I’ve just finished writing the big parts of usbscale, a command-line program written in C that reads and interprets data from USB scales. It was meant as a little hack for the Stamps.com scale, so currently it’s only set up to recognize the Stamps.com 10-lb scale (manufactured by Elane). It should be trivial to add […]

An Ubuntu package of Petite Chez Scheme seems to be a common request among students, given the popularity of Ubuntu among the techno-capable.  Currently, only RPM packages are provided on the Chez Scheme site, and the traditional recommendation was to use alien to convert the RPM into a .deb. There’s no reason to have everybody […]

Update: I now have an improved C version of this program: usbscale. I got suckered into one of those hard-to-cancel Stamps.com trials. The upside is that they give you a $10 USB 5 lb. scale to use with their software. The downside is that they want you to only use it with their software, and […]

Ubuntu’s partition editor, GParted, usually scans all the hard drives when it starts. However, in some cases, it will get stuck on this “Scanning all devices” step indefinitely. By knowing what hard drive you want to edit, you can launch GParted specifically for that hard drive. Either go into run or a terminal, and run […]

I noticed that today’s Woot was a DigiPro UC-Logic drawing tablet.  I happen to own a UC-Logic tablet: a “WP4158U ???” made by Taiwanese company UGEE.  UC-Logic makes tablet technology for many different companies, and their USB interface is relatively standard and straightforward. (I naively tried reverse-engineering the USB communication for my tablet a couple […]

To use a MacBook’s Atheros wireless chipset on Linux, you need to use Ndiswrapper with the provided Boot Camp drivers. Get the wi-fi driver at makel.org. The one you’re looking for is drivers/Atheros/AtherosXPInstaller.exe. Install ndiswrapper from apt. Install unrar from apt. Extract the drivers with “$ unrar x AtherosXPInstaller.exe“ Install the drivers with “$ ndiswrapper […]

I have the Lexmark P3120 AIO, and for the longest time I could never get it working in Linux. Well, I finally figured it out (printing only), when I saw that the P3150 was confirmed working and I was only 30 model numbers behind. I used the Z600 drivers for Linux that were provided by […]

I tried using compositing on X-Window (with Kompmgr, of course), and it is amazing. However, it is still in the developmental stages and isn’t very well-known. It features window transparency, shadows, fading in/out for everything, and more. I’m beginning to see why Windows Vista has nothing innovative. Microsoft showed off how the little icons would […]

I recently changed my system to a dual-boot setup with Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and it worked magically for awhile. However, I was using Windows XP to make a FAT32 partition (seems like I had to make it in Windows for it to be recognized), when my GRUB boot loader messed up. I couldn’t boot my computer. […]