Recently, Skype seems to hang in some odd offline mode without indicating this. I run a fairly vanilla Kubuntu install so this ought affect more people out there. The remedy for this is a set of scripts available from the Skype Reliabilitator page. Now, you can simply run check-skype-status and Skype restarts if needed.
Month: January 2011
The Sun shines again
As all great projects, this one started with a Dremel and some destruction. The back side of my external SCSI hdd boxes from sun was to receive a make over. One thing can be said about the boxes – they are heavy and now I know why. There was quite a lot of steel to cut through, but the results where nice.
To fit the board in the box, I superglued a set of distances to the chassis. There is about 2-3mm of margin to fit the board in, so it was tight.
Then I fitted a 80W PicoPSU. This allowed me to move the main part of the power supply outside the box, as the PicoPSU is powered by a 12V DC power brick.
To get the power through, I had to make an extra hole in the plates for the motherboard’s connectors. That is how tight the fit was. No additional space on the back side to drill an additional hole.
The system is run from an 8GB CompactFlash card. Most cards can apparently be used as an PATA/IDE drive. As the CF-to-IDE converter had a floppy drive power connector, I had to build a cable for it. Also, notice the tape in the top right corner of the converter – it covers a really bright red LED.
And here is the real LED. It is green and it is original. Connected nicely with the HDD activity pins of the motherboard.
So, here it is again. A sun box has sparked into new life.
Status Update
It has been quite a while since I last blogged. As always, there is not a single reason for this, but the major one is that have been swamped with work. This text will be a small re-cap and a way for me to start with a fresh-ish slate this year.
First of all, the Qt in Education material is finally completed. I was at the München Qt DevDays and presented what we had then. Since then the slides and exercises have been completed and received a polish. There is already a small errata in the Qt DevNet wiki. I choose to interpret this as a Good Thing – people are using the material.
Just after the new year, a team from Pelagicore attended CES. I did not go there this year (small kids change your priorities) but worked hard on a set of Qt-based demos that we ran there. The demos (and Pelagicore as a company) are focused on in-vehicle infotainment, or IVI as it is commonly written. Of course there are a million things that I as an engineer want to polish or add, but as a whole the event was a success.
So, there it is, a new starts. Now I will try to blog more frequently.