Go to conferences. It’s good for you. Ever wondered why to go to conferences ? Is it worth it, especially if you do not feel confident that the conference is on something that would be in an immediate realm of your day-to-day interests ? Just go ! You might end up learning something and meeting new people. And new people mean more variables to mix up your life. A bit scary, I know. [Read More]

It turns out that the last day of the year can be quite productive. I’ve managed to sneak in a PCB layout for the input measurement and protection board for my sunpowered. Got it ordered, can’t wait to test it ! I got carried away with via stitching there a bit - we’ll see how hard it will be to solder the larger components because of that. The whole project is hosted here - it’s open hardware so please do take a look. [Read More]

Let’s Encrypt is a soon to be publicly available service to provide TLS certificates for free and in automated fashion. I’m helping them test their systems by participating in the beta programme. Because of that this site is now sporting, publicly recognizable certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Yay ! The work they are doing I believe is of much importance. Lack of easy path for getting TLS certificate was a major hurdle for the most of the website owners, otherwise keen on getting their traffic encrypted. [Read More]

I run Android tests on CI and after having switched to Lollipop recently the integration tests wouldn’t run. Invoking androidConnectedTest gradle target always resulted in crashing with ShellCommandUnresponsiveException. Internet says that in such a case ou just need to set ADB_INSTALL_TIMEOUT. I tried to no avail. Sourcediving it is then ! A long while after that I got to this file: Device.java [Linking to master, here’s the commit hash:1cb1a4c2976b99ae53d28d7f01d975232c85f990, as I don’t seem to be able to find how to link to that hash directly] What do we see there ? [Read More]

This is the second part in the series on the tools I use. Tools that are surprisingly useful, tools that are not that obvious to find. Today: how to calibrate the CNC axis without actually cutting anything ? Use a test indicator ! How to hold the meter steady though, ? Attach it to the frame of your router using the power of magnets ! Sample item on Amazon here [affiliate link warning] [Read More]

Just a quick note on how to get USB 3.0 in Virtualbox for VMs that were created with USB 1.1 support only. First, download VirtualBox Extension Pack from here. Install it. Then quit Virtualbox completely. Go to your directory that contains your virtual machine and edit .vbox file. Replace the whole <USBController> section with the following: <USB> <Controllers> <Controller name="xHCI" type="XHCI"/> </Controllers> <DeviceFilters/> </USB> That’s it, let me know if it works for you ! [Read More]

Some VPS providers, e.g. Azure provide you with 2 disk drives for your VPSes. One, of very limited size, system disk, and the other one, spacy but with not guarantees that the data survives reboot. Basically it means that you can have a small VPS, with a small amount of RAM but large temp disk space. Why this could be useful ? Imagine tasks with lots of mem requirements but that not need to be extra fast, where swapping is allowed. [Read More]