I’d love for someone to point me in the direction of a (working) app to better manage the Ubuntu Unity launcher items. I needed to prefix a “gksudo” on a launcher item for regular use (don’t ask), and couldn’t figure out how you’re supposed to do this. In the meantime I’ve worked this out…

Continued…

I had an old USB GPS puck sitting around and wondered if I could make it play nice with the Arduino. Of course, there are easier modules (including this one in serial) that can be found elsewhere for a few dollars more. But assuming you have this one, it can be done.
Continued…

Lexan Sheet from Lowes: ~3.50
U-Bolt and Hardware Kit: ~2.50

The rest I’m sure you can figure out.

A Giz reader made a good point. You should always wear your eye protection when cutting or drilling anything. It should go without saying, but well, there you go.

Also, LH and Giz kicked the crap out of the host. Nice! I probably should have been a little more proactive and braced for impact. Oh well…

It seems like every time I want to play with those little picaxe chips, I can never find the stuff from last time. This board and cable came together pretty clean, so hopefully this way I’ll always have a rig around for tinkering…

Continued…

As of late the Apple iPhones and iPods have worked flawlessly in Ubuntu out-of-the-box. However, if you’ve upgraded your firmware to 4.2.x and tried it in Ubuntu 11, you’ll get a nasty message about being unable to mount.

To fix this, add the following repo to your sources so we can install a few updates:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa

sudo apt-get update

Followed by…

sudo apt-get install ifuse libimobiledevice2 libimobiledevice-dev python-imobiledevice

Plug your iPhone in, and you should be gtg!

Quick Update: libimobiledevice1 has been replaced with libimobiledevice2. Thanks to crowdtube.tv for the heads-up.

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As it turns out, the Sun Java JRE doesn’t exist in the Natty Narwhal Partner repo’s just yet. With some helpful advice on #ubuntu+1 (Freenode), this got everything up and working…
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A couple days ago I hooked my laptop up to my now old (but still bulletproof) HP Deskjet 6122 to print out a new insurance card before I ran out the door. In a world of smartphones that can hold any list, display driving directions and instantly store or retrieve just about anything else you’d want, I just don’t print much anymore. So what I got was an unreadable streaky mess… a sure sign of dried ink cartridge heads. Continued…