Richi's blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • cmake with MSVC

    I have used cmake for a couple of years with my hobby projects, and I love it. It is a cross platform meta build system. Like with Qt, people tend to first think that “cross platform” is the main feature. But like with Qt it’s actually one great feature amongst many others. It brings so […]

  • software defined radio on the cheap with a DVB stick

    I think I first learned about software defined radio a few years ago on the chaosradio podcast. I was totally excited about the idea, and immediately installed gnuradio not only on my computers, but at times also on the smartphone. The USRP has been on my wishlist ever since. That’s the hardware device most commonly […]

  • The cheapest netbook

    When I read this blog post telling that there are netbooks available from china for $65, where it is possible to install a proper linux distro, I knew I must have one. Yes, the specs are lowest end, but even more so is the price. It has a WonderMedia 8650 system on a chip. That’s […]

  • machine learning class

    Another one of these incredibly interesting online classes came to an end. Machine learning was one of the first two classes that started last fall. As I thought to make AI and ML in parallel would be too much, I decided for AI with the intention to make ML later. The second round of ML […]

  • Harley Davidson gathering in Brunnen

    This weekend was Harley Davidson gathering here in Brunnen. I’m not so much into motorcycles, but I saw some incredibly cool looking bikes. There were a lot of bikes from all over Switzerland, as well as lots from the surrounding countries, and I even saw a bike with a Russian number plate. Saturday they had […]

  • Raspberry Pi – at last

    The raspberry pi, for those living under a rock, is the $25 linux pc that was announced big almost a year ago. It has a 700Mhz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM and an OpenGL ES capable GPU. To enable hardware hacking it comes with lots of GPIO pins. All in all about the performance of a […]

  • Correcting the date in the EXIF meta data of a jpeg image

    Lots of cameras have a wrong date configured. Mine is even worse: It has a dead internal battery, so it looses the date and time every time I turn it off. When you take a picture, the wrong date is saved to the meta data tags of the resulting photographs. Afterwards, you import them with […]

  • installing ros on a bifferboard

    I wanted the robot arm to be a bit autonomous from the computer, and I thought the bifferboard should be powerful enough to drive it. So I wanted to install ROS onto it. My bifferboard runs debian squeeze, and that means it’s not just a matter of installing the packages as with ubuntu. There is […]

  • recovering files from a repurposed harddrive

    Recently, I was searching for a bunch of photographs on all of my harddisks, and couldn’t find them. I know they had been there on the old notebook and on the old computer, and I thought I had copied them over. I could also not find them on any of my backup harddisks. Neither could […]

  • Roomba vacuum cleaner hacking

    Late last year I got a Roomba vacuum cleaner from a friend. My wife and I wanted to evaluate such a device for a while. The battery was completely dead, and before spending lots of money on a  new battery, for a device that I didn’t know if it still worked, I tried to hook […]