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.

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.

This weekend was the first 57N Stupid Shit No One Needs Hackathon . I tried this weekend to perform serial comms over a string and cup using the msp430 based TI Launchpad.

I had the tone generation working really quickly and then spent 15 hours trying to demod and tones and find a byte stream using a microphone. I had no chance, it didn't work at all.

I was able to transmit the tone a long the string over 3 meters of room. So the core idea does work. I think I will try this project again after reading some more dsp.

Hibby and I were happy to announce the first 57N Stupid Shit No One Needs Hackathon this week. It isn't often that you come across a strange link in your search history and it turns into an awesome event, we seem to have beaten the odds.

The first Stupid hackathon I read about produced some of the coolest ideas for pointless things I have ever seen. The best one to make the event clear has to be endless.horse .

So what are you going to do Tom?

Of the many terrible ideas I have each day, only a few are worth spending 48 hours polishing to death. This coming weekend I have decided to take two technologies I have been gradually learning, mirco controllers and DSP, and build the most terrifyingly bad things I can think of.

So tomorrow prepare yourself to see the start of a paper cup and string telegraph being forged in 57North Hacklab.