Well I’ve installed the official HTC Magic update with the new Sense UI a week ago and I have to say I’m pleasant amazed at HTC’s work with the Sense UI and how responsive the update is.  Just purely love it.

Other than the annoying thing that I couldn’t download it using Firefox or Linux, and that you need to update using Windows and HTC Sync… its awesome.  Even though it’s a Taiwan ChungHwa ROM, there is an English option luckily

In addition to the Sense UI and its wonderful feature set, another interesting but hidden away feature is “Mobile Internet Sharing”, aka tethering!  Azilink is now redundant with this new firmware, and honestly I was getting annoyed with Azilink’s performance and constant dropping out.  On Ubuntu at least, it was ‘plug-and-play’ without any other tricks.  Awesome.

Now I’m not so jealous about all the HTC Hero’s my friends and relatives have…

Photos (pretty boring) after the break.

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Neat little package

The toys just keep coming in!  Another one of those wallet killing impulsive orders whilst I was sick in bed last week just arrived today, a USB-CAN bus converter module by EasySync that promises a great interface and should work in Linux!  This will give a little bump start to my Mazda CAN Bus / mChumby projects.

Note : EasySync UK’s online form doesn’t allow international shipping but a short E-mail or two managed that.  There is a US subsidiary with US and international shipping, but the international shipping rates on the US site is plain ridiculous [$68USD to ship a $88 device to Australia].

Note 2 : I hear the interface is mimicking the Lawicel CAN-USB interface…only hearsay…

Plugged it in – didn’t work.  Doh!  Took a peek at the manual and website, nothing on Linux other than “Linux drivers provided”… So much for the marketing material, guess I have to try make it work myself.  (Yes I got it working, read on for the quick run-down post aimed at helping others)

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Go on, use your QR Reader on this

Yes, that is “Colour” not “Color” for all your Americans out there!

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This post is record to help myself if I ever decide to do a fresh install again, so it might be a bit messy.  (Posting helps me keep these untitled files off my hard-drive hehe)

Download the Citrix Linux client (v11) from :-
http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/index.asp
URL mileage may vary, go back to the home page if its not right.

Unpack the tarball and install… e.g.

tar -xvzf linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz
sudo ./setupwfc

Might be missing a ‘cd’ step here obviously…
If run using sudo, default installs to /usr/lib/ICAClient

Confirm it doesn’t run because of libmotif

/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr
/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Download a 32bit (i386) Open Motif package from :-
http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/o/openmotif/

Rip out libXm from it…

$ dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-4_i386.deb ./tmp
$ cd ./tmp
~/tmp$ cd usr/lib
~/tmp/usr/lib$ ls
libMrm.so.3      libUil.so.3      libXm.so.3      X11
libMrm.so.3.0.2  libUil.so.3.0.2  libXm.so.3.0.2
~/tmp/usr/lib$ sudo cp libXm.so.3 /usr/lib32/
~/tmp/usr/lib$ cd /usr/lib32
/usr/lib32$ sudo ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.4

Then this stupid error…
You have not chosen to trust “Equifax Secure Global eBusiness CA-1″, the issuer of the servers security certificate (SSL error 61).

Download the root 1 (Base64) Cert from :-
http://www.geotrust.com/resources/root-certificates/index.html
Change the extension to .crt
Copy it to Citrix Installation Path/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

$ mv Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.cer Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt
$ sudo cp Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Set firefox to open the ICA with /usr/lib/ICAClient/wfica

Voila…

Need to tidy this post up in the future

I’ve finally made the jump and using the AMD64 version of Ubuntu as my primary installation.  There are a couple of tricky things to deal with, primarily with closed sourced applications such as Adobe Flash Plugin and Skype which are two applications I need to use.

How to install Adobe Flash Plugin 64 Bit for Ubuntu 9.04

A lot of the tutorials/guides online will tell you to use nspluginwrapper or similar.  Adobe has released an ‘alpha’ version of their 64 bit player which is pretty stable so far…

Download it from :-http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Unpack the archive and copy the only file to the Firefox plugins folder in ‘/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins‘ :-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

How to install Skype 64 bit for Ubuntu 9.04

You would think you could just go to www.skype.com and ask for a download and it’ll be like the Adobe site detecting that you have a 64 bit system right?  Wrong (at time of writing).  Annoyingly that’ll just let you download an i386 package!

You could manually remedy this by downloading the AMD64 .deb package from :-
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64

Everything else?

So far the respositories have been kind to me… but i’ll update if I run into any other troubles

Voila happy 64 bit Ubuntu’ing.

Working a 70 hour week dampened my enthusiasm for the MChumby but I managed to scrape a couple of hours today to try my hand with HaXe + Flash to prototype the Chumby Interface.

Test of revised layout

A few interesting tidbits were learned from the experiments :-

1. HaXe + Geany are great for developing flash widgets for the Chumby
2. Gnash doesn’t render the same as Linux Adobe Flash
3. Chumby renders the same as Adobe Flash
4. Text vertical alignment in flash is crap

A bit of background and a demo video of the widget on the Chumby after the break.

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It’s taken me a while to officially start this project.  When I first bought my Mazda 3 I had envisaged making my own speedometer based off the Mazda CAN Bus but somehow never quite got around to it.

I even ended up buying 2 Chumbies for the purpose of hacking one and developing the same speedo (The chumby is such a great alarm clock I couldn’t live without one…).

There has been quite a bit of interest in the comments for source code/information etc etc.  So now I’m officially starting the mChumby project!  This first post is basically a brainstorming session write-up or a mini requirements specification on myself.  Feel free to comment on any ideas/improvements you think I can make.

(This post seems too wordy without a photo but I’m just too lazy)

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Yesterday I went and bought a laptop for my dad to learn how to use computers and the internet.  A base install of windows is not functional nor safe enough to let loose on the internet without some additional software.  Being an avid fan of things that are free, I went and downloaded the latest versions of free software that I thought would be essential for this new PC.

I hope this post is useful for other people, but its really a lazy way of me bookmarking everything in-case I have to do it again.

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So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep   Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept