The FLAP bag (Flexible Light And Power) is an interesting idea to bring a piece of usable tech to the developing world. I don’t know how one gets their hands on a kit but right now a friend of mine has taken 10 of them to Africa to have them tried out. As many say – if it works in Africa, it should work anywhere. That second link has videos of Erik unpacking the kits and checking them out before he left Florida for Africa.
Erik grew up in Kenya and last we talked he told me he has plans to return with some amazing ideas and dreams that he is going to try and implement in Nairobi. Cool stuff. You can follow Erik on twitter @whiteafrican or his blog. If you are interested in tech, Africa or development stuff (or all 3 like me) he’s a great resource for ideas and news.
Browsing Posts in Hardware
At work I use a Microsoft keyboard that has a bunch of keys up at the top for special functions. There is one for firing up a web browser, back and forward buttons, mail, search and some media player buttons for play/pause, and volume stuff. I’ve never really used them – but I was looking at them today and thought, “I should use those.” Now when I say that – I mean I should use them for my main work machine which is running the Fedora distribution of Linux. Getting them to work wasn’t hard – and didn’t take too much searching.
The key was finding the right keyboard layout for KDE. Getting to the layout was interesting. I opened up the KDE Control Center and there is a Peripherals section – but the keyboard item there just has a couple options that deal with repeat rate and numlock settings for startup. The stuff I wanted is under the Regional & Accessibility section in Control Center.
The section that was a little trick to get right is the Keyboard Layout. I clicked on that section and then on the layout tab checked the “Enable keyboard layouts” box. Once I did that then the Keyboard model dropdown box became available. I have a Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000, according to the sticker on the bottom. There was no corresponding description. I tried a few Microsoft models but things didn’t seem to be lining up just right. Certain buttons would work but others wouldn’t. I got tired of shooting in the dark pretty quickly. So rather than keep on, I did a quick google on keyboard layouts for Linux. That took me to this very nice article on using multimedia keyboards with linux.
Now that article just bypasses the desktop stuff and deals with X. I still wanted to use KDE if I could and what was helpful here was seeing that xbindkeys had a mode where it would show just what a keypress was sending. Installing xbindkeys took about 10 seconds (yum install xbindkeys) and then I fired it up. I switched between control center and that program – switching through the various keyboard models and looking at the output. It just took a minute or two to realize that the keyboard model I wanted was “Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro OEM”.
Once that was done, all my buttons on my keyboard were being sent. All that was left then was matching them up to what I wanted them to do. In some cases KDE already did this for me. The volume keys, the forward/back keys were set up automagically. Launching applications I needed to do, because it is up to me what apps will launch.
In the same part of the control center that handles the keyboard layout there is another section – Keyboard Shortcuts. That makes it easy to choose key strokes to fire off apps among other things. There is also a section, Input Actions, that can be used to set up mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts. The gestures and shortcuts can be tied to launching apps or DCOP calls. Very nice stuff.
On a side note – and an appreciated bonus – once my model was right – synergy passed all keys correctly to my windows machine that I use at work. There was no setup needed for that. They just shoot right on over.
I’m not sure if I’ll use them much. I just like knowing I can if I want to.
Edit: I just redid this on a new Fedora 10 install – to get to the place to set the keyboard in KDE 4 it is now “System Settings” instead of Control Center. Everything else should be pretty much the same.
IHT is running a David Pogue review of the Chumby. The Chumby is a small computer embedded in a soft case. The Chumby hardware and OS are open and the review mentions that the device already has a large developer following, cranking out new widgets for owners. Pogue is obviously quite taken with the Chumby and gives a good introduction to a device that may be the inspiration for a new generation of hackers.
Carl Hayden High School’s Falcon Robotics team won the top prize in the international robotics championship over the weekend in Atlanta. The 42-member high school team includes students from some of the lowest income neighborhoods in Phoenix. The teens have competed this school year with a robot they built and named “Virginia’s Dream.” It was named for a girl that team members knew before she was deported after it was discovered her family was in Arizona illegally.
Got my $40 ‘coupon’ for a digital converter box today. So I went to Best Buy and picked one up. It was $20 out of my pocket. It works pretty well, and has a lot of neat features. It’s almost like having cable in a lot of ways. When the signal is good, the picture is great. Unfortunately I can’t pick up NBC at all. I do get something like 10 pbs channels though – if you include the subchannels.
Ingrid and I have a Dell Latitude D600 that we have owned for almost 3 years. The other day I went to use it and noticed that the hinge cover on the left side looked odd. Looking more closely I saw a piece of metal sticking out the back.
I messed with it a bit and found that the hinge had an outer sleeve that screwed down onto the case. Inside of that was another sleeve that had frozen to the frame that was attached to the lid of the laptop. The inner portion that had frozen had a flat extension that was never intended to turn. But since that piece was now locked in place with the center of the hinge, opening the laptop lid caused it to turn and push apart the outer sleeve.
Fortunately I found a place where I could order a replacement. I ordered some rubber feet for the bottom while I was at it. The whole thing was under 20 bucks but I payed extra for two day shipping. I wanted to get this fixed before something worse happened. The lid swung open and shut pretty freely and I could see a real chance of the lcd getting damaged.
Putting the new hinge in place meant pulling off the bezel on the lid and the bezel over the power button, etc. That always makes me nervous. I feel like I’m going to break something pulling it apart or snapping it back into place. But the toughest thing about this repair was just making sure to keep track of all the little screws. In a few minutes everything was good as new.
For a month or so I’ve had to hit the little button thing that sticks up – that turns off the screen when the lid is closed. If the lid was closed for a while, and I opened it up, the backlight wouldn’t come back on until I hit that with my finger. I’m hoping it was because of the hinge problem, and that now things will work as they should. We will see.
The little rubber feet I put on with super glue rather than just the adhesive they came with. I really would rather have these stay on for a while.
All in all I’m pleased that I was able to do a $30 repair instead of looking to buy a new laptop.
Information Week is running a story that credits the recent and rapid increase of Linux PC offerings to the rejection of Vista by users. It seems that Vistas troubles have opened the door for inexpensive solutions built around Linux. It seems to me that this would also be an indication that rather than Apple killing Linux, this shows how they can complement one another as Apple is not competing in this low-end space.
