misc

To make an usbtiny programmer usable directly as user from avrdude or the arduino toolkit, add the following line to a new file in /etc/udev/ :

ATTRS{idVendor}=="1781", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c9f", MODE="0664", GROUP="plugdev"
I created a file called /etc/udev/joost.rules with this line.
Reload udev with /etc/init.d/udev reload

I sometimes buy things on ebay, always went fine. Find item on ebay, pay with paypal, done.

Lately though there is this new trend where large sellers use a sort of third party to manage their sales, like e.g. channeladvisor.com. Not only does this add an extra step to buying it also adds an extra step that can go wrong.

On one auction I get mails from channeladvisor to pay for an item I already payed via paypal, yet didn’t receive.

On another auction I was sent along to a totally confusing german only third party site, causing me to accidentally pick the wrong payment method, which turns out  I can’t use, and I can’t change it, thus I can’t pay.

Don’t bother to send a message to the seller, because for them you’re just collateral damage. One negative feedback on thousands of sales.

I won’t be buying from indirect sellers on ebay anymore…

In erlang there is a simple way of making config files, just use file:consult/1.
It parses a file that contains erlang terms terminated by a dot.

Given this input file:

{hello, world}.
foo.
42.

It can be used like this:

file:consult("test.txt").
{ok,[{hello,world},foo,42]}

neat eh?

I already wrote a review (also in Dutch) of last.fm some time ago, but I have to praise it again as it works so amazingly well!

I’ve been listening to my Loved Track Radio the last two days and it just makes me so happy listening to one super song after the other.

If you haven’t tried it yet, be sure to give it a try. I’m not a big fan of flash but the flash player on the website works just fine.

Those of you who have wii fit will know that the game shows which muscles or parts of the body are trained by which exercise. However if your memory is as fine as mine, especially when exercising, this information doesn’t really stick. Same with the suggested combinations of exercises.

In order to make this information readily accessible, I made two tables for your download pleasure:wii_fit.pdf.

neigh_drv is an Erlang driver for neighbour manipulation (arp cache). You can find it here.

I run a photo blog at http://damad.be/joost/photo/. However this blog is being phased out in favor of this central blog. If you’re only interested in my photos, you can subscribe on the photo category on the right by clicking on the RSS image next to it.

Enjoy.

I finally moved my blog to a descent system: movable type open source edition! This is still work in progress, if you find any issues, don’t hesitate to contact me!

 
I’ve been using the proprietary nvidia driver for the X server for quite some time, but I wanted to give the free nv another try. One thing which immediately annoyed me was the smaller font sizes when using nv. I solved this by adding a

DisplaySize    370 300

 directive to the Monitor section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file. This basically tells X how big my monitor is in millimeters and X uses this to calculate an optimal font scale factor.