fidzu : mobile

Smartphones with foldable displays were the next big thing in the market but after Samsung initially rebased their Galaxy Fold, people started questioning whether it's actually viable for long-term use. The Galaxy Fold got bad reviews for its durability early on and so Samsung had to delay the actual launch. Huawei also delayed its Mate […]

20 Jan 2020 3:10am GMT

Over a couple of months ago, the Xbox Console Streaming service rolled out but was only on preview. Last week, the Xbox Console Streaming Preview started to expand to more markets around the world. This means Microsoft is doing its job in improving the service so more people can experience the new gaming sensation. It's […]

20 Jan 2020 1:36am GMT

'Flagship' smartphones from the biggest tech brands seem to only keep skyrocketing in price, but fortunately the Android ecosystem is rich with great options at far lower prices, so let us lay out the best choices for you so you can make your next wallet-friendly phone one that you'll love!

Come comment on this article: The best budget smartphones under $300 in 2020

19 Jan 2020 6:31pm GMT

LG may be slowing down these days but we're expecting new LG G and LG V ThinQ phones will be revealed at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. LG is determined to turn around the mobile business but it may take a while. Before all these happen, expect the other South Korean tech giant to release […]

18 Jan 2020 12:00am GMT

A new render of the upcoming Huawei P40 Pro has leaked, showcasing a brand new design, camera layout, and color options. If you were thinking Huawei would avoid the massive camera module trend of 2020, think again. Huawei P40 Pro Huawei's set to announce these phones sometime in March, although we're not expecting Google Play […]

Come comment on this article: Huawei P40 Pro shows off a new design and five stunning colors in latest renders

17 Jan 2020 7:09pm GMT

We're finally seeing some photos of the Xiaomi Mi 10 out in the wild, giving us a look at what to expect next from the company. However, it may not be all we were expecting. Rumors so far have told us that this was supposed to be an extremely clean smartphone, but it's following Samsung's […]

Come comment on this article: Xiaomi Mi 10 shows up in the wild

17 Jan 2020 4:41pm GMT

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Developer Marketing

The indie developer community released several fantastic titles on Google Play during 2019, showing the technical skill and innovative design that makes them an essential part of the gaming landscape.

To continue helping indie developers thrive, today we're announcing the 2020 edition of our annual Google Play Indie Games Festival. This year we will host three competitions for developers from several European countries*, Japan, and South Korea.

Prizes:

Prizes are designed to help you grow your business, including:

• The chance to exhibit at the final events in Warsaw, Tokyo or Seoul
• Promotions on the Google Play Store
• Promotions on our consumer and developer-facing channels
• Access to exclusive developer-focused Google events
• Personalized consultation sessions with Google team members
• And more!

Eligibility:

The contests are open to developers from selected countries, with no more than 50 employees. The submitted game must be new, released at least in open beta between May 7, 2019 and March 2, 2020. See other requirements in the terms and conditions for each of the contests.

Process:

Simply fill out the relevant form by clicking here. Submissions are open until March 2, 2020, at 3pm CET.

The Top 20 entries in each region will be announced in March and invited to showcase at the Festival events where the field will be narrowed to 10 by the event audience, industry experts and the Google team. The Top 10 will present their games on stage and the 3 winners will be selected.

Not submitting a game? Come and take part:

Even if you're not submitting a game to the competitions, we'd love to see you at one of the Festival events on the 25th of April 2020.

Learn more and sign up on g.co/play/indiefestival

* The European competition is open to developers from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).

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09 Jan 2020 8:00am GMT

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Advocate (@FMuntenescu)

At Google I/O 2019 we announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Together with JetBrains, we also launched Kotlin/Everywhere - a global series of community led events focusing on the potential of using Kotlin everywhere; on Android, servers, web front-end and other platforms.

Kotlin/Everywhere events took place from May through December and we want to thank everyone for getting involved

👨‍💻👩‍💻30,000+ developers participated in-person at Kotlin/Everywhere events

🎥🍿200,000 views of live-streams and event recordings like Kotlin/Everywhere Bengaluru, Minsk, Chicago, Buenos Aires and more.

📅 500+ events: from short evening meetups, half-day sessions, and full day events, to Kotlin/Everywhere tracks at larger events like DevFests, or even StudyJams that spanned several weeks.

🎤~30 speakers from Google and JetBrains gave ~70 talks at events around the world.

🌎 85+ countries/regions: from United States to Chile, Kenya, Greece, Taiwan, New Zealand

💻 Many of the resources used or created for Kotlin/Everywhere by Google and JetBrains are available online:

General Kotlin:

• Intro to Kotlin: Kotlin Koans
• Refactoring to Kotlin: codelab in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese
• Kotlin for Java developers (Coursera course available in the free "Audit" mode)
• Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers (free Udacity course)
• Coroutines hands-on tutorial

Kotlin in Android:

• Kotlin Android fundamentals codelabs
• Developing Android Apps with Kotlin (free Udacity course)
• Using Kotlin Coroutines in your Android app
• Advanced Coroutines with Kotlin Flow and LiveData

Kotlin in Google Cloud Platform:

• Build a Kotlin Spring Application with Google Cloud Platform
• Extend an Android frontend with a Kotlin backend running on App Engine
• Run a Kotlin Spring Boot app on App Engine standard environment
• Run a Kotlin Spring Boot application on Google Kubernetes Engine
• Run a Spring Boot application on Google Compute Engine

Multi-platform Kotlin:

• Intro to Kotlin Native
• Kotlin Multi-platform with Kotlin/JVM and Kotlin/JS

We're grateful for this engagement with Kotlin from communities around the world, as well as for all the organisers, speakers and attendees who made these events possible! To participate in more Kotlin events, check out JetBrains' KotlinConf'19 Global initiative, happening through March 2020.

With all of the resources available, there's never been a better time to adopt Kotlin… Everywhere!

18 Dec 2019 5:08pm GMT

Posted by Patricia Correa, P&E Developer Marketing Director

The last 12 months have seen Google Play continue to grow, with over 116 billion downloads of the apps and games that you created.

We've been working hard to build the latest technology and tools for modern Android development and distribution, improving Google Play and the Play Console to offer you new and better ways for your app to be discovered, promoted, and monetized.

A key focus has been addressing the challenge of keeping users safe and maintaining trust in Google Play.

Modern Android development

We are focused on building great tools and services and your feedback is crucial in helping us do so. You have told us that you love Android's openness, but we have also heard that you would like us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. We call this approach modern Android development: opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development, taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences. You can see modern Android development come to life in a number of investments we made this year:

• We previewed Jetpack Compose, a modern declarative UI toolkit built for the next 10 years. Inspired by Kotlin, Compose makes it easy to build beautiful, native apps with code that is more intuitive and concise. Check out the Compose tutorial to learn more.
• This year, Android Jetpack saw many stable library releases from background scheduling with WorkManager, in-app navigation with Navigation to app performance measurement with Benchmark . In 2019 , we also gave you early versions of more building blocks for your production apps with Jetpack CameraX library, BiometricPrompt and encryption & security. Check them all out here.
• For everyone who wants to get started with Kotlin there are a range of courses available on Udacity. We've added the Advanced Android course with Kotlin to help every developer grow their skills and get the most from Kotlin. For those who are already experts, we're launching a new Android Developer Certification in Kotlin, which is available at a discount until early 2020.
• We recently released the first canary version of Android Studio 4.0 with powerful, integrated tooling support for Compose. It also has a new Motion Editor, Java 8 Language library desugaring, full support for KTS files, Kotlin live templates, and more.

Android 10

Android 10, released earlier this year, is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldables and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology.

Modern app and game distribution

We introduced Android App Bundles last year as a mechanism to simplify and streamline app distribution, overcome the constraints of APK publishing, and introduce advanced distribution features such as dynamic delivery. There are now over 300K app bundle apps and games in production, covering nearly 30% of all active installs. If this doesn't include your app or game, check out 16 reasons to publish your apps and games with the Android App Bundle.

This year we've made it much easier to test and implement app bundles and dynamic delivery. Internal app sharing makes it easy to share test builds with others. You can easily grant anyone on your team the ability to upload a test build to Play and get a download link to share with your testers. With internal app sharing, you can be sure that each device is receiving exactly what Play would deliver in the wild. You don't need to use version codes or the prod signing key, and can even upload debuggable artifacts.You can also get download links for old versions of your app from the Play Console, whether they're app bundles or APKs.

Protecting the ecosystem

In 2019, you helped us make Google Play even safer, building user trust in your apps and Google Play as a whole. Thanks to your hard work, we have:

• Made Google Play safer for children and families by helping ensure apps and games for children have appropriate content, show suitable ads, and handle personally identifiable information correctly.
• Reduced access to sensitive data by restricting SMS and call log permissions to apps whose core functionality needs them, resulting in 98% fewer apps accessing this sensitive data.

To help you protect your apps, we've improved our ability to detect impersonators, repackaging, bad content, and other forms of abuse. Additionally, we're investing in resources like policy-focused Play Academy courses to help you better understand and navigate our policy changes.

Because the threats are always changing, it'll take all of us working together to keep users safe and our platform secure. Thank you for continuing to work with us on this.

Building better app businesses

During 2019 we continued to look for new ways to help you market and monetize your apps and games:

• Google Play got a visual refresh which improves app discovery and accessibility for the wide diversity of store visitors.
• App tags improve discoverability, enabling you to describe the content and functionality of your game with up to five tags.
• Your app's rating is now weighted towards your most recent ratings, instead of a lifetime cumulative average, so that it better reflects your app's current state.
• Improved and more granular benchmarks in the Google Play Console's User Acquisition-, Ratings-, and Android Vitals-reports; and new benchmarks for core statistics against 200 curated peer-sets; with period-on-period growth rates, including user and device acquisitions, churn, actives, and more.
• If you're using subscriptions, the pause subscription report offers you new insights including the length users paused for and whether they returned or churned at the end of their pause period.
• We expanded our buyer support so you can now sell apps and games to people in Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Iraq, and Turks and Caicos. We also welcomed many new developers to the Google Play Store's family with Seller Support, with more than 35 additional countries launched this year. Find out more.

And that's a wrap

With such scale comes responsibility. We're committed to ensuring our users' safety for the future, to making development easier and distribution faster, and to offering you more effective ways for your app to be discovered and monetized.

On this note, we hope we can all continue working together to make Android and Google Play better for billions of people around the world, in 2020, and the years to come. From everyone on our team, we wish you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year.

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17 Dec 2019 8:00pm GMT

Lets say you have mesh data in the typical format, triangulated, vertex buffer and index buffer. E. g. something like

>>> vertices

[[[ 46.27500153  19.2329998   48.5       ]]

 [[  7.12050009  15.28199959  59.59049988]]

 [[ 32.70849991  29.56100082  45.72949982]]

 ..., 

>>> indices

[[1068 1646 1577]
 [1057  908  938]
 [ 420 1175  237]
 ..., 

Typically you would need to feed it into OpenGL to get an image out of it. However, there are occasions when setting up OpenGL would be too much hassle or when you deliberately want to render on the CPU.

In this case we can use the OpenCV to do the rendering in two function calls as:

img = np.full((720, 1280, 3), 64, dtype=np.uint8)

pts2d = cv2.projectPoints(vertices, rot, trans, K, None)[0].astype(int)
cv2.polylines(img, pts2d[indices], True, (255, 255, 255), 1, cv2.LINE_AA)

• Wire-frame rendering

See the documentation of cv2.projectPoints for the meaning of the parameters.

Note how we only project each vertex once and only apply the mesh topology afterwards. Here, we just use the numpy advanced indexing as pts2d[indices] to perform the expansion.

This is pretty fast as well. The code above only takes about 9ms on my machine.

In case you want filled polygons, this is pretty easy as well

for face in indices:
    cv2.fillConvexPoly(img, pts2d[face], (64, 64, 192))

• Filled polygon rendering

However, as we need to a python loop in this case and also have quite some overdraw, it is considerable slower at 20ms.

Of course you can also combine both to get an image like in the post title.

From here on you can continue to go crazy and compute face normals to do culling and shading.

• But you can only get that far without a depth buffer

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06 Nov 2019 4:26pm GMT

So after having made fun of people for "wearing toothbrushes", I finally came to buy such headphones for myself.

Having used non-true wireless Bluetooth headphones before I was curious what the usability advantage would feel like.

Here I went for the Xiaomi AirDots Pro 2 aka Air2 which I could grab for 399 Yuan which is about 51€, which seems like the right price-point for this kind of accessoire.

Keep in mind that the built-in battery only survives so many charging cycles and once it dies you can throw them away.

The Airdots (right) compared to the Airpods (middle) and the Oral-B Precision Clean

The initial feeling of using true wireless headphones is surprisingly relieving - there is simply no cord to untangle or to be aware of while wearing.
This is especially true during phone calls, where one needs to keep the microphone aligned.

The downside is that the headphones are too small to accommodate any buttons for volume and playback control.

The Air 2 kind of make up for it by automatically connecting to your phone once you put them on and by automatically pausing the music when you put one out of the ear. This is achieved by a built-in brightness sensor.

Furthermore you have double-tap actions, which default to play/ pause on the right headphone and launching the voice assistant (e.g. Google Assistant) on the left headphone.

The battery life is stated with 4 hours per-charge with 2 extra charges in the case. I could confirm those on a long distance flight.

Compared to the Airpods 2

Looking at the feature-list above or simply at the images, the similarity to the Apple Airpods is apparent.

Out of curiosity I borrowed some from friend for comparison. The most important point is probably sound quality. Here we found the two virtually in-distinguishable. But keep in mind that we only did a quick test and did not use them extensively.

The second point is likely the form. Here, both earphones have the same ear-part and only differ by the shaft. So if one fits your ear, so should the other.

The shaft however is considerably wider on the Airdots. This is less apparent when viewed from the side as the thickness is similar.

For me, the more important difference is being able to control the headphones from my Android smartphone. This is currently not possible with the Airpods, while there is some way for the Airdots;

Companion app & Software integration

To control the earphones, you have to sideload the Xiao Ai Lite App. The main purpose of it is to provide the Xiaomi voice assistant and the Air2 options likely just ended up there as they offer an always-on assistant integration just like the Airpods.

It handles firmware updates and allows you to configure the douple-tap action per earphone as well as displaying the charging status of the earphones and the case. By default android will only display the charging status of the least charged earphone.

Furthermore, you can use the fast-paring if the app is running. Here, it is sufficient to hold the earphone case close to the phone and just open it. The app will ask for confirmation. This is only slightly more convenient then holding the pairing button and using the normal bluetooth pairing procedure.

The downside is that the app is currently only available in Chinese and consequently the voice assistant only works with Chinese.

Below you find some views of the earphone related settings translated by with google lens

• Overview
• Double-tap settings
• Voice Assist Settings
• Firmware update

I tried out some voice commands via google translate and everything works as it should. However if you are not fluent in chinese it is far from practical. Most people should disable the assistant in the settings to avoid accidentally triggering it.

A serious advantage of Xiomi/ Huawei phones is the availability of the LHDC Bluetooth Codec which offers a superior bandwidth and latency.
While I am fine with the bandwidth provided by AAC when listening to music, there is still a noticeable and annoying delay when watching videos and playing games.

Active Noise Cancellation

The firmware upgrade to v2.6.9.0 significantly improved the active noise cancellation and thus general sound quality.

There is a very noticeable noise reduction compared to v2.6.2.0 - especially in the lower frequencies; things like your footsteps get filtered out. Higher frequencies like car motor sounds are still perceivable though. This is however a good compromise for me.

Charging issues

Over time I noticed that the left earphone consistently runs out of battery before the right one.
The issue seems to be that it discharges while stored inside the case. Putting it in and out resolves the issue - but only until it is fully charged. This makes keeping the earphones pre-charged and ready quite an issue.

Hopefully this can be addressed with a future firmware update. (reproduced with firmwares up to v2.7.1.0)

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02 Nov 2019 3:56pm GMT

  <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
      <array>
        <string>tiff</string>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>tif</string>
        <string>TIF</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>image/tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
      <string>NSTIFFPboardType</string>
      <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>****</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
      <string>Viewer</string>
      <key>LSHandlerRank</key>
      <string>Default</string>
      <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>public.tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>NSDocumentClass</key>
      <string>PVDocument</string>
    </dict>
    …more dict entries for other supported file formats…
  </array>

#import <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
#import <ApplicationServices/ApplicationServices.h>

void MacOS::runApp(const QString &app, const QList<QUrl> &files)
{
    CFURLRef appUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(app).toCFURL();

    CFMutableArrayRef cfaFiles =
        CFArrayCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault,
                             files.count(),
                             &kCFTypeArrayCallBacks);
    for (const QUrl &url: files) {
        CFURLRef u = url.toCFURL();
        CFArrayAppendValue(cfaFiles, u);
        CFRelease(u);
    }

    LSLaunchURLSpec inspec;
    inspec.appURL = appUrl;
    inspec.itemURLs = cfaFiles;
    inspec.asyncRefCon = NULL;
    inspec.launchFlags = kLSLaunchDefaults + kLSLaunchAndDisplayErrors;
    inspec.passThruParams = NULL;

    OSStatus ret;
    ret = LSOpenFromURLSpec(&inspec, NULL);
    CFRelease(appUrl);
}

LIBS += -framework CoreServices

0 0

13 Oct 2019 6:51pm GMT

A small brain dump of topics that currently fascinate me. These are mostly pointers and maybe it is interesting to follow it.

Books/Reading:

My kobo ebook reader has the Site Reliability Engineering book and I am now mostly done. It is kind of a revelation and explains my interest to write code but also to operate infrastructure (like struggling with ruby, rmagick, nginx…). I am interested in backends since… well ever. The first time I noticed it when we talked about Kolab at LinuxTag and I was more interested in the backend than the KDE client. At sysmocom we built an IoT product and the backend was quite some fun, especially the scale of one instance and many devices/users, capacity planning and disk commissioning, lossless upgrades.

It can be seen in my non FOSS SS7 map work on traffic masquerading and transparent rewriting. It is also clear to see which part of engineering is needed for scale (instead of just installing and restarting servers).

Lang VM design

One technology that made Java fast (Hotspot) and has seen its way into JavaScript is dynamic optimization. Most Just in Time Compilers start with generating native code per method, either directly or after the first couple of calls when the methods size is significant enough. The VM records which call paths are hot, which types are used and then can generate optimized code (e.g. specialized for integers, remove type checks). A technique pioneered at Sun for the "Self" language (and then implemented for Strongtalk and then brought to Java) was "adaptive optimization and deoptimization" and was the Phd topic of Urs Hoelzle (Google's VP of Engineering). One of the key aspects is inlining across method boundaries as this removes method look-up, call stack handling and opens the way for code optimization across method boundaries (at the cost of RAM usage).

In OpenJDK, V8 and JavaScriptCore this adaptive optimization is typically implemented in C++ and requires quite some code. The code is complicated as it needs to optimize but also need to return to a basic function (deoptimize, e.g. if a method changed or the types passed don't match anymore), e.g. in the middle of a for loop with tons of inlined code (think of Array.map being inlined but then need to be de-inlined). A nice and long blog post of JSC can be found here describing the On Stack Replacement (OSR).

Long introduction and now to the new thing. In the OpensmalltalkVM a new approach called Sista has been picked and I find it is genius. Like with many problems the point of view and approach really matters. Instead of writing a lot of code in the VM the optimizer runs next to the application code. The key parts seem to be:

• Using branches taken/not-taken as indicator how hot a path is. The overhead of counting these seem to be better than counting method calls/instructions/loops.
• Using the Inline Caches for type information on call sites (is that mono-, poly- or megamorphic?)
• Optimize from one set of Bytecode to another set of Bytecode.

The revelation is the last part. By just optimizing from bytecode to bytecode the VM remains in charge of creating and managing machine code. The next part is that tooling in the higher language is better or at least the roundtrip is more quick (edit code and just compile the new method instead of running make, c++, ld). The productivity thanks to the abstraction and tooling is likely higher.

As last part the OSR is easier as well. In Smalltalk thisContext (the current stack frame, activation record) is an object as well. At the right point (when the JIT has either written back variables from register to the stack or at least knows where the value is) one can just manipulate thisContext, create and link news ones and then resume execution without all the magic in other VMs.

Go, Go and escape analysis

Ken Thompson and Robert Pike are well known persons and their Go programming language is a very interesting system programming language. Like with all new languages I try to get real world experience with the language, the tooling and which kind of problems can be solved with it. I have debugged and patched some bigger projects and written two small applications with it.

There is plenty I like. The escape analysis of the compiler is fun (especially now that I know it was translated from the Plan9 C compiler from C to Go), the concurrency model is good (though allowing shared state), the module system makes sense (but makes forking harder than necessary), being able to cross compile to any target from any system.

Knowing a bit of Erlang (and continuing to read the Phd Thesis of Joe Armstrong) and being a heavy Smalltalk user there are plenty of things missing. It starts with vague runtime error messages (e.g. panicslice not having parameters) and goes to runtime and post-runtime inspection. In Smalltalk thanks to the abstraction a lot of hard things are easy and I would have wished for some of them to be in Go. Serialize all unrecovered panics? Debugging someone else's code seems like pre 1980…

So for many developers Go is a big improvement but for some people with a wider view it might look like a lost opportunity. But that can only be felt by developers that have experienced higher abstraction and productivity.

Unsupervised machine learning

but that is for another dump…

25 Sep 2017 10:11am GMT

02 Sep 2017 10:00pm GMT

01 Sep 2017 10:00pm GMT

Shopping for 3D TV (again), few findings:

• There are no non-LED 3D TVs for sale in this part of world anymore (in particular, my older favorite, LE40C750 is no longer available)
• Samsung D6xxx series (the cheapest) were caught red-handed not providing FullHD resolution in 3D: via Samygo. (Note from myself: Samsung was caught because lots of people actually buy their stuff, what one can think about other vendors?)
• LG goes out of line of vendors with 3D shutter glasses technology with their FPR ("Cinema 3D" in marketing speak) technology. It uses passive (no power needed) polarized glasses, like RealD cimenas. Announced April (on these longitudes), already in local shops at not-so-indecent prices. FPR is Film Patterned Retarder, and I hope the last word is spelled right, because I have high hopes for this tech. It shares the same issue as Samsung D6xxx: there won't FullHD here for sure, but at least it's official and there're other benefits.

12 Nov 2011 6:55pm GMT

I finally going to get Arduino, and while I'm choosing flavor and waiting for it, I can't help but disassembling all devices I have at home, each time speaking: "This must have Arduino inside!" (meaning of course that I expect it to be based on general-purpose MCU). Gosh, I usually get "blob chip" (uncased chip with blob of epoxy on top).

Well, I finally had my expectations fulfilled - Luxeon SP-1 voltage stabilizer/cutter features ATMEGA48V-10PU (Flash: 4k, EEPROM: 256, RAM:512). Not only that, it is installed in DIP socket! Buy from Luxeon, they're hacker-friendly ;-).

I bought the device actually for a wattmeter it features (which fact is hard to figure out from common specs found in the shops, I accidentally read somebody mentioning it on a forum). The wattmeter is of course not bright - for a lamp rated 100W it shows 88W, and for more powerful equipment (like perforator) understates wattage even more (maybe it's difference between real and apparent power factor).

Still, for $17 you get Arudino-alike with voltage/current sensor and hacking possibility. Woot!

BOM:
High-power board:

• Relay: Coil: 24VDC, 5A/240VAC
• 7805
• Coil transformer LR-019B

MCU board:

• ATMEGA48V-10PU
• 2 buttons
• 2 LEDs (red & green)
• 3-digit 7-segment LED indicator

12 Nov 2011 5:58pm GMT

Kindle:

• Amazon Kindle official GPL source code
• Kindle keyboard shortcuts and other reference
• Latest jailbreak appears to be one from NiLuJe (forum). It's known to work with firmware 3.3. Hacks/updates should be copied to Kindle USB drive root.
• SirAlex's page
• Intro for writing kindlets
  

Linux kernel module tricks:

• How to bind Linux driver to device whose IDs it doesn't know (yet), without recompiling
• Building a kernel module separately
• (build module from a kernel source tarball using currently installed kernel config)

10 Nov 2011 3:21pm GMT

In Debian Unstable the transition to Gnome 3 is taking place; when Gnome 3.0 firstly came out some unnamed geeky users complained loudly about the design decisions of the development team to push strongly towards gnome-shell as a new default UI; gnome-shell was designed focusing on usability (usability is a metric relative to a certain target audience BTW) and simplicity, hiding a lot of details from the users. Obviously you can never make everyone happy so some of us simply happened to be "out of target": you know us computer people (*cough cough*), we like to be in charge and control The Machine... I must admit I still don't have a definitive opinion about the gnome-shell concept, for now I just know that it does not suit me; I am going to try it eventually, maybe I'll get used to it, but in the mean time I need my desktop back just like I shaped it through the years; can this be done without loosing all the good Gnome technologies (Empathy over all of them)?

To be completely fair I have to say that there is little to complain about with Gnome developers, we can still get our good old GNOME desktop fully back by using the fall-back mode based on gnome-panel and live happily ever after, let's take a look at how this can be accomplished.

NOTE: GNOME people state that the fall-back mode is meant for systems with older graphic cards which cannot run gnome-shell, however it can very well be seen as a good opportunity for those who do not want to run gnome-shell just yet.

Getting back to the topic: some minor touches are needed to make the panel look more like what we are used to, maybe some of these settings could even become default for fall-back mode, we'll see.

First, enable fall-back mode (on Debian there is a dedicated session you can choose from the Log-in Manager for that) and change some desktop settings, in a terminal type:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name 'gnome-fallback'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'menus-have-icons' true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'buttons-have-icons' true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background 'show-desktop-icons' true

gnome-tweak-tool can be used for some of these settings like shown in the attached images.

Then rearrange the applets on the panel as you please (use Alt-RightClick to access the panel properties), and fix the theming using this patch to have a light panel again (against gnome-themes-standard=3.0.2-1):

$ mkdir $HOME/.themes
$ cd $HOME/.themes
$ cp -r /usr/share/themes/Adwaita Adwaita-fallback
$ cd Adwaita-fallback
$ patch -p1 < $HOME/adwaita-fallback-panel-theme.patch
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'gtk-theme' 'Adwaita-fallback'

Some final touches for the Metacity window manager and to the clock applet, and we are all set:

$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode mouse
$ gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true
$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel3-applets/clock/custom_format '<span color="#333">%a %d %b</span> <b>%H:%M</b>'
$ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel3-applets/clock/format custom

Ah, in the new gnome-panel based on Gtk3 there are still some details to take care of, I hope issues like that will be addressed and that the panel will be supported for quite some time.

Attached images:

Attached files:

Adwaita theme patch for fall-back mode

19 Oct 2011 9:37pm GMT

After letting us wait for a bit longer than scheduled (13 days), the hospital initiated the contractions. For the first couple of hours, everything went just perfect, but then the little one got stuck on the way and we had to resort to a cesarean section. Lara Marie Lauer was born 8th of June at 04:41 (AM) with 3460 gramms and 49 cm.

Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can't express the feelings I had in this very moment. I'm still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world.

Please bear with me if in the next time I'm not as responsive as usually

09 Jun 2011 4:06pm GMT

And now for something completely different… while we are all waiting for my baby to arrive (who was scheduled for 25th of May), she just received her first greeting card - together with a personalized bib and a towel (with integrated hood - pretty fancy!) from my good friends at #openmoko-cdevel.

Guys, seeing this card was very heartwarming - it means a lot to me that you share my anticipation, thanks a lot! And I'm 100% sure she will appreciate her gifts… now let's cross fingers it won't take much longer… waiting is the hardest part of it

Yours,

Mickey.

30 May 2011 8:54am GMT