam however, you may not want to alt-tab out of your game session. Besides, if you’re running in Wine there’s a fairly good chance this will crash your game in some fashion. Short of booting up another computer or opening ports on your router to allow web-based ssh services to work, what is one to do? Read on for my solution to the problem.
Quite the dramatic lead-in, I know. It’s been one week since I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Pixel Qi trans-reflective screen from Makershed and just over one whole work day since I installed it. And what a difference a day makes. Here I sit, typing a blog post and fixing bugs, not 20 feet from the ocean. At 11am. In Los Angeles. The sun is shining brightly overhead, and I’m actually getting work done on my laptop. It’s fantastic. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Pixel Qi screen, it’s from the folks at Pixel Qi, a spinoff from the OLPC project. You can order the screen right now for 250$ on sale from Makershed and I have to say it is quite worth it, at least if you’d like to get some work done in the sun. If you’re smart about it, you can actually get yourself set up with a Pixel Qi enabled netbook relatively cheaply, as I did.
