chuma.org

Category: computers

  • USB to PS/2 Adapter: a good idea

    Since I pre-ordered my Pepper, I’ve been casually browsing around looking for some kind of small, wireless, full-size-ish keyboard to use with it. Don’t get me wrong, even though my thumbs are huge, I am getting used to and quickly learning the layout of the thumb-pads, but for more serious text input I knew that something larger would be needed.

    Since the Pepper has built-in Bluetooth I’ve been looking at those, but the only ones that seem to exist are either the Apple Wireless Bluetooth keyboards, which are more or less full-size, or foldable types for use with PDAs. I wouldn’t buy either without trying them out first, as I can be quite picky when it comes to keyboards — my favourite of all time is the IBM Model M. But in the meantime there’s a really quick, easy, and cheap way to hook up an external keyboard or mouse to your Pad: a USB to PS/2 keyboard/mouse adapter! These can be had in many places for around $10 to $15. They’re powered off of the USB bus, and converts any old PS/2 keyboard or mouse into a USB HID device. Sweet! I’ve got one plugged in right now with an IBM Extended Access II keyboard, works like a charm!

  • Getting stuff onto the Pad

    Unfortunately, right off the get-go I was having problems getting my music and video onto the pad (which is still without a name, and no, I’m not calling it Sgt. Pepper). I had initially planned on using my USB->CF card reader to put files onto it. Unfortunately, the Linux 2.4 kernel doesn’t get along with my card reader. Not Linux or Pepper’s fault – apparently my card reader just happens to be “quirky”. Considering it cost me net $0 I’m not too pissed.

    There’s also of course the Pepper Desktop software, which is supposed to let you sync the Pad’s contents with your desktop. But still no joy – I added files into the Music Library on the Desktop and followed all the instructions to start a sync, but it died at Step 4. Looking into the log files, there’s something rotten going on on the Desktop’s side I think. I sure as hell hope it isn’t Norton AntiVirus doing something bad, but I suspect something’s just broken. No joy!

    Next, I thought “I know! I have this external USB hard drive with backups of all my music and video on it – I’ll just plug it into the USB port and awaaay we go!” Which should have worked. But didn’t, even after I converted the drive to FAT32. The reason? Pepper assumes that any USB device will have only one partition, sda1. Well… in order to have a 186GB FAT32 partition, it has to be within an extended partition – meaning it showed up on sda5. But even trying to mount it manually failed, which was strange to me – something just doesn’t want to read an extended partition table or something?

    Finally I hacked me a solution. Samba (the Windows File Sharing client for UNIXes) is installed and works just fine on the Pepper. I suspect it will be integrated into the software soon, but all I needed to do was mount my SMB share into /media/usbhd (where Pepper expects a USB disk to be mounted) and Eureka! It worked.

    I’m really hoping to solve this sync problem soon, because it’s by far the most elegant way to be doing things.

  • FCC gives up the insides

    Photos of the inside of Pepper, so I don’t have to take mine apart!

    Images in PDF file

  • Ohh, the extreme irony…

    My Pepper Pad was shipped from Canada (where it is assembled), to the USA, and back to Canada.

    Canada Customs is making lots of money off of this transaction.

  • Hacking Pepper’s Linux (setting up SSH)

    Yes, it’s here.

    And since there’s virtually zero third-party information about this thing on the net, expect this category of my site to get very busy, very soon.

    I got the Pepper Pad for two reasons:

    • Easy-to-use , portable web browsing throughout my home
    • Makes a decent portable video player too
    • Has full Linux distro, meaning can be hacked to your heart’s content, which for me means run lots of emulators

    So after about 15 minutes, I’ve got sshd running so I can at least login to it remotely and not have to use the xterm with the thumb-board.

    Here’s how to do it:

    • Open the xterm – press Ctrl-Shift-1.
    • Edit the /etc/sshdconfig file to allow remote root logins: vi /etc/ssh/sshdconfig
    • Find the line that says PermitRootLogin, and uncomment it (remove the # from the beginning of the line, put the cursor on it and hit x), then save (ZZ)
    • Assign a root password. Run ‘passwd’. SSH clients don’t seem to want to let me login as root with no password, for good reason 🙂
    • Start the ssh server: /etc/rc.d/init.d/ssh start
    • If you want the ssh server to start on every cold boot: ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/ssh /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S89ssh
    • Now you can login remotely, run ‘ifconfig’ on the Pepper to find your IP address, then ssh to it as root from the other machine.

  • It’s here! It’s here!

    I knew it wasn’t vapourware. Shame on you, Jon!

  • Where’s my Pepper?

    It’s officially been two months since I pre-ordered my Pepper Pad, and it’s supposed to ship any day now. Still no joy. I hate waiting for stuff to ship, especially when it’s really expensive and I’ve saved up for it for months and I really really want it to get here but it isn’t here and I get sick of griping about it and e-mailing customer support departments and argh.

    I wonder how the desktop syncing works… hrm, it seems to listen on UDP port 2112.

  • gotta hack this page design

    So now I’ve got WordPress installed and it’s nice and all that, but the default theme is driving me bananas. Why? It has a static width.

    I hate static width webpages. It’s not that hard to use a design that scales gracefully from 800×600 all the way up to 2048×1536. So the first thing I’ll be doing is hacking a nice liquid layout into this theme. Then we’ll be getting somewhere, and I can go on to recreating all the old pages from Movable Type.

  • busted device blues done got me down

    There’s really no point in carrying my Newton around anymore. I haven’t opened it in weeks. I need to figure out where my sites are going to move to though, since I’m going to have to bring my server home by the end of September and I don’t just want those resources to go away.

    My GBA Flash card hasn’t worked right in a long time… the save function on it is still really wonky, I’m sure it’s not the battery now, what it seems to be is that most of the time writing to the save area just doesn’t work. This could be due to a damaged pin, short, or bad solder joint somewhere on the card but I can’t fix problems like that, nor do I have the tools. It just sucks that I can only play the first level in most games, because I can’t save my frickin’ progress!! Urgh. For brief shining moments it does work, so it’s not completely broken, it just pisses me off!

    When the Pepper Pad comes though, I will be porting many emulators over to it and then my GBA will be moot, because I’ll be playing GBA, NES, SNES, whatever games I want, and be able to keep them all on the internal hard drive. Unless I leave it at home for Sandy to use, of course. I can share!

  • About hardware, and avoiding “lock-in”

    I’ve been asked and also been asking myself the same question, over and over again, over the recent weeks and months:

    Nintendo DS or Sony PSP?

    I’ve finally come to a decision, and it is: neither. This is the reason:

    I don’t like hardware of software that makes decisions for me. I don’t want to be locked in to stupid, expensive formats (Sony UMD or MEMORY STICK PRO DUO ULTRA HYPER MAGIC MARK II), crippled capabilities (802.11b/g wireless that doesn’t talk to any other devices, hellooooo?), or only be able to run code that Sony or Nintendo wants me to run on their devices. I like being in control of where I get my media or software, and how I play it. I don’t want to buy stupid UMDs or have to resort to stupid hacks like the PSP memory stick swap hack that came out today.

    I’ve drooled over the Pepper Pad before, and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a hardware platform (with the exception of ubiquitous handwriting recognition). My only question was: how hackable would it be? Now I see that there is already a Pepper hacking site, and it makes me warm inside 🙂 Warm knowing that yes, this device will “just work” out of the box, but people can also extend it without having to resort to ridiculous hacks like the NDS and PSP hackers are currently doing.

    So we’ve started saving for one of these – it really fits the bill.