GRG's Miscellany

Mumble is beautiful.  It is simple and does exactly what it says on the tin. Something new I discovered about it today is that the static linux release works out-of-the-box on TinyCore ! I got an old thin client off ebay a while back (an IGEL D200 ) and it's so crap it wouldn't even boot with a USB plugged in.  Maybe that's some security BS I haven't found the BIOS switch for, but I gave up on trying to find a way round it. So what I did was set up a VM in VirtualBox which had the right RAM/HDD sizes, then install TinyCore and do the setup. Then, I followed the instructions here (but with VirtualBox not VMware) to clone the VM onto the CF card from the thin client (using CloneZilla ).  I had to use the command line instructions from here to create a raw disk vmdk file for the VM.  I also had to change the permissions on the vmdk file and the block device (/dev/sdd in my case) so I didn't have to run VirtualBox as root. ...but then I slotted the CF c

I have been reading about React (so I can eventually learn React Native), and the book starts with a bunch of stuff on functional programming and how it is beautiful. It was quite convincing, so I decided I would give it a try with a code parser I'm writing in javascript (the reasons why are of no consequence :) ). In hindsight, I should definitely have started simpler, but it was still a fun adventure and I learned a lot. I played around with compose() functions which return a function which calls a bunch of other functions in order, and functions which add/remove fields from the data and return it. It was looking fairly descriptive and not too ugly (any ugliness was surely down to my inadequate understanding of functional programming)... ...but then I tried to debug a piece of it. I nearly vomited at the giant stack of bollocks which appeared in the callstack window.  How the hell is that giant stream of nonsense supposed to be helpful? So I'm going back to the

For a long while I've had ideas about building a raspberry-pi controlled buggy.  I'd already bought the servos and PWM controller module and they were just sitting in a box labelled 'pi buggy'. Today, I got them out and spent a few happy (and frustrating) hours getting them to work. First up was setting up the PCA9685 servo board.  I didn't even know which pins were what.  I found this document , which came in very handy for that, but I still ended up needing pointers on how to enable i2c on the pi. Then came the joy of setting up the Adafruit libraries.  This should have been a piece of cake, but for some reason the pi wouldn't pick up my home wireless  (Probably because my wifi router is old and pants).  So I had to transfer the library on a USB stick, then install it to find out I was missing dependencies. :( So I ended up downloading Adafruit_Python_... PureIO , GPIO and PCA9685 and installing them ( sudo python3 setup.py install ) in that orde