grep
Nokia N82 Bluetooth + GPRS/3G
Feb 12th
A few months ago I did an interesting discovery about using my cellphone to go on the internet via bluetooth. I had this strange situation before where it just stopped working, and after revisiting all configs it worked again.
What really happens is that my cellphone somehow crashes, after which I power cycle it by removing the batteries. The phone then boots again, but here is the twist: the service channels in the phone are re-allocated and apparently in a random order!
This implies that the RFCOMM channel configured in the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file is possible wrong now!
Solution: just browse the services again with sdptool browse, adapt the file and it should work again!
how to set a serial port at MIDI speed in linux
May 30th
Linux serial ports only work at standard speeds by default. MIDI runs at 31250 baud, which is not a standard speed. However there are tricks to get custom speeds, but documentation is quite fuzzy. This is a simple recipe that worked for me with an FT232 USB-Serial board.
Check the baud base of the device:
$ setserial -g -a /dev/ttyUSB0
/dev/ttyUSB0, Line 0, UART: unknown, Port: 0×0000, IRQ: 0
Baud_base: 24000000, close_delay: 0, divisor: 0
closing_wait: infinite
Flags: spd_normal low_latency
As you can see the baud base is 24000000 here.
Next calculate the divisor by dividing the baud_base you see here by the speed you want.
In my case 24000000/31250=768.
Apply the new setting:
$ setserial -v /dev/ttyUSB0 spd_cust divisor 768
Next start your serial application, you might want to make sure it is already set to the correct speed before you do the above changes else it might destroy your settings. The correct speed is 38400 baud, which is now aliased to 31250.
With minicom just use the menu (CTRL-A Z) to change the settings.
Screen can be used like this:
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 38400
Exit screen by pressing CTRL-A CTRL-\
Sweet.
arduino toolkit on x86_64 linux Debian/Ubuntu
Apr 28th
Update:
I received an email from Ethan Bisset with a much nicer solution: just use the debian provided serial library instead of the one provided with the arduino software.
This is his recipe:
1. Get arduino software
2. apt-get install sun-java6-bin binutils-avr avr-libc gcc-avr librxtx-java
3. Untar arduino software
4. Delete <arduino>/lib/librxtxSerial.so
5. Done!
(below is the old entry:)
Download the linux 32-bit arduino toolkit from the arduino toolkit download page and untar in a directory.
Install the avr tools: apt-get install avr-libc binutils-avr gcc-avr
Install “ia32-sun-java5-bin”. ( apt-get install ia32-sun-java5-bin )
Adapt the “arduino” startup script script and replace java in it by
/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun/bin/java
Execute the “arduino” startup script. It works just fine now.
Thats all.
Many thanks to the Debian java packagers for providing this 32-bit compatibity jvm!
De Post – volmachten
Apr 3rd
Blijkbaar heeft De Post een nieuwe melkkoe gevonden: de kleine zelfstandige.
Vandaag stond de postbode aan mijn deur met aan pakketje voor de firma. Hij vertelde me doodleuk dat het niet mag afgeven worden, want ik moet hiervoor een volmacht hebben.
Deze volmacht kun je gaan halen op de post en kost elk jaar geld.
De postbode gaf zelf toe dat dit puur geldklopperij is.
Je bent dus gewaarschuwd: zorg dat verzendingen met de post als geadresseerde je privé gegevens bevatten en niet je firmanaam. Of werk met een andere firma dan De Post.
Ikzelf hang er nu al aan voor dit jaar.
Gelukkig is het zalig weer 
glibc 2.9 – maradns
Mar 1st
As Debian has been released my “unstable” box recently upgraded to glibc 2.9.
This caused DNS resolving to mysteriously fail in some applications.
Turns out that only IPv6 enabled applications suffer.
Apparently libc now fires both an IPv4 and IPv6 DNS resolving request in parallel. It looks like some DNS servers don’t handle that correctly and answer an error on the IPv6 request before the IPv4 request even has time to resolve further in the internet.
In my case it was my local NSLU2 running Debian lenny causing the trouble, more specific the maradns local DNS server and DNS proxy running on it.
I manually upgraded maradns to the latest version (> 1.3.10) and things are “back” to normal.
Another solution is to disable IPv6 systemwide but I prefer not to do that as I use IPv6 occationally for testing.
I fear that this will cause more trouble for alot of people with routers doing DNS proxying.
openMSX 0.7.0
Feb 7th
A new version of openMSX has been released!
Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami’s Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.
In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder. The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard
Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal
But save-states wasn’t enough. I also enabled “old-people” mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.
After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.
Only 22 years late 
P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating….
dell precision m6400 power brick
Feb 7th
I’m really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can’t agree more. It’s a huge 200 Watt thing and it’s really as large and heavy as a stone brick.
Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I’ve been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.
(Try at your own risk!)
a month
Jan 19th
Last year I even did it for longer then a month, but this year I want at least to redo a minimal effort, thus I’m going for a month of sobriety, as a kind of cleansing (and no, I’m not religious).
These are my 5 daily checkpoints:
- smoothie for breakfast
This is something which we (me and my wife) do already anyway, have a fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast. Currently our favorite mix is 4 blood oranges, freshly pealed and parted, a seep of Sea-buckthorn elixir, and a couple of frozen strawberries (or cranberries). Mix all in the blender, long enough to don’t have any parts left. It is extremely tasty, and gives a serious vitamin boost for the winter. The idea is to have it for breakfast and then don’t drink or eat anything else for at least 1.5 hours, to make sure it’s (almost) fully digested.
- < 4 coffee
This is a hard one; people who know me will know I’m a serious coffee lover. I have a special espresso machine, and typically serve single origin or special blend coffees. It’s hard to resist
- exercise
Just a walk with the dogs already counts.
- no sugar
This is usually not so hard for me, as I’m not into sweets anyway.
- no alcohol
This is tougher. I’ll have to stick to coffee, tea and fruit juices.
This is all as much a physical as a mental exercice
DIFTAR, geen oplossing
Dec 17th
Twee maanden geleden zat er een briefje in de brievenbus, met uitleg over het nieuwe afval system, DIFTAR, en een formulier dat ik ingevuld moest ophangen aan de brievenbus, om te kiezen welke afval bakken ik wil hebben. Nu doen we zelf aan compostering en de rest wordt door de kippen verwerkt, dus een groene bak heb ik niet nodig. Formulier ingevuld, klaar.
Niet dus.
Een paar weken later staan er twee bakken aan mijn huis, een groene en een grijze. Ikke gebeld, uitgelegd dat ik die groene niet nodig heb, en er ook niet voor zoek te betalen. Geen probleem, men ging een afspraak maken om die komen halen.
Niet dus.
Gisteren een rekening gekregen voor de twee bakken…. zal toch nog maar eens bellen…
Los van al die opstart perikelen blijf ik het een zeer slecht systeem vinden.
Uitgangspunt is als ik het goed begrijp mensen laten betalen voor de hoeveelheid afval die ze produceren, om zo aan te moedigen van minder afval te produceren.
Probleem is dat mensen met veel geld het niet voelen, voor hen maakt het geen verschil, dus die hebben geen reden. Mensen met weinig geld daar en tegen, en zeker de oudere generatie vinden dat ze ineens veel geld moeten betalen voor hun afval.
Ik ben er zeker van dat dit alleen maar sluikstorten en stoken in de hand werkt. Op een mistige of regenachtige dag als vandaag ruik je soms gewoon de geur van verbrand plastic.
Proberen aan die mensen uit te leggen dat dit slecht is is praten tegen een muur…
Volgens mij is de enige juiste oplossing de ophaling van restafval volledig gratis maken.
Nu bestaat “gratis” uiteraard niet, en betalen u en ik er dan evengoed voor, maar via indirecte belastingen. Volgens mij is dit psychologisch gezien een veel betere aanpak.
Wat dan met al die verpakkingsafval problemen… Ook hier kan volgens mij alleen een tax op de verpakking bij aankoop maar werken. Een product met minder of biodegradeerbare verpakking zou op die manier een prijs voordeel kunnen krijgen.
Linux, Debian & Bluetooth
Nov 29th
I was getting sick of all the wires on my desk, and I needed a new keyboard anyway,
so I bought a logitech bluetooth key and mouse (mx 5000). It’s supposed to work just fine.
The keyboard comes with a bluetooth dongle, but it’s rather silly not to use the bluetooth build in my laptop, so i never tried the dongle.
I was running linux-image-2.6.26-1-amd64 on my laptop and it had serieus issues with bluetooth. It was very hard to get the device to pair, it imvolved alot of manual probing/forcing.
This morning I upgraded kernel to 2.6.27.7 from kernel.org and it all started working flawlessly…
P.S.: might be fun to see if I can find a way to have it’s LCD display work in Linux