SamyGO project provides custom firmware for Samsung TV's. If you have any LED, LCD and Plasma TV models made by Samsung from 2009(Check the compatible TV list). Follow the instructions to load the custom firmware using serial interface.
The project enables you to unleash the full power of the Smart TV. In this hack, you can watch movies from your local network media server running Samba/dlna using built-in Wifi connection.
Pebble smartphone SDK 2.0 will be released later this year. It introduces new build tools, support for accelerometer, data logging, persistent storage, JavaScript and Web API(Geolocation, Local Storage) API. Developers can distribute apps on Peeble Appstore for free.
Check out the technical talk for full details. Grab the latest Pebble SDK 2.0 Beta7 and use iOS/Android 4.0 mobile device to flash your Pebble with latest Beta firmware.
You can view this presentation slides on slideshare
African WebMuses presents portraits of women that the AfricaHackTrip team met during a journey in November 2013. We wanted to show powerful females from the East-African IT industry, working as programmers, teachers, tech events organizers and managers supporting technology development. It was a great pleasure to meet you. Thank you for being an inspiration!
African WebMuses from WebMuses on Vimeo.
The movie was made by WebMuses and AfricaHackTrip, with financial support of W4 – an organization dedicated to the empowerment of girls and women around the world.
Getting anything shipped into Vietnam is difficult. During my travels, I hunt the local markets for hackable hardware. In Taipei I visited the Guang Hua Digial Plaza on tip-off from Mike.
This multistory shopping mall is packed with small electronic stores. Hidden in this huge market, there are two shops that sell open hardware such as Arduino boards, Raspberry Pi and various senors, robotics kits. You might find the prices are better than online shopping.
You'll find this first store on the fourth floor in a corner.
The second store is on the next floor. It has kits from dfrobot and books about robotics.
Here are the business cards. Have them handy if you want to find them quickly.
And don't forget to check out the Taipei Hackerspace. Happy Hacking!
Launching Firefox web browser on Ubuntu produces these debug files C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt. It is quite annoying especially when developing Firefox Add-ons with Add-on SDK, I have to remove these debug files before committing my sources.
The Adobe Reader 9 plugin is source of this annoying problem. I usually remove the plugin and forget about it. However Robert Fleming provided a better solution.
$ cat C\:\\nppdf32Log\\debuglog.txt
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
NPP_GetValue is called
Save this python program and run it with sudo to fix the problem.
#! /usr/bin/python3
#
# Save and Run as:
# "sudo ./fix_nppdf.py /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so"
#
import mmap, sys
target = br'C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt'
replacement = br'/dev/null'
replacement += b'\0' * (len(target) - len(replacement))
with open(sys.argv[1], 'r+') as f:
m = mmap.mmap(f.fileno(), 0)
offset = m.find(target)
assert offset != -1
m[offset:offset+len(target)] = replacement
Richard Van As lost four fingers on his right hand in an accident. He started to build a prosthetic hand with set of mechanical fingers using tools in his woodworking workshop. I met Richard at Tech4Africa 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His Robohand project provides 3D printed prosthetic hands for the disabled. Anyone with a 3D printer can download the shape files from Thingiverse and print a prosthetic hand.
Richard is a hero for tinkers and makers everywhere. His innovative use of 3D printing technology heralds of things to come. Watch the video about Robohand project on YouTube.
For more information visit robohand.blogspot.com
Sugar makes learning fun. There are many activities that encourage children to develop critical thinking skills. The Sugar user interface was developed for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
In this blog post, I'll share instructions to setup Sugar as alternative desktop environment on Ubuntu. Perhaps schools will adopt this setup to provide different desktop environment for students of various ages groups. At home, parents can share the home computer with their children.
These instructions were prepared on Ubuntu gnu/Linux 13.04 operating system. Please read this wiki page for further instructions.
# Download the sweets installer shell script
$ wget ftp://download.sugarlabs.org/packages/sweets-distribution.sh
# Add executable bit to the script
$ chmod +x sweets-distribution.sh
# Run the scripts with sudo program.
$ sudo ./sweets-distribution.sh
# Check the status of 'sweet-distribution' program.
$ sweets-distribution status
Platform:
Ubuntu-13.04
Selected repository:
Factory
Packages to sync:
(import GPG keys)
Available repositories:
0.94:SugarNetwork
Factory
-- Hint: Use "sync" command to synchronize packages
# Select 'Factory' as default distrubution channel.
$ sudo sweets-distribution select Factory
# Download the package descriptions.
$ sudo sweets-distribution sync
# Now install all the packages using apt-get package manager.
$ sudo apt-get install sweets-desktop
# Test the deployment by launching Sugar emulator.
$ sweets-sugar-emulator
Unfortunately there aren't many Sugar activities packaged for Ubuntu. Let's start with installing browse activity. Download browser activity and save to your ~/Documents folder or external flash drive. To install open the downloaded .xo file with Journal activity in the Sugar emulator.
You can now use the browse to download and install more activities from activities.sugarlabs.org. You can learn more about installing activities by reading the Sugar manual.
That's all. Now you can select Sugar at the graphical login screen. Do share your experience using Sugar Learning Platform.
