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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

More ways to build your own keyboards and buttons

quorten

2019-03-01

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Building cheap, custom keyboards and buttons using paper, cardboard, and aluminum foil is one sure method that works well. But, what about other methods for building cheap buttons? Or, what if you have some cheap buttons in existing consumer electronics that have started to fail? How do you repair those?

Now, this is where we get some more interesting ideas:

  • Aluminum foil (thus mentioned)
  • Pencil lead, i.e. graphite. This is actually how some commercial “conductive rubber” variants are made.
  • Conductive ink pen
  • Conductive paint
  • Aluminum foil tape
  • Copper foil tape
  • Gum wrappers
  • Hammer copper wire flat

Finally, simply cleaning the conductive rubber pads in cheap commercial buttons can do the trick. But, be careful because cleaning is also a common cause of eroding the conductive rubber pads.

20190228/DuckDuckGo resurface conductive rubber button
20190228/https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/6584/fix-remote-controller-button-contacts

Read on →

Uber releases open-source autonomous vehicle visualization toolkit

quorten

2019-02-27

Categories: twitter   motor-vehicle   random-software  
Tags: twitter   motor-vehicle   random-software  

Now, this is interesting. Uber released an open-source, web-based autonomous vehicle visualization toolbox. Again, technology-wise, this is nothing new. It’s just that… unfortunately, due to the long history of proprietary game software and in-house tooling in this area, there has been traditionally very little code reuse between companies and intended use cases. So, to step around this, Uber had to redevelop all of this software from scratch. Yuck, it’s a bummer, conceivably I can see how many hundreds of people’s time has effectively been wasted over the decades, but ‘tis the nature of the old order of proprietary software development. The proprietary source code is kept secret until the old companies are going out of business, for lack of profitability due to being in the wrong sector of the economy, at which point the original source code is lost and destroyed. Then, a new player has to rebuild it all from scratch.

20190227/https://eng.uber.com/avs-autonomous-vehicle-visualization/?fbclid=IwAR3x5vpquWJ8sGZv_BDRmb84D_6QYuWlDtUn4bX1S1HrhixM2O6l0bCQV-I

Some articles from Mr. Money Mustache

quorten

2019-02-25

Categories: personal-finance  
Tags: personal-finance  

Just looking around at the Mr. Money Mustache blog a little. So, I must say this point clearly. There are surprisingly very little articles published on this blog in a year. I’ve found some interesting articles, interestingly the Mr. Money Mustache knows Matt Cutts. Yes, the Google one. Some other interesting highlights. Recessions are actually a good thing if you are prepared, with the right gear you can bike even in the very cold winter, renting an apartment in Toronto, one of the most expensive cities, is actually more economic than you think.

Read on →

The end of public Java updates for developers

quorten

2019-02-24

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

So, yes, as it turns out, I still have some web software that requires Java, namely my smart switch for seeing the port use status. Perhaps I should look into seeing if I can get the same information over SNMP. Anyways, because I happened to be looking around the now difficult ordeal of running a Java applet on a modern computer, I found this interesting statement from Oracle that Java will no longer be publicly available for business users.

20190224/https://www.java.com/en/download/release_notice.jsp

Mount FTP filesystem on GNU/Linux

quorten

2019-02-23

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

How do you mount an FTP filesystem on GNU/Linux so that you can access it in a graphical file manager? Well, unlike Windows Explorer, there generally is no function built-into the graphical file manager for special handling of FTP servers, so you must do a FUSE mount yourself as follows.

apt-get install curlftpfs
mkdir /mnt/my_ftp
curlftpfs -o allow_other ftp-user:user@email /mnt/my_ftp/

20190223/DuckDuckGo linux mount ftplinux mount ftp
20190223/https://linuxconfig.org/mount-remote-ftp-directory-host-locally-into-linux-filesystem
20190223/https://www.linuxnix.com/mount-ftp-server-linux/

Gosh, I must say. Even on GNU/Linux, mounting Samba shares is easier than mounting FTP shares. On a typical desktop distro, I can mount Samba shares right out of the box, for for FTP shares, I have to install an additional package. So, I guess the winner-take-all solution for graphical file manager shares between Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X is Samba. I was really hoping I could avoid using Samba due to its reputation of being insecure and getting blocked by antivirus software, but it looks like it is the only technical way to make graphical file manager sharing work with ease. Otherwise, you have to use an upload-download workflow, unless your entire editing application is also implemented as a web app.

Visit libregraphicsworld, discuss some interesting articles

quorten

2019-02-23

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

So, recently I decided to visit the Libre Graphics World website again and see if I found any interesting articles. Of course I found a few interesting articles, so I will discuss them briefly and my thoughts here.

First of all, the article on the recently open sourced render manager from Google and Sony Pictures Imageworks teaming up. Here we had some proven software that was used for many feature films that was proprietary until recently. However, there were also recently created open-source render managers from the likes of the Blender Foundation and others. On one hand, it’s good to know that some important software is being published as open-source. On the other hand, it is a bit of a bummer that it had to be delayed to so late, enticing others to do a little bit of rework.

The second article, on what was originally supposed to be a lightweight graphics editor, is interesting. Originally it started out completely from scratch, but it borrowed the name of PhotoFiltre by using the name “PhotoFiltre LX.” This created problems of elevated expectations from previous PhotoFiltre users who were constantly comparing the new software to the old one, and the author really didn’t like having such rigid constraints. Hence, the author renamed the software to have more freedom in terms of community members. Originally the software was simple for quite some time, but soon it added more advanced features and functions. Particularly noteworthy was that there was one long-time commercial contributor that resulted in the author going from only working on the project as a hobby to working on it part-time. Part of the advisory was to use Qt for the windowing toolkit in preference of GTK+ as that toolkit was a better choice for more commercial software… in light of recent GTK+ API instability and controversy.

Read on →

Work-life balance leads to more diversity at workplaces

quorten

2019-02-22

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

Interesting article. What is the difference between employers that attract and retain more women versus those that do not? Very simple, the allowance of a work-life balance. At the outset, this is nothing specific or different between treatment of men and women, but the simple change is one of many that have a dramatic difference on workplace demographics. This article also talks about other useful subtle things.

20180221/https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/how-to-make-your-company-more-attractive-to-women-in-it-1707.html

Two question programming interview

quorten

2019-02-21

Categories: random   twitter  
Tags: random   twitter  

“Two question programming interview”… this has got to be good. No nonsense, straight to the point. Alas, I start reading and this is a much longer presentation than I thought.

20190220/https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz#/

Audit on Minnesota Vehicle Registration system failure

quorten

2019-02-21

Categories: random-software   motor-vehicle   twitter  
Tags: random-software   motor-vehicle   twitter  

This is an intersting audit on the failure of the Minnesota Vehicle Registration system. What were some of the primary causes of the failure? Interestingly, many of the problems that contributed to the failure of the system were non-technical. Poor management, poor planning, poor documentation of existing business processes. Poor coding standards, poor regression testing, and lack of adequate user acceptance testing were the main things relating to technical failures. Interesting, HP was contracted out early on to write the system, but due to refusal to cooperate and their system failing to perform to expectations, they were terminated and the system was to be developed in-house. As I have read elsewhere, around the time HP was contracted to work on the system (late 2000s to early 2010s), they had a reputation of terrible management at the executive level, causing their business to loose half its value.

20190220/https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/mnlarsfactors.pdf

"Living off the land" virus evades detection, and unknown Google Nest microphone

quorten

2019-02-21

Categories: security   twitter  
Tags: security   twitter  

Wow, now this is interesting. A trivial virus leveraging functions largely from other software evades detection by antivirus software, and is very difficult to detect in its own right. The spreading is very successful for this reason.

10`90110/https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/hard-to-detect-credential-theft-malware-has-infected-1200-and-is-still-going/

Google admits that the Google Nest’s technical specifications should have stated that it contains a microphone, but the original ones didn’t. That was an “error” on their part. Nevertheless, in the modern era of consumer privacy suspicion, this is a very eyebrow-raising error. Not to mention the product development and release standards that led up to this error… “higher-level” software developers are well-known for littering their software with many more bugs than microcontroller firmware engineers, so it comes as no surprise that the hardware’s documented specifications showcased this same level of inaccuracy.

20190220/https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2

Beyond smart thermostats, Google also has a similar Internet of Things suite of smoke detectors, security cameras, and camera doorbells. Of course, be forewarned that they are not meant to undergo the same rigor of traditional embedded device development for these gadgets, or even the same level of mere simplicity.