Isti's Blog » Ubuntu

Arduino and 64 bit Linux

Isti — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:13:11 +0000

Until yesterday I could not use the Arduino environment on my 64 bit Linux environment. I tried lots of things to fix it without success. While digging the net I have found this:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/arduino_on_64-bit_linux.html

Cooooool! It works fine with my Seeeduino which is basically an Arduino Diecimila. Unfortunately it does not support my Arduino Duemilanove boards. The ATmega328 chips are not supported by the avrdude config. If someone knows how to do that I would be glad to hear it.

Creating a single PDF from a series of HTML files in Linux

Isti — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:06:32 +0000

Today I found a great tutorial about digital photography. Unfortunately it was decomposed to chapters and each chapter was an a separate html page. I wanted to print the tutorial but it was not available as a single printable file. I decided to download the bunch of HTMLs with wget. Then I wrote the following perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

opendir(DIR, “.”);
@files = grep(/\.html$/,readdir(DIR));
closedir(DIR);

foreach $file (@files) {
@parts = split(/\./, $file);

$command = “htmldoc –webpage -f @parts[0]\.pdf $file”;
print “$command\n”;
`$command`;
}

opendir(DIR, “.”);
@files = grep(/\.pdf$/,readdir(DIR));
closedir(DIR);

@files = sort(@files);

$command = “pdfjoin “;

foreach $file (@files) {
$command = $command.$file.” “;
}

print “$command\n”;
`$command`;

It lists the html files in the current folder. It converts each html to a pdf file by calling htmldoc. The it lists the pdfs, sorts them alphabetically by their filename and joins them by calling pdfjoin. The output filename is generated from the last pdf filename. Look for “joined”.

You will need perl, htmldoc and pdfjoin to be installed on your machine in order to run the script. I got pdfjoin by installing pdfjam.

Slow Keyboard in Ubuntu

Isti — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:25:01 +0000

Recently I was typing a mail in my browser into a textarea in a webmail and suddenly my keyboard slowed down and at every keypress I heard a system beep. I tried to restart the browser. Didn’t help. In addition I have found that not only my browser is fucked up but the keyboard in general. Next I logged out and logged in. Yeah yeah the god old MS way. Fortunately didn’t help OK. Then Google…

Surprise surprise I’m not the only lucky one. Solution:

System -> preferences -> keyboard -> accessibility -> Slow Keys

Uncheck only accept long keypresses.

Later I read somewhere it might happened because I was pressing a key more than 8 seconds. Well I’m not so sure about that. Anyway, the solution above worked for me.