I hate computers

Today I fought some hours with Ubuntu to get my network working again. It started with the idea to have the NAS no longer attached by WLAN (SLOOOOOOOOOOW) but via a cable (FAST). I clicked on "Network Configuration" in the menu which made all my networking disappear and broke everything. Then I started to configure stuff by hand, which worked for the WLAN card but not for the classical LAN card. For some reason after each reboot it went from ethx to ethx+1, making it to eth181 before I found the problem.

Not necessary to mention that I went half mad during the search for the problem...

In the end it turned out that some completely brainless moron decided it would be a nice idea to have a random MAC address assigned to the LAN card at each reboot (from the BIOS). For privacy enhancement and you cannot switch it off... So the magical automatic hardware stuff of Linux thought "Oh, a new card" and gave it a new number. FUNNY. VERY FUNNY.

Instead of developing computers which go faster and faster (and can drive you mad much faster than anything before), why not just develop something which works? Call me wimpy, but I don't want to spend nights in front of my computer just to get a stupid network card working, this is supposed to be the 21st century...

Procras^H^H^H Gaining Experience in GIS and Mapping

I bought a new mobile phone. My old Siemens SK65 started to annoy me by being generally shaky and having a flickering display (as you might have noticed I am not that into Flickring anymore...)

So I got a Nokia, it has WLAN, can do VOIP, has lots of other stuff with fancy abbreviations. And it can talk to a GPS via bluetooth. So I bought a bluetooth GPS mouse. I tried the Nokia Sports Tracker which is quite cool but cannot do a lot. It can do tracking though.

I then found AFTrack, which can do everything, from tracking to moving map. If you use a bitmap map, you need to calibrate it, which really sucks doing with the mobile's keypad and it is really slow. So I tried to find a better way...

AFTrack can read OziExplorer map files. OziExplorer can read GeoTIFF with a plugin (via Import Map->Import single DRG Map). So taking a scanned map, reading it in GRASS, marking coordinates in GRASS, saving as GeoTIFF, transfering to my Laptop (Windows...) to read it in OziExplorer and save as map-file. Then editing the map file by hand to convert from UTM to Latitude/Longitude using a web-based converter. Then saving it on the microSD card of my mobile, importing it in AFTrack and voilá, now I know where I am and find my way around Erlangen. Not that I didn't before...

(If you ask now why I needed GRASS, and did not use OziExplorer from start: I hoped not to have to use OziExlorer. And knowing a bit what a GIS does is also fine. And it can do a lot of warping around the map to get rid of distortions...)

Next Step: get the maps of the Virgen-Valley onto my mobile, so that I can get lost in the alps next week.

Computer

The next time some hardware fails I'll get a Mac. I just bought a new motherboard for my old PC and it took only some 5 hours to get things working again. Now I still don't have graphics via the DVI port, only some not very sharp output on the analogue port. But at least it works and I hope it won't crash that often as the old one did. As for the barebone which I had and where the porwer supply died: you cannot get that power supply anymore. This barebone is less than two years old... Hurray for short product cycles.

[Edit] Finally got the DVI working. It seems that envy is pretty useful if you have an nVidia or ATI card and want to use it with Linux. Also the nVidea settings program is quite OK (you have to run it as root though and the user interface is not really intuitive). So I have now a working graphics output on my DVI port, with 3d acceleration (including wobbly windows and desktops on a cube)

How to print an a5 booklet

You've got a file full of a5 pages and want to print it on an a4 printer so that you can fold it and it will be a booklet:


psbook -s<number_of_pages> file.ps file_sorted.ps


Number of pages is here the number of pages in a stack (normally the number of pages of the document plus a bit that it is dividable by 4). If you are binding a real book, it is the number of pages which will be folded and sewn together.


psnup -2 -pa4 -Pa5 file_sorted.ps printme.ps


-p is the page size of the output file, -P the page size of the input file.

Print with flipping on the short edge. This is tricky on the command line, but if you print from a viewer this should be easy...

Bikes and Computers

I got a new saddle for my bike today as the old one was falling apart. It has a ventilation system which keeps your rear end cool. Actually quite a nice feature...

I did a short cycle trip to check the saddle, to play with my GPS and to get some training. See picture for the trip, in total 19km.

The power supply of my computer died today, taking the fuse with it. So my living room (where also my fridge is located) was without electricity for some time... Fortunately the fridge is mostly empty. The computer was switched off while it happened, the computer has some fancy display which is always on, so the power supply was doing something. As it smelled quite badly, I think one of the capacities just exploded. This computer had about a year and a half... Hurray for reliable technology. So I am sitting now at my old desktop and wonder why I bought the new computer as it does not feel slower.

GPS

I got a PDA with GPS, WLAN and a lot of other stuff, including TomTom Navigation for west europe. So now be prepared to more boring posts about GPS...

This had as a consequence a lot of fights with the GPS and my computer. The PDA is running Windows Mobile, which is a pile of crap and annoys me with sheer stupidity. The WLAN connection is dying randomly, but else you can work with it under the normal annoyance level of Windows.

I installed Outdoor-GPS for tracking and general GPS purposes. It's free and looks quite nice. Tracks are saved as opx, so in a format which is actually usable. With gpsbabel you can convert it eg to kml and import the track in google earth, which you see in the screenshot (I took the GPS with me on the way to the supermarket. Inside it had no GPS reception, this caused the track to look like I went swimming in the pond.)

Getting google earth to run again was also some pain in the ass, for some reason it froze at the splashscreen and ate up all my CPU. What helped was exchanging libGL as mentioned here.

Recipetable

This Table looks cool. You place food items on it and it suggests a recipe what to make of them. Re-arrange them, and you get another recipe. I want one of these!

Gone Beta

So, I am Beta now as well. Which means I can do colourful texts. Yehaa. Web 2.0. Much more enterprisy!

Blogging

Finally, after only about a year, I managed to put some updates to Cogumelos Aporcalhados

Homebanking

For some reasons Ubuntu cannot ship gnucash with HBCI (a german homebanking standard) enabled, due to some licensing problems which seem to be no problems for other packages. You need to compile it yourself, after editing the rules file. Strangely enough, all dependencies (including those who have that bad licence) are in the repositories, so no need to get other stuff...

Did it, went well, had the option to get HBCI running in gnucash. Then I discovered that my chip-card-reader was not recognized... Googling, trying a lot of stuff, hours pass. Then I found out that I need to download a driver from the manufacturers page (they have packages for ubuntu) and then do some symbolic linking. All this hidden in a non-google-able web presentation...

Now my chipcard reader is recognised, but unfortunately the automagic updater, which I asked to update everything, re-installed the official gnucash package without HBCI. So I am now recompiling it again and waiting for the outcome...

Paper and pen is by far the most easy and safest way of keeping track of your money...

Computers are teh suck

Why doesn't it just work? (And don't tell me to get a Mac or Windows or whatever, because they also suck...)

Apparently during the update from dapper to edgy, for some reason one of the essential system packages got lost, so I didn't have any consoles. After about 2 hours I fixed this.

Then I tried to get the external monitor thingy working. I sometimes got output in weird colours, sometimes nothing, sometimes X wouldn't start. Very annoying. Now I have this section in my xorg.conf and it works, cloning my screen to the external output:


Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "XVideo" "true"
Option "VideoRam" "65536"
Option "XvMCSurfaces" "6"
Option "DynamicClocks" "true"
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option "Clone" "true"
Option "DevicePresence" "yes"
EndSection