I wanted to make a note here about a recent news story related to a topic that’s fascinated me for the ~10 years or so since I first heard of such things…. For some time there have been 3d printers. Devices that would use a liquid of some sort to “print” a real physical object. Usually these were plastic-ish prototype parts/proof of concept samples. These “printers” cost 10s of thousands of dollars and typically just have one material to choose from. Certainly out of reach for a home tinkerer… But recently I read this article about a desktop fabricator… The project name is fab@home and for ~$2500 in parts YOU can build your own personal fabricator….
Tag: GUI
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Cutting Short, splitting or truncating mp3 files…
from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.
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Joystick calibration under linux
I don’t know off the top of my head of a graphical joystick calibrator for linux, but there is a command line utility that’s dead easy to use…. jscal I found the tip in a flightgear mailing list after having a hard time with one of the first flights. The stick was very far off center, I had to pull almost all the way to the right to keep level. Anyway… here’s the tip.
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apt-get introduction
For those of you new to linux and using a debian based distribution… here is a good introduction to the world of apt-get. Apt-get is a tool for installing software, updating software, uninstalling software and even for doing complete distribution upgrades.
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Making backups simpler
Linux.com is running an article on easy automated backups with a new program called sbackup. Sbackup is a product of Google’s summer of code and is a GUI to pick and choose what to backup and when to routinely back it up. Apparently the project was also sponsored by Ubuntu. (I’d expect integration into their distro’s admin tools if not already then.)
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part I
I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.
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Make panoramic pictures with a digital camera (or any other)
There’s another great article at newsforge this evening. I remember seeing some time back a camera which took panoramic pictures. The photographer would hold it steady over his head and the camera would slowly circle around to get a 360 degree photo. In fact I think I remember seeing a large group picture where someone played with the idea and ran around to be in the picture twice.
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Administrative access on linux systems
Tux magazine has a comparison of su and sudo as ways to administer a linux system. Many people are under the mistaken impression that you just login as root (gui or otherwise) and that’s the only way to do it. In fact, I’ve used su primarily. Although in some circumstance sudo has it’s benefits.
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Display problems with livecds
One of the things I’ve run into with various linux livecds, whether it’s my own made with mklivecd, or others based on Knoppix, the Suse Livecd, or I could go on…. the problem I’ve seen is with the display drivers. Yes, MOST of the time the autodetection seems to work fine and you get a good legible display. There are sometimes that you get an illegible display of one or two flavors. One is the overlapping ghostted images. I personally like this one more because it means we’re close, that the autodetect has just chosen the wrong resolution or refresh rate. This can be fixed.
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qemu for testing linux livecd’s
I’ve mentioned a few things about linux livecds in the last few days and thought I would also mention a great tool for testing them. QEMU is a program, available for Linux or Microsoft Windows, that allows you to run an operating system within your current desktop. Let me try to clarify, I have my linux desktop fully booted with the editor for this post in the background and open up a run prompt. In the run prompt I type “qemu -cdrom /cdimages/klax-kde-3.4.2.iso” *(quotes are not necessary). This gives it the recent klax-kde-3.4.2 preview livecd as the thing to boot. A window pops up and it’s booting now as I type in the background. I can switch to it, make it full screen and play around with it without the need for a reboot. (more…)