First post of 2009
Happy new year everyone!
Now is supposed to be my free time of year, in my summer break from University. A time to kick back, relax, and code up until 3AM on a Wednesday night. That’s not been the case – I’ve actually been quite busy! These last few months since University finished for the year, I’ve been busy working at a neat place called the Center For Health Innovation (thats the current website, my current assignment is to upgrade it) which has led to some nice ongoing projects. I got to say, it’s been darn nice seeing my bank balance go up regularly instead of down! Working in a real environment doing real projects has proven to be quite rewarding (and educational), much more so than my original failed plan to get a job in retail for a few months during my holidays.
On that note, thank you all who have donated. I’ve been astonished at the level of generosity of people visiting my site and using my work.
I never expected such a response to my last post! There’s been more discussion on that unrelated rant, than on any of my many previous posts about my development milestones. For the record, I do not hate Linux in general, just the level of support on my modern hardware (a Toshiba Satellite A210, for those asking, with ATI graphics, Dual 1.9GHz AMD Turion CPU, 2GB RAM). That’s not all the Linux developers fault; my point is that it is unsuitable for general use by the general non-technical populous until driver support improves. Whether than means yelling at the hardware vendors or not is up for debate, but the summary would be:
- User expects OS to work on hardware
- Windows works on hardware
- Linux does not work on hardware
- User concludes Linux is bunk
I’ve actually gone ahead and ordered a the latest Ubuntu CD from the site, in the hopes that the last release fixed the issues for me in 7.10. I’ll repost when that arrives and I have time to give the new version a go.
On another unrelated note, the past weeks have seen a few neat new gizmos arrive in on my doorstep. Over from AVROpendous.org I received the latest incarnation of the board, the AVROpendous Mini (photo stolen from the AVROpendous page):
The new board is much smaller than the old, forgoing the previous SIL header strip – allowing it to be inserted vertically into a breadboard – for tiny female DIL headers of the same size as the USBKEY headers. Unlike the USBKEY however the AVROpendous Mini has the benefit of actually having said female headers mounted, removing the head-scratching problem of how to wire the darn thing up to anything. Standard solid-core breadboard wire will fit into the headers for easy prototyping to an existing breadboard. In case that’s not your cup of tea, there’s also a new adapter board which the Mini plugs into, to make it of the same form factor (save width) as the original AVROpendous, and an adapter to make the Mini easily wireable to a HD44780 based Alphanumeric LCD display.
Second, I’ve recieved some hardware from Denver Gingerich, over as OSSGuy, shown below after being Macgyver’d into an old box of mine by myself to protect it:
Sporting a three-track magentic card reader and a custom board based on the AT90USB1287, my new firmware for it allows it to act as a USB keyboard and type the card data to the host. Denver’s new host-side software will be able to convert this read data into (hopefully) something meaningful, but for now I’m considering making it into an esoteric security system based on train tickets, which come with magnetic stripes here in Australia.
Much work to do – Dean out.
