Home automation – the beginning

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In the year of 2019 home automation is finally starting to be a thing. However the industry is walking in an uncharted territory where most of the companies are coming up with their very own devices, protocols and mobile apps. And if you don’t want to use a separate app to switch on your lights and another to open the door you can sometimes even connect them to a walled garden network proprietary smart-home framework or even your home surveillance device assistant!

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Moving the blog

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Sometime last year the company hosting my blog at wincak.besaba.com decided to change the rules and move all blogs hosted for free on a new domain.

This transfer wasn’t the one-click-painless process they advertised so it took a while to find out how to do it properly and get around some bugs. But here we go, this great blog is online again!

Electronics workshop #2

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After the wild success of the first workshop, it was time to make another one. Location and team remained the same: Marius and me had a room in Krikragaa HQ (in Pilies dirbtuves, Klaipeda) at our disposal. This time we have focused more on manufacturing process and simplified the circuit complexity as much as possible. Components: coin battery and flashing RGB LED. Skills taught: PCB preparation. Goal: make a flashing badge.

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Running Plasma Mobile in qemu

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Recently new iso’s with Plasma Mobile were released (no, don’t look at the official website, you can find it on a seemingly random blog). So how to try them out? The post just briefly mentions booting in a virtual machine. You can also find instructions how to use qemu to run Plasma Mobile there, but they describe what seems to be the old way of doing things, now obsolete.

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Electronic Eglute workshop

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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to organize an electronics workshop in Klaipeda with help of my friend Marius and people from the Krikragaa. The workshop was a part of christmas events – market and workshops.

The goal of the workshop (apart from having fun) was to build a simple flashing circuit with six LEDs. To fit into the christmas mood better, LEDs were usually embedded into custom decorated cardboard christmas tree.

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The long and painful road to useful Plasma 5 desktop

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UPDATE 22.1.2018

Some parts of this angry rant still hold true, but Plasma desktop sure improved greatly since this post was originally written. I now run latest KDE software on Manjaro for several months and it sure got good enough for my day-to-day use. New post incoming… maybe when I get around to it.

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First of all, I would like to state that I’m a fan of KDE. Some of their programs and utilities are unmatched by any other. For example file browser Dolphin, text editor Kate, the great PIM suite Kontact, … the list goes on. Also the level of customization is borderline fetishist. KDE desktop lets you do absolutely anything you ever thought possible and more… or it seems so at first. Then, in the moment of awe, the first crash comes. Then you start noticing weirg glitches and somehow missing features.

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Running Ubuntu natively on Nvidia Shield Tablet

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Thanks to Nvidia’s Linux4Tegra and work of Bogdacutu and Steel01, as of today I’m running desktop Ubuntu on my Shield Tablet. And it works surprisingly well. Except some tablet-specific hardware like the modem, accelerometers and such, of course.

All it takes is to install MultiROM, patch the kernel and install the appropriate Linux4Tegra installation archive next to existing Android system and there you go:

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