2010-10-26

14k miles down, and so is the bike

So, I came a cropper on a road used by construction traffic (less than 100yds off site) and the road slightly damp. At approx 20mph, front wheel slid out from me while making a slight left turn.

Good news was no serious physical injury, and no serious damage to the bike. The only thing that stopped me riding the thing home was a broken gear lever.  On picking up a replacement from the dealer, saw a street triple with LED turn signals. Turns out no modification to bodywork to get these on. The Triumph has a separate bolt hole to where the wires go through.

So post-crash, me thinks some modding is in order!!

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2010-06-20

Blog Migration.

Well, looks like the migration from Nucleus to Wordpress has gone without a hitch. Plus an upgrade along the line as well. Hopefully there will be more content en route!

2010-06-15

LiveJournal import

OK, so imported my life's history from LiveJournal! Go me!!

2010-05-15

Ubuntu Lucid JRE and Formula 1 live timing

So, you have a fresh install of Lucid on your PC, and you're wanting to view the live timing from formula1.com, but all you get is a progress bar that doesn't finish, and a grey box where there should be live timing. Well, not to worry, you need to remove Open Java and IcedTea plugin, and install the Sun ones instead.

All well and good, but Canonical have removed the Sun JRE from the main repository. Fortunately it is available from the Partner repository. To enable this, you need to open System -> Administration -> Software Sources. On the Other Software tab, enable the ubuntu lucid partner. If it isn't available, click the Add button, and enter deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner into the APT line box.

2010-05-01

Ubuntu updates

Lucid Lynx has barely been out a day, but I now have a VM, a netbook and the desktop PC updated to the latest version of Ubuntu.

Everything went smoothly, until I messed up the grub update on the desktop (dual boot Vista and Ubuntu). For a brief while, I had a machine that would only come up with a grub rescue prompt. After a session with the Live CD, I now have a rescued desktop PC running Ubuntu Studio. As time goes on, I have less reason to use a Windows PC.

2009-03-22

Skins....

OK, I'm probably far too old to be watching this show (Hell, it's on at 10pm, so who the hell is it's target audience???) but this weeks episode (19/3) was a great one. A true evolution for a couple of characters.

New Projects

Right, new project news. I've got an ipod (so who hasn't?) and I'm looking at the USB Apple Accessory Protocol. There's quite a bit of info out there on the serial interface, and seeing as I have an Alpine digital car head unit, all the info is going through the USB connections, and feeding data back from the ipod to the head unit for decoding there.

The Alpine head unit comes with its own USB to iPod dock connector cable. The thing will only work with this cable, and based on the info from the iPod Linux website, it must be appearing as an Accessory, based on the electrical connections of the cable. The head unit then puts it into Advanced iPod Remote (AiR) mode, as the iPod reports that it's "OK to disconnect", complete with Alpine logo. The same effect also happens with my Philips remote dock unit, but this connects out using the conventional video and audio outputs of the dock connector.

Using the Alpine dock-usb cable on the PC, the iPod stays with the standard iPod UI, and appears on the computer as the usual removable disk drive. The PC also installs some new drivers (Ok, this is Vista, and as I've said before, don't flame me - it came pre-installed) USB Human Interface Device, iPod, and USB Composite Device. I now have access to some generic USB interface source code, so will be experimenting and will report as I find out new info.