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.
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.
If you want to take good care of your lithium-based battery, you should not charge or discharge it completely, but stick just to a part of the total range. This way you can increase the number of charge-discharge cycles it survives and thus prolong it’s life.
Certain laptops offer ways to set battery charging thresholds.
Have you ever been annoyed by terminal windows not aligning their edges with edges of other windows or screen edges in xfce? Seems like there is an easy fix, if you know where to look!
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.
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:
Recently, I have been forced to finally replace my old and not-so-trusty N900 with something a little more up-to-date. I ended up with Nvidia Shield Tablet. You can get these for great price, if you are lucky, because of the global tablet recall. The old tablets can survive this procedure and seem to be working well.
After the relatively recent switch from LMDE Jessie to Betsy and the developer’s intention to change the base repositories to Debian stable, the frequency of interesting package upgrades became horribly low. For me, this became too much of a problem with the availability of new version of Xfce. LMDE will probably stick with the old 4.10, while others can have fun with these pretty new features. So, how to deal with this?
After the initial fuzz about the new greatest version of Windows, the mighty big Ten with it’s many userspace improvements (there are rumors on the Internet about the new UI being a fork of Plasma 5), the hard moments of truth are finally here. The W10 has been released! And with it many jokes about it’s new brilliant error announcement dialog windows and various bugs. Of course, it would be unusual if everything went absolutely without errors, guys from Redmond will sure get everything important in order very soon. But there are other issues at hand. Very serious ones, actually. What I am talking about are those various gaping security holes and actual Microsoft spyware, built-in in plain sight.
The final version of the BLDC driver is working, at last. It is a simple modular controller for sensored BLDC motors with easy-to-understand scalar commutation. The code is work in progress, and should be usable in a few days. The hardware was designed so it could be completely assembled manually without special instruments, and the PCB layout is also DIY-enabled.