Reading

Throy : The Cadwal Chronicles Book 3 by Jack Vance

android tablet update problem

If you (like me) have had a "NAND not supported" error trying to update a cheap WM8505 Android tablet (motherboard is wms8105c like this one ) it's because, when you look inside, there is no NAND on the CPU daughter-board. It has a naked USB stick wired up. Tipstir has update ROMs here that fix the problem , WMT212_105_M3CSL_V10_script.7z works good.

Man in Space

It's fifty years since Yuri Gagarin was launched into history as the First Man in Space. Celebrate.

Zero Carbon AU

Melbourne University have produced "A ten year roadmap for 100% renewable energy "
http://www.zerocarbonplan.org/

it looks feasible and affordable, so the question (for our politicians ) is why aren't we doing it ?

Tellymate works good

I bought a TTL Tellymate kit from Batsocks to hook to my Bifferboard, with a simple transistor to invert the RS232 it works good. It's like cool retro ascii from days gone by.
I whipped up a quick bash script to interact with it :
#=============================
#!/bin/bash
export TERM=vt52
PORT=/dev/ttyS0
ESC="\x1b"
function dohelp {
echo -en "tm \n -c clear screen\n -q print diagnostic info\n -b big letter banner \n -e program to run\n"
}

function cls {
echo -en $ESC"E" >$PORT
}
while getopts "b:cqe:h" flag
do
case "$flag" in
c) CLS="yes" ;;
q) Q="yes" ;;
b) BIGTEXT="$OPTARG" ;;
e) PROG=$OPTARG ;;
h) dohelp;;
esac
done
if [ "$PROG" != "" ] ;then savestate ;fi
if [ $CLS ]; then cls;fi
if [ $Q ];then
echo -en $ESC"Q" >$PORT
fi

if [ "$BIGTEXT" != "" ]; then
echo -en $ESC"_4"$BIGTEXT"\n"$ESC"_5"$BIGTEXT"\n" >$PORT
fi
#needs more functions to do x and y pos etc..
#====================================================

along with figlet and the fold and other linux text utilities it was easy to do stuff :
eg.
tm -c -b TESTING -e "figlet -c -w38 Telly Mate test"

tm -c -e "figlet -c -w38 `date`"
(hard to take good photos of lcd but )

Reading

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Wrong

In this (via BSNYC) notionally satirical piece in the WSJ P.J O'Rourke quips "Search plazas, parks and city squares the world over and you won't fine[sic] a single statue of a national hero riding a bike."
Completely wrong, Rochester has this fine statue of Sir Hubert Opperman .