http://www.nokturnal.org/wp the personal blog of john chia covering ubuntu linux, robots, electronics, photography and other junk Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:11:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm upgrading to the Jaunty beta tonight and taking a look at what's new in the package rep. Aside from thinkfinger breaking and Xorg not coming up right away, things went pretty well. The thinkfinger tools verify my finger so it seems like something related to PAM.  Meh, in tablet mode ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=28 I recently picked up a Canon 30D for a great price.  Two things were wrong with it: its shutter release was unreliable and its focus was unreliable.  It turned out that both were easy fixes: the shutter release just required a bit of cleaning and the focus was unreliable due ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=27 I have a bluetooth mouse that runs off a single AA battery.  This is annoying since the charger I have can only charge doubles at a time and I seem to have lost all but two of my AA rechargables.  So in my infinitely perfect logic, rather than simply buying ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=26 I came across the Affective Diary the other day (Paper).  There's a youtube video but this blog entry sums it up nicely: As you move through your day, you send and take pictures and send messages over your mobile. These messages and pictures are captured to the system which is connected ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=25 I come from a Perl background so with my beloved first code love Perl being a dynamically typed, interpreted imperative language with functional and object-oriented elements thrown in for free, I was delighted to read that C#, a statically-typed pseudo compiled imperative language has not only object-oriented grammar/semantics/features but functional ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=24 Every engine in every car sold new today is controlled digitally so wtf is not having an abundance of cheap ODB2 cables and open source software that supports every damn car out there. Get with it, Internet. So I picked up a VAG-COM the other week and have been slowly ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=20 Goosh is a command line shell to google. I really like being able to consolidate several types of searches into a simple, bare bones, consistent list style query/result interface. It feels revolutionary to use, sort of 5/7 of the way towards the feeling I had when I discovered ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=16 Been busy moving into a new apartment in Toronto's East Chinatown. Painting, cleaning, buying stuff for the kitchen... other misc junk. While searching flickr for suitably cool pictures to hang on my walls, I came across this guy named Josh Sommers. He uses MathMap, an extremely cool GIMP plug-in, ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=18 There's a new (ackwardly named) basic circuit element that relates magnetic flux with charge. It joins the inductor, the capacitor and the resistor as the fundamental basic building blocks of electric circuits. According to arstechnica, once you dive into the math, it actually boils down to a variable ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=17 This Atmel based boost regulator is powered by 2AA and produces 10.5 V output. It's designed to drive 3 LEDs so it's current limited to about 60 mA. Shown above. WikiMindMap shows all the wiki links from a particular article as a graph. For topics with subsections, the ... http://www.nokturnal.org/wp/?p=12