Barry's Blog

I've been using this excellent motherboard for about 2 years, it has now been disassembled as I had less of a need for a silent PC in the living room after retiring my use of MythTV.  I had Ubuntu installed on this PC and during its lifetime was subjected to many performance tweaks. Rather than delete this work, I've decided to put the files online for other people to use. Sound I wanted digital sound over the HDMI cable so it can be played by either my TV or AV amp; I've played back DTS HD with this configuration, my TV had issues with some sample rates which is why the rate is configured explicitly. asoundrc pcm.!default front pcm.analog-hw { type hw card 0 device 0 } pcm.analog-hw-formatted { type plug slave { pcm analog-hw rate 48000 } } pcm.digital-hw { type hw card 0 device 3 } pcm.digital-hw-formatted { type plug slave { pcm digital-hw rate 48000 } } pcm.hdmi_softvol { type softvol slave.pcm digital-hw-formatt...

We purchased an iPad last year for my son to use and in the year he has become eerily proficient with the touchscreen interface. The educational applications have been very good and still use it for this purpose; however more recently it is being used as a video player... Whilst I'm not particularly against this, I would rather he start creating content rather than merely consuming it. One problem with being used to touchscreen is the keyboard and mouse paradigm is alien - it must be really weird to have to press a keyboard key located somewhere else. I imagine using a keyboard for the first time would be like writing notes on a piece of paper but the ink actually appears on a different pad. Anyway, keyboards are here to stay and I want my son to learn how to use a keyboard as well as learn the alphabet (he is already pretty good at numbers). Therefore as part of my Raspberry Pi setup, I purchased a Duragadget keyboard for my son to use, this has large keys, lower case letters...

I'm a bit late to the game here, but I've been swithering over the iPad 2 as an educational device for my son. Whilst I've been an Apple Mac OS X user since 2005, the iPhone and subsequent iOS devices have never appealed and I prefer the Android ecosystem. However in terms of applications - specifically educational ones - nothing can beat iOS, in fact, I wouldn't even consider purchasing an Android tablet. A combination of my son soon being two and the recent black friday sales at the Apple store I felt the time was right to go ahead and purchase one. So I purchased a white iPad 2 with the green smart cover. We've had it in the house now for 1 week and I think it is a great device. I have a few issues, for example why can't the keyboard keys show capitalisation so you see what case you have? There is no haptic feedback unlike HTC when pressing an active part of the screen which means sometimes you don't know if that is really a button or not. Also my son lov...

A few months back I made a python script available which monitored the Dell 5530 / Ericsson f3507g mobile broadband modem in Linux providing network, access type and signal information to a file for other programs (such as Conky) to pick up and display the data. I've since updated this program to now use PyGTK to display a status icon indicating the signal strength and the access type. Through this icon the radio state can be changed to enforce 3G only, GPRS only or 3G preferred connections (aswell as turning the radio off). The script should work in tandem to network-manager so you can still get online using something you already use. The only addition is a new status icon with your signal strength - something ModemManager should resolve when it becomes available as standard in a few months time. If you can't wait that long and want signal monitoring, then this is for you! Additionally, if you use vnstat to monitor your bandwidth, clicking the status icon will displ...

A few months back I posted a howto guide on getting this mobile broadband card working with Linux, what I failed to mention was I continued to work on these scripts. I feel it is appropriate to post a status update on what I use now especially given there appears to be no further updates on the NetworkManager front. I no longer use UMTSMon as I found it relied on AT+CSQ for the signal quality and during UMTS and HSPA connections, the f3507g/dell 5530 returns either the previous GPRS value or 99,99 which UMTSMon considers as no connection available. I've used a simplified wvdial.conf scripts and now do the rest of the radio work using python. wvdial.conf # Author: Barry John Williams # Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike 2.5 UK:Scotland Licence [Dialer defaults] New PPPD = yes Stupid Mode = 1 Modem Type = ACM Modem Modem = /dev/ttyACM1 Init1 = AT Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"ip","internet" Baud = 460800 I...

There is an updated howto on the Dell 5530 using my own python based monitoring tool at http://blog.bjw.me.uk/2009/03/dell-5530ericsson-f3507g-on-linux.html Introduction Here is a Howto document for getting the Dell 5530 wwan card working along with the onboard GPS under Ubuntu 8.10. This card does not work conveniently with the bundled Network Manager software, but replacing NetworkManager with other utilities will give the ability to get online using a pretty GUI and not have to resort to using wvdial and the command line... It should also work with the Ericsson f3507g as I believe the Dell 5530 is a rebadged version of this module. Check Hardware First you need to check the modem is detected correctly. On my computer, the modem is detected out of the box by the cdc_acm module and exposes three serial ports (/dev/ttyACM[0,1,2]) for communication. Check by running: dmesg | grep ACM Mine shows the following: [ 34.385302] cdc_acm 1-6:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ ...