Big day, I hauled in a little over 6 dollars. Wow. Too bad I spent more than that on food alone, I really went hog-wild. Also bought an old dot-matrix printer at the Red Cross thrift store for 5 dollars. Several times already I've lost customers because I couldn't make a hardcopy. This won't help an awful lot if they want laser or inkjet quality, but it will meet the most basic needs at least. They had an inkjet printer they would have let go for $8, but I've never had much luck with the damned things. The cartridges work the first day, then go kaputt, and no amount of messing with them can get them to work reliably. Maybe I just have bad karma.
I managed to make some progress with my network boot setup; both stations are now 100% diskless, though one still has the option of the Damn Small Linux CD in case something goes wrong with the bootserver. I've got xscreensaver running on all 3 computers, and I can easily get lost in them. A lot of the programs show amazing creativity. Fascinating.
I've had to go back to v0.91 on amsn, I had two computers crash yesterday
when kids were using it with large contact lists. It spawned multiple copies
of mozilla-bin for some reason. Maybe they were doing something funky, but
whatever, it locked the boxes up good. I'm not sure the older version is any
better but we'll see. I haven't gotten gaim to come up yet on the client
boxes. It starts up, but without all the graphics, and apparently without
fonts. And it doesn't accept any input.
I found a bunch of .pdf documentation on the STV chip at www.st.com, but
not really what I was looking for. And though they mention an SDK I can't
seem to find it anywhere. Of course, it's only for Windows anyway, but I was hoping
the header files could give me some clues. Anyway, no progress on that front.
Actually, things are worse with it in a way, because I used to be able to
mount the camera as a storage device and fetch images off it; now it won't even work for that. Apparenly
older Linux kernels and utilities could deal with the single 16-bit FAT that
this uses, but no more. If I reformat it with 2 FATs using mformat, the camera still works but
only updates one of the FATs. Then dosfsck will "fix" it by truncating all
the files to zero bytes. Very useful. On the other hand, if I use dosmkfs,
I can mount it and copy files to and drom it, but the camera can't deal with
it. Anyway, that's no biggie because the Clié has a better camera.
I really just want the JB1 to function as a webcam now, so that's where my
efforts are going to go.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:28:12. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com