Paris loves the theatre, they have world renowned plays enjoyed by douchy
teenage girls the world around. They love no theatre more than Security
Theatre. To transit through Paris CDG and make it to the departure lounge you
need to show your passport twice and your boarding pass at least six times.
In fact one agent of the airport was enjoying her role more than anyone I have
seen at work. She scanned my boarding pass and scrutinized my passport before
sending me through the metal discoverer.
At the other side I waited and waited expecting my bag. Instead I hear a
shriek! 'You did not show me your pass'. I am dragged back through the magnetic
arch to show my passport once again. This this with the agent shouting as if I
had stripped half naked.
Oh fun.
BHX is a strange airport, security are trying to stay in business and keep
manning up. They manage this by directing transfer passengers back through
security to redo the dance, I did get set on the priority track though.
Of course, with a flights worth of passengers transferring this wasn't quick.
Past security and a worm whole takes you to a mall in the center of the city. A
shopping horror exists until you overcome the forces of capitalism and resign
your self to sit in the uncomfortable long.
The Mega Charity Mozilla keeps offices for their staff in many major
cities. I think most of their staff work from home, but some must visit offices
and the require space to hold meetings. Hopefully Mozilla Space Paris is
the most decant of them all.
The space has all the trappings you would expect from a hip and trendy startup,
mozilla sort of is. They have a big airy space, a fancy cateries kitchen and
the most insane meeting room I have ever seen. You can see from the pictures
why the French Revolution started.
I should probably apoligize to anyone that has donated to mozilla in the past.
I took full use of their stocked kitchen and to avoid the ridiculous parisian
beer prices drank more than my share of mozilla beer. Yum yum.
The best way to get around Paris is to use the metro, if you are coming into
CGD you can take the train to Gard du Nord then hop onto the metro from there.
Metro stations seem to be dense enough that there will be one near to your
destination, I didn't see more than a 10 minute walk.
Using the metro fulfilled every Parisian stereotype I had, lovers kissing,
gypsies begging, men busking with accordions. The metro was a brilliant way to
get around very entertaining.
Just as entertaining for me(though some might not enjoy it) was my pre metro
knowledge walk across Paris to reach my hotel. On the map before traveling the
walk didn't look every long. I didn't have any frame of reference for Paris,
but a similar distance around the Thames in London would be a reasonable walk.
Well reasonable to people that like to walk through cities.
With the 30°C heat at 1800 it was probably a little long for a 6Km walk
through the city. But the walk was very fortuitous if I had been down in the
metro I wouldn't have seen the stunning sights of Paris, large buildings,
street gangs, passed out tramps that have pissed them selves and the myriad of
cheap suit shops. Shiny silver suits are a steal at 50€.
After a couple of bouts of despair I reached my hotel in once piece,
only loosing about 5 kilos in water.
Like
last year
, here are from BSDCan that have stood out to me. I don't
think all of the videos have been posted yet so there are probably some gems
left to watch. All of the videos are
here
I have a
navspark
gps microcontroller board I backed on indiegogo last
year. The board has been sat in my desk for a year so I decided to just use it
as a dumb gps and not bother with the microcontroller part of the board.
The default firmware sends nmea strings over a usb serial controller at 115200
baud, this was easy to test with cu. I wanted to use gpsd with the gps, I am
planning to integrate it into a wardriving box in the next few weeks.
cu -l /dev/ttyU0 -s 115200
gpsd is unable to accept baud rate
changes, instead there is workaround in
the faq. The faq is probably wildly out of date, I couldn't get stty to change
the baud rate on FreeBSD. I found that FreeBSD offers .init files for each of
the serial devices and they should be used for configuring the serial device.
Using the following command worked for me and allowed gpsd to speak to the
navspark.
# stty -f /dev/ttyU0.init speed 115200
# gpsd
I could then connect to the gpsd and make sure it is working with cgps.
$ cgps -s -u m
I am not really happy with the navspark, the indiegogo made the board look
really cool, but so far there no community has formed around the board. This
has led to a lack of approachable documentation and an ide only available with
Linux and Windows bulds.
I would love to find a cheap gps that emits data over serial. The closest thing
is the
Adafruit Ultimate gps
, but it is far too expensive for what it is.
I have a pair of
U-Blox PCI GPS cards
, so far I haven't been able to get
them working with anything.
