Well bugger me… if it doesn’t rain it pours. After singing the praises of my little MacBook I got home and the thing was as dead as a door nail. It’s a $1600+ type problem to get fixed (a new machine is about $1700). So after some cursing and swearing yesterday I am back running my Mac world from an external hard-drive. Not a long-term thing, but surprisingly effective.

Toyota announced their PT device the Winglet. It is, apparently, the love child of their usual fare and the recent acquisition of the Sony Robotics division (all praise what ever deity that enabled that match to occur - I was gutted to see Sony axe that group and I am glad that it went to such a good home). Anyways, for your viewing pleasure:

And then this video sums up my thoughts:

From BBC World:

Security expert Bruce Schneier said: “As bad as the damage is from publishing - and there probably will be some - the damage is much, much worse by not disclosing.”

For my own notes: Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse

After getting my bash-scripting-fu on I was able to load my own content on the display:

Image Load Test 2
Originally uploaded by flash5.

Eventually I am going to have to recompile the OS of this puppy (it won’t do a DNS lookup for instance - let alone not having Perl or Python on board)… but I am going to try and put it off for as long as possible.

They sold out the first shipment of iPhones… seems they got their pricing bang on. Well played.

I was going to give up being an Apple Fanboi. But then I upgraded my iPod Touch to version 2.0 of the OS and installed the iTunes Remote Control. Very cool. Next Lent I guess.

Ok having nutted out how to talk to my dev board using the USB-serial connection… I then wanted to use the USBNET connection. Again this required some new drivers - but it was basically done by following the instructions outlined here.

The biggest hassle was setting up USB Ethernet on the Mac. You don’t have a comparable ifconfig call to make as you would under Linux. You need to install the USB drivers (additionally this if you’re running 10.5.x), wait for OSX to do it’s stuff and then set up the network connection in the ‘Network’ prefs panel. Once you’ve done that you can execute the relevant ifconfig call via the serial connection and then ssh using the OSX terminal.

I have started playing with the e-ink dev kit (it uses a Gumstix as the controller). The first problem was talking to the dev board using the usb-serial connection and OSX. I got it working ok last night using my XP virtual machine. This morning I got it up and running using OSX. The key steps:

1. Install the USB drivers for the serial port.
   I needed to install the FT232R drivers - which you can find here.
   You will need to reboot your Mac and then when you plug the USB into your machine you will be treated to a new tty under /dev (in my case /dev/tty.usbserial-A1002bao).
2. Install ZTerm
   I couldn’t get an intelligible connection using ’screen’. ZTerm allows you to set up the serial connection correctly.

My devkit is literally sitting down the road at the FedEx office waiting for the customs paper work to get sorted. The next trick will be to find time… don’t even have time to blog evenly these days.