MacBook keyboard
Last year I promoted the US International keyboard layout as the ultimate solution for english keyboards. A weeks ago, I started using OS X on my MacBook (It had been running Gentoo Linux before) and so I wanted to use the US International keyboard layout within OS X. At first I was enthusiastic when I saw the “U.S. International – PC” layout in the Language & Text settings, but after a few seconds I realised that this wasn’t the layout I was looking for.
After some googling I found Ukulele, a nice editor for creating custom keyboard layouts for OS X. So I created my own US International keyboard. I use the “USA International (ALtGr dead keys)” layout from GNOME as my draft, because I’m used to it. It has a very few differences to the US International layout described on Wikipedia. Read more…
As I grew up in Germany my keyboard layout has always been the QWERTZ based German keyboard layout. The main difference between QWERTY keyboard layouts is that the Z and Y keys are swapped and most special characters are moved to third level as the German language uses umlaut (diacritic) characters like ä, ö and ü and the ligature ß.
German keyboard layout © Wikimedia Commons
This is very handy for writing German text but if you program in programming languages like C, C++, Perl, PHP, … where brackets like [] and {} and slash/backslash are frequently used it’s a pain to use it. So I decided to change to the US keyboard layout, which I thought is the best choice as it is very popular. The problem was, that typing umlaut characters is very circumstantial as there is no standard method. Read more…
Panasonic DMC-TZ7
A few weeks ago, my lead a company to convert some old Super 8 home videos to DVD and so we watched some of them. Among them was one showing me and my brothers as little kids and it was fun watching them. So I decided that I need some camcorder with HD resolution support. But they’re expansive so I found another solution: A usual digital photocamera which supports filming in high resolution. This would also solve the problem of the weak battery from my old Sony DSC-P10. Read more…
tethering info
The iPhone OS 3.0 software update includes lots of new features, one called “Internet tethering”. It mean that you can use your iPhone as a modem to connect to the internet via GPRS or UMTS. My mobile provider O2 has a Internet flat rate for 10 € a month with UMTS speed for the first 200 MB and after this it is throttled to GPRS speed. So I asked in the local shop if it’s legal to use it with my laptop and they told me that it is. So I searched for some information how to set this up, and it’s very easy. Read more…
OCZSSDMPES-16G top side
I few days ago I found the OCZ miniPCI-Express SSD (SATA) by chance. On the website it claims to be an SSD with
- up to 110 MB/s read and up 51 MB/s write speed
- PCIe interface
- 16 GB or 32 GB size
So this is much faster than my 40 MB/s 8GB CF Card I’m currently using for my server and it’s much cheaper. Amazon sells the 16 GB version for 57.50 EUR.
So I ordered one, but I got disappointed: Read more…
On my blog post about Installing Gentoo on ALIX.3D3 Mart Raudsepp made an interesting comment: He pointed out, that on AMD Geode CPUs it might be better to use i486 CHOST instead of my used i586, because the CPU is more like a i486 as far as instruction scheduling and times go.
This sounded interesting, so I googled for some benchmark test to measure differences. I found nbench, which measures performance by executing some typical algorithms and compares them to a Pentium 90 based system. So I installed it and run on the i586 CHOST system, then rebuild it completely to i486 CHOST and run it again. Read more…
The AMD CS5536 Geode companion on the ALIX.3D3 board has several general purpose input/output pins. Most of them have different functions as well, and there are some registers to set if they should be used as special function GPIO pins. The ALIX.3D3 uses 4 GPIO pins for 3 LEDs and 1 mode switch. Accessing the leds is very easy using the leds-alix2 driver, but they can be addressed as GPIO as well. There is already a driver for the GPIO pins in the kernel named cs5535_gpio.c, but it uses a non standard interface to communicate with kernel. So, I wrote a new kernel driver using the GPIO interface. Read more…
The AMD Geode LX800 CPU has an on-chip AES 128-bit crypto accelerations block and a true random number generator. Using this block for encryption and decryption is a lot faster than software implemented algorithms and it unloads the CPU. There are two main purposes where en/decryption is needed:
- Storing files
- Communication over network (IPSEC, OpenVPN, WPA2, …)
I’ll focus on the first point in this article using LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup).
Read more…
A few days ago, while I was compiling some stuff on my ALIX.3D3, I discovered a very high CPU temperature by chance:
M/B Temp: +59 C (low = +0 C, high = +70 C)
CPU Temp: +71.1 C (low = +0.0 C, high = +70.0 C) ALARM
Alix.3D3 with heat sink
I downloaded the datasheet of the AMD Geode LX800 CPU to check which temperatures are OK. On page 598 I found that my model (ALXD800EEXJ2VD) is fine for temperatures from 0 °C to 85 °C. Anyway I looked in my spare part box if I could find a suitable heat sink and fortunately I found a 40mm x 40mm x 9mm one. So I ordered some thermal adhesive and installed it.
Read more…
Today I received my new Linksys Router. It’s WRT610N with two wifi cards inside. One for traditional 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n and one for 5 GHz 802.11a/n. I’m planning to use OpenWRT or some other non standard firmware on it, so I wanted to add the RS232 console port I had on my old WRT54GS. Here’s how to use it:
Read more…
Recent Comments