Confessions of a dangerous mind

Toshiba NB200, life and death, and rebirth with the Phoenix crysis disk

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In Greek mythology, a phoenix or phenix (Ancient Greek φοίνιξ phóinīx) is a long-lived bird that is cyclically regenerated or reborn. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor [wikipedia.org]

This was a very exciting Christmas. I was on the job while inadvertendly clicked on the wrong file: the latest (currently should be 2.20) BIOS winflasher for my Toshiba NB200, previously saved for later use.  Panic: I should have press Cancel right away.

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Asrock ALiveNF6G-VSTA sound issue with Ubuntu Precise

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Ubuntu precise is sometime unsettling at best. Audio won’t work with my old ALiveNF6G-VSTA. It used to be the reverse on Linux: old hardware would work, new hardware not always. Ubuntu Precise changed that altogether: old hardware isn’t working, and new hardware isn’t working either.

ALiveNF6G-VSTA(m)
ALiveNF6G-VSTA motherboard. Photo courtesy of Asrock

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Fixing the frontpanel USB ports, One at time

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Today I decided to fix my front panel USB , that were since long gone due an unspecified issue on my Asustek mobo (WYGIWYP, what-you-get-is-what-you-paid). Since the usual remedies wouldn’t work (resetting CMOS, changing front panel, BIOS fiddling) I decided to tackle the problem the hard way, by bypassing the motherboard completely.

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Playing with bluetooth GPS for fun and profit

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I am recently fiddling with an old Bluetooth receiver to use it as a time source for my Arduino chrondot clock. Please note it’s already been done[wyolum.com] and an interesting graph of Chronodot drift is provided. First of all I decided to get a good look at the NMEA stream coming out of the GPS … Leggi tutto

Updating the Atmega8U2 on an Uno with DFU

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My Arduino is quite old, and I had to upgrade the firmware to address  some issues that arose with serial. Basically I used Windows  XP and those resources: http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/DFUProgramming8U2 but it’s no so verbose, it’s useful as a general introduction. I soldered a 10K resistor like advised, but then  I decided  to rely on this … Leggi tutto

Codingcolor Arduino RTC LCD clock with Chronodot

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I recently started experimenting again with Arduino and must say I am having a lot of fun.

Chronodot Arduino and LCD RTC clock
Chronodot Arduino and LCD RTC clock

I had the idea to implement an RTC clock with arduino and excellent Macetech Chronodot and got myself the needed parts from Adafru.it. As it often turns out with Arduino project, someone already had the same idea (and luckily they used the Chronodot too): before reinventing the wheel a fast google search revealed “An Arduino LCD clock using the ChronoDot RTC”.

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Cryptswap and Linux assigning different devices letters to disk

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I had this weird issue recently: I had a simple Ubuntu setup with cryptesetup and swap, and the crypt swap device (say /dev/mapper/mycryptoswap1) keept disappearing.
Caution: fiddling with cryptsetup and disk devices is dangerous for data and OS. I personally made a full backup on a separate disk and then umplugged it to be sure it wouldn’t be involved in any mishap.

Turns out is a little worse that that: Linux is changing the drive devices assignations (eg /dev/sdb /dev/sdg) at every boot under my nose. I did not notice at first because I am using UUIDs, so everything looked fine. Unfortunately my raw partition did not have any UUID.  Probably there’s a way to assign an UUID to a general partition, but I didn’t address this issue.
Having the disk changing its letter any time was the reason why the crypttab device wasn’t created a boot.  I was lucky: would a partition with valuable data be present in the other disk, it would be overwritten with encrypted swap data.

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