Just Uber

I’ve just installed the ‘email on three’ application onto my Nokia e71. It seems to be a rebranded version of SEVEN; a push email solution for various mobile devices including Symbian based mobile phones.

So far it seems to be pretty good, and although there are a few reports on the ‘tinterweb indicating poor battery life, later comments suggest that this has got better with recent updates to the software.

All of which leads me to the question of whether or not ‘email on three’ uses SMS messages to trigger email synchronisation or whether it keeps an data connection open back to three’s NOC?

Anyone happen to know?

Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, has written a couple of very interesting articles describing how to hook up Wii peripherals to an Ubuntu Pc over bluetooth.

The first article describes how to hook Ubuntu up to a Wiimote, followed by another showing how to build a working weight sensor and real time display with Ubuntu, a Wii Balance Board and a couple of hundred lines of Python.

Could this herald a new era of Wii type games on Ubuntu?

I hope so!

As you might have seen in the news, the UK Parliament has made available records of MPs’ expenses from 2004/05 - 2007/08.

Obviously these records can reach hundreds of pages for each MP and will take some time to sift through. It seems to me that by applying a bit of ‘crowdsourcing’ to the job might help us to pick out the more ‘interesting’ claims that our MPs have made.

Following that line of thought, I’ve had a look through the claims made by one MP and noted items that jump out at me.

If you’re interested in transparency in politics why not do the same? It’d be great if you could post a comment here linking back to your post so there is an easy to follow thread.

2007/08 - David Davis MP | Haltemprice and Holderness

David Davis bagged himself an 8GB iPhone along with docking station, remote and case at a cost to the taxpayer of £339.00. This is in addition to a monthly bill from Vodafone, plus a regular payment marked ‘Cellhire’ (no invoice I can see).

A 24″ HDMI LCD. Not cheap at £463.06

£100 claimed each month in petty cash.

£2820 to a paid to an invoice headed ‘People Innovation’. The only company I can find of this name is a company listed under the ‘Business and Management Consultants’ category in Horsham, West Sussex.

A claim for £705 was made for ‘data recovery’ which raises the question, why was important data not backed up or easily recoverable in the first instance?

The Ubuntu-UK mailing list brings news of the emergence of the ‘Pirate Party UK‘ (PPUK).

Inspired by the Swedish Piratpartiet, the PPUK is a single issue political party campaigning principally for the reformation of copyright law and patent systems.

Interested in the political/legal concepts of Free Libre and Open Source software? Give PPUK a visit.

For a while now I’ve found that ondemand CPU frequency scaling (enabled by default) makes my laptop seem sluggish under Ubuntu.

Basically the CPU speed doesn’t seem to increase quickly enough to keep up with the sudden brief bursts of demand caused when using Gmail, or playing Youtube videos for instance. Applying information found on this website seems to give a more responsive system.

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load
echo 40 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold

This changes the default behaviour of the ondemand governor to force it to take into account background processes, and tells it to increase CPU speed when your CPU usage exceeds 40% rather than 95% (as is default).

Because /sys/ is a virtual file system created each time you boot your system, any changes you make are lost after a restart. Add the lines above to /etc/rc.local (read here for more on rc.local) to have your chosen settings applied each time you start Ubuntu.

Have fun.

Having just moved across to Kubuntu Intrepid I found that Firefox looks a little crappy by default. This can be remedied pretty quickly by grabbing this theme, created especially for KDE 4:

http://ramonantonio.net/kde-firefox/

Secondly some people suggested that they found Gmail scrolling a little slow on some computers. Disabling the Ubuntu Firefox Modifications addon (anyone know what this does anyway?) seems to give you a little extra speed if you need it.

Finally ensure you that you have ‘performance’ selected in CPU Policy. It’s easy to forget that power saving mode is on and find yourself wondering why your laptop is slow!

Lock your doors, stock up on supplies and withdraw all of your money from the bank for Google is broken!

It won’t be long now before mobs rampage through the streets destroying small businesses and legging it with pilfered tellys. This could be the end of the world as we know it!

Currently clicking on the result of any Google search brings up a page warning the user that the website is a potential risk, and does not allow the user to continue on to it.

Be afraid folks, be very afraid!

Update: A little while later Google started working properly again. Normality was restored. Sheepish looking folk gently placed nicked tellys back through the shattered windows of Currys and jogged home.

So, you’ve got a touchscreen monitor and you’re wondering why it doesn’t work properly? Lets see if we can get it up and running!

After connecting the touchscreen monitor’s USB cable to your PC and restarting, check out the USB devices on your system by running the command ‘lsusb’. If you see a line with the words:

D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreen

then we’re in business. I know how to set that one up!

Give the screen a sneaky tap with your finger. Marvel at how the computer seems to recognise a mouse click event (you may notice it highlights some text, or scares a small child from your PC case), but doesn’t yet doesn’t recognise mouse movement events.

Go on over to http://210.64.17.162/web20/TouchKitDriver/linuxDriver.htm and select the file called ‘Kernel 2.6.x with xorg 1.4.0 only’. At the time of writing the direct link to this file is here. It may have moved by the time you read this.

Anyway. Extract the TouchKit-2.03.tar.gz file. It contains a folder with 2 files and a tar archive in it. Good times.

At the command line move to the TouchKit folder you just extracted and run the following command:

sudo sh setup.sh

Wait a sec and be rewarded with the following menu. I’ve left in the choices I made.

(*) Linux driver installer for TouchKit controller

(I) Begin to setup TouchKit Linux driver.
(I) Checking user permission: root, you are the supervisor.
(I) Extract TouchKit driver package to /usr/local/TouchKit_x14.
(I) Create TouchKit utility shortcut in /usr/bin.
(I) Copy X module egalax_drv.so to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input.

(Q) Which interface controller do you use?
(I) [1] RS232 [2] PS/2 [3] USB : (I) Please choose [1], [2] or [3]
(A) 3
(I) Using interface: USB
(I) Found a HID compliant touch controller.
(I) Found kernel module usbtouchscreen.
(I) It is highly recommended that add it into blacklist.
(Q) Do you want to add it into blacklist? (y/n) y
(I) Add kernel module usbtouchscreen into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

(I) Found X configuration file xorg.conf in /etc/X11.
(I) Add touch configuration into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

(I) Please reboot the system for some changes to take effect.

Reboot your system

When the system comes back up you can calibrate and adjust your touchscreen by running sudo /usr/bin/TouchKit

Jobs a gud’un.

— Update

You may find that clicking on the desktop leaves irritating little selection box artifacts that wont go away. You can sort this out by changing the xorg.conf configuration that the TouchKit application generates.

Change SendCoreEvents to CorePointer (I edited out the default config at the top there). Problem solved.

Section “ServerLayout”
### InputDevice “EETI” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “EETI” “CorePointer”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”

Unfortunately though you may find that your mouse no longer works. Swings and roundabouts!

I’ve let this blog go a little quiet lately because I’m lazy…

I noticed a fun little meme over at planet.ubuntu-uk.org so thought I’d join in to see if the old blog still works!

Snapper? Well, the conversation went on and on about him.

- Seven Troop, Andy McNab

To join in just follow the instructions below:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

It happened again!

Karoo - the demon spawn ISP of Hull’s much bemoaned monopolistic telephone overlords KCOM - has managed to yet again destroy the city’s ability to connect to the t’interweb.

From piecing together odds and sods from various sources (and from being one of the poor buggers having to use KC) it looks like the outage downed all internet services delivered by KCOM.

The fault which lasted over 8 hours, is alledged to have downed essential services, residential broadband, and businesses utilising credit card equipment connecting back through an ADSL connection.

As usual users from the unofficial karoo forums have jumped onto the problem and are debating it, so if you’re interested, jump in and have your say!

Karoo last dropped Hull off the internet in January this year, and August last year. Bad times.

The Register are covering the story here.