Setting Up For The Omniversity Arduino Course

I'm very excitedly setting up for the Madlab Omniversity Arduino course this weekend.  I'm following the instructions to set up the Ardunio on the Mac.  It worked like a charm.

I wonder if I have to take my soldering iron...

Wiki Setup For Lego League

I've set up a new MoinMoin wiki for my son's Lego League team.  Here are a few quick notes to myself about what I did for future reference:

• Installed MoinMoin from aptitude
• Read the installation docs from /usr/share/doc/python-moinmoin/README.Debian.gz
• Created the directories for producing a wiki called “lego”
• Added site to /etc/apache2/sites-available
• Configured MoinMoin by editting /etc/moin/mywiki.py
• Edited /etc/moin/wikilist
• Called a2ensite to active the wiki
• Restarted the apache server with invoke-rc.d apache2 reload
• Went http://your.site/MyWiki/LanguageSetup to set up username and password
• Installed the English language pack all_pages
• Turned on apache mod_rewrite
• a2enmod rewrite
• Edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/lego to include

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/$ /Lego/FrontPage [R]

• Restart apache again
• Make so only registered users can edit:
• Edit /etc/moin/mywiki.py
• Add line: acl_rights_default = u'Known:read,write,delete,revert All:read'
• Set up site uptime testing at http://pingability.com

Getting Started With Open Wonderland

I've been looking to build a 3D environment for our home education Lego League team to hold virtual meetings.  After a couple of false starts I'm working my way towards a functioning Open Wonderland server.

The Basic Setup

I've got an old laptop running a headless Debian installation.  I've put the Sun/Oracle JRE on the server.  For then it was a very straightforward job to download the jar file and fire it up.  It took a while on the slow old laptop for the server to get itself started, but once it was ready it politely told me the URL to connect to.  Over to the client PC and the server's URL took me to a page to down load a Java JNLP file from which the client sprung into life.  I soon had an avatar going and was merrily walking around the Open Wonderland world.

Audio Problems

The main set up problem I had was that I couldn't get the Audio to work from the server.  A little bit of tweaking with the Windows Control Panel got the client audio going, but I couldn't get anything back from the server.  I headed over to the Open Wonderland community pages to find some help.  My first port of call was the IRC channel.   There was no sign of life there, so I next tried the Google Group. There was at least some discussion taking place on the group.  I posted a "please help the newbie" message and left it for the evening.  The next  day I had had no response from the group, so I dived into trying to figure out the problem myself.  Locating the log files was less than obvious.  The root of the log file directory was in .wonderland-server below the home directory of the user that I had used to run the server.  Digging into the ~/.wonderland-server/0.5/log directory I found the voice_bridge.log file.   Delving through the log file I spotted that the "Bridge private address" was set to 127.0.0.1.  I figured that would mean none of the server audio traffic would be being routed between client and server.  A small amount of digging into the server's /etc/hosts file found the name of the server being mapped to 127.0.0.1.  I tweaked that to the IP address of the ethernet card, restarted everything and hey presto the audio worked.

I've since had three clients with audio running simultaneously on the home LAN.  Next job is to set up the server on the public internet and see what the performance is like with remote users.

Minecraft Running On Old Laptop

I've been setting up the Minecraft client on an old Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop running Windows XP. The basic installed failed complaining that I had a bad video card driver. The solution was to go into Control Panel, click Display, pick Settings, Advanced. Under that menu find Troubleshoot and turn down the hardware acceleration settings. Mine worked at just less than halfway turned on. In order to get the client to run without too much lag I had turn turn the render distance down and turn off other fancy graphics options.

Which Bookmarking Tool To Use

I'm between bookmarking tools at the moment. I've been happy with StumbleUpon for a while, but I've just given up on their new UI. It requires you to remember too much mystery meat to get anything done. I had used Delicious before that. I can't really remember why I stopped using it. I think I liked the old StumbleUpon more. I'm considering using Google's +1 facility, but again that seems a little obscure.

Here are my requirements:

• Save bookmarks
• Work quickly from Chrome or Firefox
• Work okay from the Android browser on a phone
• Support tags
• Able to be viewed as a web page rather than tied to a browser (rules out Firefox Sync)
• Easy way to get my data out again

Suggestions?

"Family Math" - Great Book Of Maths Games

I've just finished reading Family Math. This is a book of games and puzzles focused on giving kids interesting challenges while stimulating mathematical thinking. A couple of favourites have been about an algorithm for palindrome numbers (try 89) and "Ten Card Arrangement" where cards are dealt and shuffled in a repeatable way and you have to stack the deck to come out correctly.

Highly recommended.

We've just done the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch 2012. Here's what we found:

Bird	Max Number
Blackbird	2
Magpie	2
Carrion crow	1
Woodpigeon	3
Coal tit	1
Blue tit	3
Nuthatch	2
Jackdaw	1
Song thrush	1
Robin	1
Chaffinch	1
Great tit	2
Wren	1