Entries from October 2007

My previous despair faded and I’m giving Gutsy another try. Configuring my disks so that I have two partitions available for OS installs made it easy to try things as I got the chance.

I finally found a combination of settings that appear to make my displays work and don’t kill gnome-terminal. I’ll attach my xorg.conf here in case I forget what it took.

Sound volume is markedly lower than under Feisty. But I simply turned up the volume on my speakers.

I went back through my old Ubuntu posts and redid the things that seemed applicable. Hopefully my update won’t be too much trouble for Murray.

Adapted from the recipe on Bob’s Red Mill Wheat Bran.

Preheat oven to 375 on convection or 400 conventional.

• 1 cup wheat or oat bran
• 1.5 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup raisins or dates
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup apple sauce
• 2 Tbsp oil
• 1 beaten egg

Stir together the dry ingredients. Stir together the wet ingredients. Add to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened. Spoon into greased muffin tins and bake 16 minutes.

I’ve been annoyed for months by my laptop selecting my neighbor’s access point over mine. On every startup I’d have to make sure I was using our network. I looked a few times but apparently with the wrong search terms. The answer is to use gconf-editor as described here. One point that momentarily fooled me, you do not want to use sudo for this.

Here’s an idea for a simple game to encourage movement to music. I’m drawing from our Comp 80 class ideas for Generalized DDR.

In this game the player moves to music. Their score depends on how well their movement is synchronized with the music and on how many different moves they made. A more advanced version allows them to play along with the music though various delays will have to be overcome to enable their sounds to be sync’ed with the music. The system keeps track of their score and rewards improvement. Perhaps new tunes get unlocked like in DDR.

Continue reading →

I had tons of problems with Gutsy on my computer at work. Feisty worked great so I expected Gutsy to be even better.

First I upgraded. That resulted in a system that worked but that had annoying bugs. For one, the Gnome tray apps would sometimes fail to start and I’d get a stack of notification dialogs on my desktop, all of which I had to dismiss before I could continue. Sound would quit working for no apparent reason. I wrote all this off to having upgraded so I decided to do a clean install.

I wiped the disk and did a clean install. Then the graphics problems started. I’ve got an older nVidia board with dual video outputs. On reboot I’d get complaints that it couldn’t detect my graphics hardware and wanted to start in low-graphics mode. After making the adjustments, it would appear to forget them on the next reboot. Then I found that gnome-terminal wouldn’t start. It complained about an X11 error that might have something to do with dual screens.

So, I restored by backup of my previous feisty install on another partition and after a bit of fooling with grub and the uuid’s in my fstab, I’m running feisty again.

I think I’ll let gutsy simmer for a while before I try again. At least with my new disk organization it will be easy to switch back and forth between releases.

Diane P pointed me to this interesting looking book “Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design“.

I’ve been a platelet donor for the Red Cross for years but driving over to Durham to donate is a bother (can’t ride the bus so I have to drive to work that day but then parking around here is awful). So I’m going to give the program here on campus a try.

Their web page is impossible to find, so I’m blogging about it so that I can find it in the future. Go to the UNC Health Care Platelet Donor Program page.

Update: Maze Day 2008 will be April 30, 2008.

Maze Day has been postponed until Spring 2008. Many school districts are unable to come on December 6th so we’re going to postpone the activity until late Spring 2008 (around the time we’ve held it before). We apologize to those (few) of you who have already committed to coming.

Maze Day is for visually impaired students in grades K-12, parents and teachers to enjoy fun and educational computer applications. Lunch will be provided. Free!

Registration is limited to the first 70 students.

Date: December 6 POSTPONED
Time: 9am until 2pm
Location: Sitterson Hall on the UNC Chapel Hill campus (click here for directions)

Forms you will need:

Registration – Each group must register.

Photo Consent – We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.

Experiment Consent – High school and middle school Maze day participants are invited to participate in a fun research study during Maze Day. This study is part of an activity called Metric Olympics where you will estimate the sizes of different things. Not only will you win prizes, but you will help researchers understand how students learn about size and estimation. Interested participants should read and sign the consent letter. Join us in having fun while helping out researchers

This D800 has the 1920 by 1280 screen and the touchpad defaults are way too slow. I looked for a tool to adjust it but don’t see one. I edited xorg.conf to look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.75"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.50"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

I tried upgrading to Gutsy on my old Dell D800 today, it took about 7 hours to download the packages and then the upgrade failed. It couldn’t get the screen resolution right and didn’t detect my graphics hardware. The CD does it just fine. So I wiped the root partition and did a clean install. That seems to work fine. The wireless configuration was effortless. Now to figure out all the packages I need. I should keep some notes on the changes I make too.