Happy Hackmas from 57North

We have two old Black and White CRT monitors in the hackerspace, they look really cool. I put together a Card and gif for the holidays:

I used a raspberry pi running FreeBSD for each monitor. The bottom monitor is running aafire which gives a nice fireplace effect. I did some big text in figlet for the message.

I also put together a paper card by using the gcard package in latex to put together some cards. This relies on double sided printing to get the message inside the cards. It was a bit of trouble(I had to trim the cards down), but the cards came out quite well for an hours work.

Card Outside 

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{gcard}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{Ubuntu Light}

\begin{document}

    \begin{frontcover}
        \centering
        \makebox[0pt]{\includegraphics[width = .5\paperwidth, height=13.9cm]{card.jpg}}
    \end{frontcover}

    \begin{insideright}
        \centering
        \makebox[0pt]{\includegraphics[width = .5\paperwidth, height=13.9cm]{card.jpg}}
    \end{insideright}

    \begin{insideleft}
    \end{insideleft}

    \begin{backcover}
    \end{backcover}

\end{document}

Card Inside 

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{gcard}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{Ubuntu Light}

\begin{document}
    \begin{frontcover}
        \centering{
            {\large{Happy Hacking}}

            {\large{From Everyone at 57North Hacklab}}
        }
    \end{frontcover}

    \begin{insideright}
        \centering{
            {\large{Happy Hacking}}

            {\large{From Everyone at 57North Hacklab}}
        }
    \end{insideright}

    \begin{insideleft}
    \end{insideleft}

    \begin{backcover}
    \end{backcover}

\end{document}

This generates two pdf files, I used pdfjoin to join them together into one file: 

pdfjoin inside.pdf outside.pdf -o hackmascard.pdf

pdf is here

Tamogotchi Hive

spritesmod has returned, this time making the matrix for tamogotchis

Quick gifs

In the last post I showed an animated gif of the of the post source run through sent.

This gif was super easy to make manually, I ran sent on the post source file, then I ran my screenshot tool from dmenu on each slide. I stepped through each slide manually.

For a long presentation, or if I might do this more often I would probably automate this in some way.

I was left with a directory of files call 1.png, 2.png, for each of the slides. I used the convert tool from imagemagick to turn these into an animated gif. 

$ convert -delay 100 -loop 0 *.png sent.gif

Animated gifs can be played with the animated tool from imagemagick to see how the delay is working.

Super simple presentations

This weekends In The Other BSD's section had a link to a nycbug thread about presentation software. That was strangely apropos, last week I made slides for a lightning talk using my own template and beamer just exploded. I fixed the issue with beamer, I was pretty upset, upset enough to try looking for other software to use when I can.

At the start of the nycbug thread suckless sent is mentioned. sent is a really simple presentation tool that, it takes some input files and shows them as a slideshow. No pdf output, no templates, just a presentation.

sent isn't packaged in FreeBSD, suckless make it rather easy to build their tools(you normally edit a header and rebuild to do config) so I grabbed the source and built it.

I had to add some search paths to get it to build: 

$ git diff
diff --git a/config.mk b/config.mk
index ed08199..6f5f3e4 100644
--- a/config.mk
+++ b/config.mk
@@ -11,8 +11,9 @@ X11INC = /usr/X11R6/include
 X11LIB = /usr/X11R6/lib

 # includes and libs
-INCS = -I. -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I${X11INC}
-LIBS = -L/usr/lib -lc -lm -L${X11LIB} -lXft -lfontconfig -lX11 -lpng
+INCS = -I. -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I${X11INC} -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/freetype2
+
+LIBS = -L/usr/lib -L/usr/local/lib -lc -lm -L${X11LIB} -lXft -lfontconfig -lX11 -lpng

# flags
CPPFLAGS = -DVERSION=\"${VERSION}\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600

Sent just expects paragraphs of text.

FreeBSD on a pi with a small screen

For the past month or two the uboot on the FreeBSD RPI-B images has been unable to boot on most sd cards. This weekend a new version of uboot was released and new images were created. The new images boot no problem and I am finally able to try this cheap 5 inch screen I got on ebay.

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