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Dension, the guys that released the Gateway 500 interface that allows one to listen to their iPod (or other source) through the OEM head unit have now brought out an accessory, that when hooked up inline between the iPod and Gateway 500 gives Bluetooth functionality. The BTA1000 supports both A2DP/AVRCP and HSP profiles which are generally used for hands-free calling and streaming audio from media players or navigation devices. I got my hands on one, so on to the install… (more…)

About a year ago I was working on a project where one of its features allowed the user to upload an image, select a colour on the image with a colour picker tool, then select from a group of colours to replace the picked colour with. I had a somewhat stable build running where it simply replaced the hue of the picked colour – Introducing saturation and value changes invoked a number of ‘random’ glitches and odd colour effects. This feature was subsequently dropped from the project due to it costing too much to continue developing.

Skip forward about a year and I find this script knocking around on a back-up disc, so I decide to put some more development time in purely for my own satisfaction of enhancing it. I have made it work to a nearly passable level, it works nice on images with isolated high contrasting colours. I created a function to create a tiled pop-arty graphic from an inputted image too just for fun. For example, input this and it will spit out this. There is plenty of room for improvement: You can’t convert colours to or from white/black and it replaces all instances of a colour, not a flood-fill effect. So, on to the code… (more…)

I was looking at adding some extra functionality to a couple of bits in my guitar set-up, in my case this involved buying some footswitches – One for my Vox AD30VT amplifier, and one for my Boss RC-2 Loop Station. Vox offer the VFS-2 and Boss has the FS-6 for a combined cost of around £60, which is quite a bit for what they actually are. Okay, the Boss has a few fancy features like interchangeable latching / momentary functionality, status LEDs and switchable polarity but I don’t need any of that. I was sure I could build something that does exactly what I needed for a lot less than sixty quid, so I did. (more…)

Microsoft released the fall update for the Xbox 360 on the 4th of December which included support for DivX/Xvid playback. A popular choice for encoding video due to its compression to quality ratio. Could this mean I am now able to free up some space on my A/V rack? Currently I’m using a hardware-modified Xbox (original) with the open source Xbox Media Center (XBMC) installed on it, decoding my Divx/Xvid content from a Samba share on my media server.

After a quick poke around I found a package called uShare that serves media over the uPnP protocol that the Xbox 360 utilises. (more…)

Ever since the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 I have been experiencing random crashes. The type of crash varied from full-on lock-up where the only way out was to hit the reset button to mild crashes that could be escaped by restarting X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). Sometimes the system would just hang for 30 seconds then come back to life.

As you could imagine this was becoming rather irritating, it being my main dev-box and all! I started monitoring my system from another machine on my desk over SSH by running top. It would appear that whenever my machine ‘crashed’ Xorg would be the culprit, consuming 100% of my processors cycles.

It turns out that many people were experiencing this problem over at the Ubuntu forums and there seemed to be a trend developing where a large proportion of us were using 64-bit AMD X2 chips and the Nvidia GeForce 7 series cards, namely the 7300. My fix involved downgrading my video drivers from the proprietary 100.14.19 to the 100.14.09 release, obtainable from the Nvidia website. This fix didn’t work for everyone in the thread at UbuntuForums, but did for some.