RFduino – Adventures into the world of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

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A quick write-up on the rfduino which arrived yesterday.

The rfduino started life out as a kickstarter project to make it easy for hardware tinkerers like myself to get access to BLE and incorporate it into our projects.

rfduino pictured next to an SD card for scale.

My rfduino pictured next to an SD card for scale.

It consists of a Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 chip, support circuitry and Bluetooth chip antenna all on a nice tiny board. The nRF51822 contains a custom boot loader written by rfduino which when combined with an add-on to the Arduino IDE allows you to code for the device as if it was an Arduino device. This means you don’t need the Nordic Semiconductor development kit or API’s but does limit what you can do with the nRF51822 slightly.

What’s the big fuss with BLE you ask?

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Get rid of the Floppy Icon in (x)Ubuntu

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By default Ubuntu is configured to load the floppy kernel driver on start-up, if you don’t have a floppy drive though this can be annoying because the icon will appear as a un-mounted drive on your system. In Xubuntu on my machine the icon and entry in thunar (the file manager) looked like this.FloppyIcon

The fix is to unload the floppy driver from memory, thankfully on Ubuntu its a module so you can unload the module with the following command:

sudo rmmod floppy

If you want to permanently stop it from loading on boot you can blacklist the driver as follows:

echo “blacklist floppy” | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-floppy.conf
sudo rmmod floppy
sudo update-initramfs -u

Initial thoughts on my OUYA

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My OUYA has finally arrived, I backed the original project on Kickstarter and as I’m sure most of you know they had some “teething” problems getting these shipped.

My first impressions are mixed, the console is nicely made, build quality is not bad at all. The software unfortunately feels a little unfinished but isn’t too bad, game quality so far though leaves a lot to be desired.

Concert

Gallery

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Waiting for the show to start… at the stadium to watch The Darkness. (oh and Lady GaGa) Please forgive any errors, this was posted using WordPress for Android on my tiny little phone.

James Bond: Skyfall – Review

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Last night we went to watch the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. I should probably first point out I’m a huge James Bond fan and own all of them on DVD and have watched most of them more than 10 times, I grew up watching the movie franchise and wanting to be James Bond. So this “review” is going to be a little biased.

I had heard many good reviews of this movie, and had high hopes for it. After watching over 20 minutes of trailers and 007 themed adverts the movie finally started.

The simple truth was that while this was an awesome movie it was not a a great “James Bond” movie. In fact had they changed a character or two’s name and the title I think I would’ve given it a huge thumbs up.

[A possible spoiler or two after the break]
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Offer in

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We’ve just made an offer on a 3 bedroom free standing house in the area. Requires a little work, but that’s the fun part.

Waiting

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Waiting for the estate agent to arrive for our meeting, we’re hoping to put an offer in on a new place…