DavidCraddock.net

I just noticed that US bulletinboard giant Craigslist.com has opened a Brighton UK section of their website! There are a few posts already. At the moment, Gumtree’s Brighton Section is massively popular here. I’ve recurited several flatmates using Gumtree, and am basing my local housing search around it.

It will be interesting to see how Gumtree.com fares now that Craigslist.com has competition in the Brighton local area.

Nabaztag (Armenian for “rabbit”) is a Wi-Fi enabled rabbit, manufactured by Violet. The Nabaztag is a “smart object”; it can connect to the Internet (for example to download weather forecasts, read its owner’s email, etc). It is also fully customizable and programmable. - Wikipedia.org

Here is our Nabaztag - Francois Xavier:

Of course, I’ve been messing around with poor old Francois’s programming..

With the help of OpenNab, a proxy server that masquerades as an official Nabaztag server, you can make your Nabaztag do all kinds of tricks. At the moment I’m getting him to read out what’s currently showing on TV when someone presses his button.

Here’s the technical details:

Whenever the button is pressed on Francois, he sends a message destined for the official Nabaztag server, that is caught by the proxy server. The proxy server then executes a PHP script. This PHP script grabs the current TV listings from a RSS feed, composes them into a readable list, and then sends the list to the official Nabaztag server, which converts the list (using a text-to-speech synthesis program) into audio files, and streams those audio files to Francois.

The result is a rabbit that reads the TV listings. A useful addition to our TV room.

Coming soon: More technical information on how you can do this yourself.

My GeForce4 MX 420 didn’t work properly with OpenGL under a fresh install of Dapper Drake. Fixing it, however, proved to be really easy:

1) Install the nvidia package:

$ apt-get install nvidia

2) Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the ‘driver’ where it says ‘nv’ with “nvidia”:

Section “Device”
Identifier “NVIDIA Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]”
#Driver “nv”
Driver “nvidia”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

3) Kill X with control-alt-backspace

4) Login again and test if it works by running glxgears and glxinfo on the console

This blog will be about my perspective on technology. Anything that catches my interest will be fair game, but mainly it will revolve around internet technology and the development of such.

It will allow me to create an online presence, and to improve my writing skills.

I hope you will find the time to check back on this blog and watch it progress.