How to use a Maplin USB microscope on a Mac (by alaric)

We received a USB microscope from Maplin for Christmas, from my father and stepmother. It's basically a webcam engine coupled to a different optical system; so there's a small hand-held device on a cable that plugs straight into a USB port. It has inbuilt LED lights, so you push the end right up against a surface, and the casing of the unit holds the surface at the correct focussing distance while illuminating it. There's a manual control to focus, but once it's set, you don't need to fiddle with it.

It's Maplin code N87FX.

Anyway, it claims to work under various flavours of Windows, and certainly doesn't work out of the box on a Mac - but a bit of research (see the USB vendor/device codes in System Profiler, looking them up at http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids to find the generic name of the device, googling from there) led me to http://www.pc210.com.cn/downloadhtml/sonix201_PC_Camera_driver_for_MAC_405.html where a suitable driver can be downloaded. The RAR file wouldn't expand under Stuffit, but unrar from pkgsrc on my NetBSD system opened it fine, to reveal two zip files (duh) each containing a .dmg file (duh) which had a different driver in each... I just installed both.

Skype then immediately picked up on it as a webcam. But Photo Booth refuses to talk to anything other than the inbuilt iSight on my laptop, but then I found that the driver installs had also installed an app called Webcam Monitor, which is a simple wrapper around the underlying Quicktime video capture APIs, adapted from Apple's reference source code. It can record video, or a simple ⌘-C will copy a picture to the clipboard for Preview.app to save. It'd be nice to find something where I could just press a capture button and have a snapshot appear in a list which I can then choose a name for and save as a .PNG to automate this, though. Perhaps I ought to do my own quick adaption of Apple's reference source code...

Observe, my stubble!

Puzzling properties of my mind (by alaric)

On Saturdays, I take the train home from London.

I was feeling particularly groggy last Saturday; I was tired for some reason, I had a lot to carry (three bags, two heavy ones and one bulky one full of clothes), and I foolishly decided to pack and get straight on the Underground without going out to buy and then eat breakfast, in my desire to get home to my wife and child soon.

So after climbing the steep hill between my lodgings and the underground station I was already running a bit short on blood sugar. Which is probably why, while navigating a route around the underground lines they had closed for maintenance over the weekend, I got on the Victoria Line in the wrong direction, and nearly got on another line in the wrong direction while making my way back.

I grabbed some food at Paddington and leapt onto the next homewards-bound train; there were no free seats so I crouched in the vestibule with my bags, wolfing down my food, then leaning blearily against the wall while my body verified it really was food, so that it could afford to release my final reserves of nutrients to keep me going while it processed the new bounty (although, as it made it abundantly clear to me, it would rather I slept while it did this).

I got off at Swindon to change for the Stroud train; it was 2:35pm or so, and the next train to Cheltenham Spa was at 3:00pm or so, so I rang home and told them to pick me up from Stroud at 3:30pm, then went and sat down.

Some ten minutes later I glanced up at the indicator board, and saw that the next train was actually at 3:15pm. Odd - I must have misread it. I rang Sarah up and said I'd be a quarter of an hour later. It was still a Cheltenham Spa train from platform 2, though.

So at 3:10pm I went to platform 2, which was a little terminating platform used for the branch line up to Cheltenham, and got onto the train. It pulled off, and the inspector came to check tickets; when I showed him mine, he said "But this train doesn't go to Stroud. We're going to Westbury! You'd best get off at Chippenham and get the next train back to Swindon!".

Bleargh.

Well, I did that, and made it onto the correct train this time, and got to Stroud at about 4:45pm instead of 3:45pm; I wonder what time I'd have made it home if I'd not gone the wrong way on the Underground, too.

But through this whole day of bleary groggy failing to manage to comprehend even something as simple as the rail system, what did I while away my long waits doing?

Analysing distributed algorithms. A specialist topic far more involved than rail route planning.

How I was finding that a welcome rest from trying to figure out which train to get on, I don't know.

Or does this just say something about our rail system?

Business Day (by sarah)

Ok so after a weekend of server nightmare I spent today in a meeting with my Prince's Trust business mentor hashing through some of my ideas - mainly as due to being in London yesturday I had not finished the work he should have been going through.

Still he seemed impressed when I told him of the graphics packages and things I'd been learning to use and hunting out suitable name for my business.

I was going to spend today building my website and ordering my business cards and stickers but lo! I had no logo yet and without that there apparently isn't alot of point in moving ahead with the other two. And so I thought I would draw my own and so that is what I have spent the whole afternoon doing and it is still not finished and I am having a nightmare trying to work out the finer points of adobe illistrator which I need to know for a college project :/

Still I think today probably has been productive even if it was just becuase of the structure now imposed on my business idea after the meeting.

I'm hoping to use the christmas holiday to build up my web stuff and begin advertising my business properlly. I am also exploring other options other than having to buy new servers and stuff. At the moment I am still being crippled by the lack of capital to move forward and the credit crunch is making things a little bit sticky for me as is colleges insistance that I need to pay a top up fee for going back :(.

And so I suppose I need to get back to that logo :/

A stressful upgrade – and a design for a better backup system (by alaric)

My server cluster has been having lots of outages lately - which I traced down, after much experimentation, to probably being the ethernet driver in NetBSD 3.1 (which I was running), since the machine in question (as luck would have it, the NFS/NIS server; mental note, make the other server be a NIS slave so it can run on its own...) seemed to just disappear from the network but be perfectly happy if spoken to over a serial console - but ifconfig wm0 down ; ifconfig wm0 up would then hang it.

So, since a machine with the same Ethernet interface but running NetBSD 4.0 was running fine, and I could see there'd been a lot of commits to the driver between the versions, I decided to upgrade it.

Easy enough, right? Stick in the NetBSD 4 boot CD, boot, select Upgrade. But then problems struck; my /usr and /var are on a RAIDframe mirror set, and the install kernel didn't have RAIDframe installed. So I just let it install into /usr and /var directories under the root directory, and then booted into the new system, mounted the RAID, and copied the new /usr over my old one in order to upgrade all the binaries while leaving /usr/pkg and /usr/local untouched.

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Jean’s First Christmas Play (by sarah)

I have just come back from the Snowman at Sunset which was the nativity Jean's pre-school put on and Jeany was a snow cloud.

We made her outfit last night and I'm hoping it will have survived so I take a photo of her in it when Daddy comes home on Saturday. The children all had a great time though Jean did do a lot of wide eyed staring and had to be reshuffled to the front when her snow cloud bit happened. The sun shined on her and made her sparkel.

I put hair gel glitter in her hair and then dug out the 'fairy dust' stage glitter my aunt gave me when I was little - this stuff makes you shimmer and I have used it in countless christmas plays and I even used it when going out to clubs and things at uni.

Jean was very sparkly 🙂

She run up at the end of the play and hugged me lots, she said she'd been a bit scared and I told her she did really well and was very sparkly - she even had sparkly shoes. She went off for an after show treat whilst mummy and ferfer (my dad) went for mince pies and non-alcholholic mulled wine.

When I get round to I will put the out fit up on Salaric.