Around the December holidays I received three sets of the jyetech lcd scope kit. This cheap kit (~£10) builds a small low frequency (1Msps) oscilloscope.

In all it took me about 2 hours to solder everything together, that includes me misplacing a resistor and a capacitor. I wish I had sorted the resistors with a multimeter that scales automatically before starting.

I am planning to build these kits into some audio projects later in the year, getting three of them was great luck. The kit was really straightforward to build and didn't take too long, there are serial logging features on the board as well. This kit could be built into a portable work bench without much thought.

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

spritesmod has returned, this time making the matrix for tamogotchis

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.

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.