As regular readers know, I've turned a BLE Beacon into a wireless business card. Physical Web used the Bluetooth beacon standard to continually broadcast not an ID number, but a URL. If you're in my proximity, you can grab my contact details. The one problem with the beacon I have is that it has an exposed button. Every time it got bumped in my pocket, the token would emit a couple of shrill…
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I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁 208:10 - Fri 27 November 2015Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @eden…
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I was recently gifted a Satechi WiFi Travel Router & Charger. Currently available on Amazon for £35. It's a clever little device with several useful functions: Travel adapter. Plugs into most power sockets and has a universal plug on top. Two USB charging sockets. Connect to Ethernet and share the signal via WiFi. Connect to WiFi and share the signal via WiFi or Ethernet. …
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I've been busy writing the definitive Sercomm Camera API documentation. (No, you need a hobby!) While doing so, I noticed that I couldn't get my Pan/Tilt/Zoom camera to... well... pan! No lateral movement whatsoever. It'd move up and down - but its left and right movement was non-existant. I could hear the stepper motor whirring, but it wasn't producing any movement. Weird... TO THE…
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I've started talking a lot more over VoIP. The microphone on my MacBook Air is basic, but serviceable - so I thought I'd treat myself to a new mic headset. I went with the HP Premium Digital Headset from Amazon. The headset is USB - and worked instantly with Ubuntu Linux: It even has a dedicated "mute" button to cut off the microphone. Handy when on a conference call. The only problem was,…
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Last year, I wrote about how Authentec wouldn't support their fingerprint readers on Linux. I've been chatting to the good folk at Authentec, and they've agreed to release the specification documents! So if you want to code up an interface for the AES2810 or AES2550 you can! A word of note, the best way to get the latest version of these documents is to register for the Authentec Developer…
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(I think I'm the first person to try this - so I decided to document the process.) A few weeks ago, I won a Raspberry Pi at the #OTA12 hackday. It arrived on Friday, so I thought I would turn it into an SMS server using the incredible FrontlineSMS. 0. Setting up the Pi This is the easy part. Follow the excellent guide on the eLinux wiki. Essentially, download the Debian image, extract, and dd…
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Every so often I find a device which - inexplicably - doesn't include Linux support. I've been very impressed with how well Ubuntu runs on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200. Everything worked out of the box - with the exception of the fingerprint reader (AuthenTec AES2810). Now, I know that fingerprint readers can easily be defeated by jelly-babies, but it annoys me when something doesn't work. The…
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So much has already been written about the N8's atrocious software. It's a popular (and fair) stick to beat Nokia and Symbian with. One thing that is always mentioned is how amazing the hardware is. I disagree. The hardware is as poor as the software. I think this picture symbolises that problem. N8 and HDMI lead The N8 has an HDMI port. A mini HDMI port. The image is of a full sized…
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This review was orginally written for a now-defunct website. Terence Eden - 2016 The Spec Mello Branded Cyprus CompactFlash MP3 player (v11) + 128MB Compact Flash card (a 128MB CF card gives you 124MB (130658304bytes) which is just about enough for 2 hours of 128Kb music. If you go down to FM quality (64kb) you'll get 4 hours worth of music.). Manufactured by…
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