This past weekend I took PiBox out in the trailer for a field trial.  The box was mounted under a cabinet with power and HDMI wrapped around to a 7″ HDMI-input monitor.  Power on worked fine and the system came right up.  But not everything worked as expected.  Here is […]

PiBox field trial results

It’s taken more than 2 years but I’ve finally finished the first versions of the PiBox Media Server and Media Player.  The cases are stained wood boxes from a hobby store but they provide me with information on how to deal with layout in a 3D printed case.  It also […]

PiBox prototype cases

I’ve been using Apache 2.2 for quite some time.  Lately I’ve noticed CentOS and other distros using Apache 2.4.  The new Apache breaks a bunch of stuff, as does newer php. One thing that needed changing is a switch in directory listing tools.  I have an archive on my web […]

Apache 2.4 changes

When I was just getting started with embedded development I found many tutorials on how to perform cross compiles required setting up some shell functions and variables before working on builds.  This is a necessity for embedded work because the embedded build for the target platform won’t use the same […]

cdtools, because who has just one project?

Networking in QEMU I’ve recently had a need to test UEFI booting for a disk image.  I stumbled upon OVMF, a bios that will handle UEFI booting.  It works pretty well but doesn’t remember its config sometimes.  But that’s not why I’m writing this. In my disk image I need […]

Networking with QEMU and KVM speedup

I can no longer push to gitorious so I tried to run the import of all my repos (and there are alot) into GitHub. This failed miserably. Only two of 34 repos were imported. Some of the repos actually got created on GitLab but there is nothing in them. So […]

Migrating from gitorious – it sucks.

I was trying to set up a directory index via a named vhost under Apache today.  Typically all you need to do for this scenario is something like this in an apache conf file. <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName files.gfxmuse.org DocumentRoot /home/httpd/files <directory "="" home="" <span="" class="hiddenSpellError" pre="" data-mce-bogus="1">httpd/files"> Options +Indexes </Directory> […]

apache 2.4/Fedora quirk in welcome.conf

I was job hunting from late November to late January.  Since few of the people needed to do interviews tend to be available during the 12th month of the year, I was able to devote a lot of time working on PiBox development.  However, once the new year rolled in […]

PiBox update: user and developer guides

I’ve been working on building custom Debian and Ubuntu distributions for use under VirtualBox.   One advantage that both have over Fedora is debootstrap.  This tool allows you to create a default rootfs from pre-compiled packages inside a directory.  You can then chroot into that directory to install the kernel image, […]

Debian/Ubuntu debootstrap images for VirtualBox

I’ve been working on PiBox now for a couple of years.  The immediate goal is a consumer-oriented device for video playback while not connected to the Internet.  In other words, play movies while camping.  I have longer term goals for it, but that’s where the project is aimed currently. At […]

Raspberry Pi: Kodi vs PiBox use case comparison

Last November I left CEI where I had worked for 8 1/2 years.  I had plenty saved up to cover me to the next gig.  So out went the resumes into the void and we waited for the holidays to pass to get an idea of how things have changed […]

Life update: new gig @ HGST

Needed some place to note this short one-liner for generating a changelog between version releases with git. git log v0.5...v0.6 --pretty=format:'%s' The output looks something like this. RM #225: Fix xcc to build when gmp is already installed. This is a back-rev'd patch from Crosstool-NG that required no changes so […]

git changelog generation: one liner