More Than Technical  

I recently bought a second raspberry pi, for the purpose of making it a "dumb" media center running XBMC (Raspbmc to be exact). I already have a media center PC running XBMC on Windows 7, and I wanted to connect my raspberry pi to the downloaded media, stored remotely on the Win7.

First, of course, I tried SMB (windows share). It worked… ok. But after installing a new HP Wireless printer, it seemed to disconnect a lot. I don't fully understand why, but it appears that the printer publishes itself as SMB master thus disconnecting my other SMB connections (or maybe only Linux ones)

Anyways, I have spent almost two days, understanding how to connect the Raspberry pi to Windows 7 using NFS. It was not easy, because it seems Microsoft has dropped support for it on home OS (even Win7 ultimate) since Windows XP.

I ended up doing it with Cygwin (which gives powerful Linux capabilities to windows machines).

I want to outline what I have done in order for this to work. This process could be very easy and it could be frustrating. I really hope it will help you do it yourself.

So it might do the trick as step-by-step, and you might come some obstacles on the way

The original guide I used can be found in this link, however it did not work at once and I had to tweak a bit. Also, it is referring to Windows XP.

As this is not step-by-step in full, with screenshots, it might help you on your journey. This can also help you with any windows share to be exported to linux

Here it is: Continue Reading »

Tags: cygwin, linux, nfs, nfs server, raspberry pi, windows 7

This is not proper technical thingy, but I took some time to try out some audio skills by doing somewhat obvious mashup
Came out pretty good, in my opinion

Sara Baraeilles's "Brave" and Katy Perry's "Roar" sound very similar. So I took two acapellas and instrumental and mixed them together.

Enjoy (or.. not)

Tags: brave, fl studio, katy perry, mashup, music, roar, sara bareilles

Don't you just love scouring the web for a piece of simple code, come up short and then just write it yourself? Well that was the case with NURBS for me. These simple curvy lines, why doesn't anyone just dish out a straightforward implementation of them? Well, now you have it. I wrote a simple renderer that reads a DXF file with NURBS (from Rhino3D) using DXFLIB, although the DXF file format is super easy to parse, and renders them to an image with OpenCV.
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So I have this incredibly old and stupidly cheap AIPTEK tablet (like a Wacom, only Chinese and cheap) that is so outdated it practically has almost no existence online. Why did I bring this item across the atlantic? I have no answer, but it's here anyways and I can't seem to bring myself to trash it. Of course no drivers are available for it so I wrote a tiny simple driver using the great libHID library from Brandon Fosdick. It was painless, and my old tablet was saved.
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Tags: aiptek, driver, hid, libhid, usb

There's a fantastic way to collaborate when writing an academic paper in LaTeX - using Google Docs. LaTeX is all text anyway, so collaborating over GDocs is straightforward, but alas there is no colorization to make it like a good LaTeX editor... Fortunately there's AppScript to help us!
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Tags: document, google, latex.script

I bet creating searchable PDFs has been done many times over, even so I'd like to share the way I did it recently with strictly open source tools. The pipeline is simple: GS to separate the PDF to pages, tesseract OCR to extract text, hocr2pdf to create a merged PDF and GS again to bundle everything back to unified PDF. If you're creating a PDF from scanned books, this project may also be of help: unpaper
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Phew. Finally this is working!

I've been confined to OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 on the Mac since the Qt OpenGL context will not pick up the core OpenGL profile (a big problem on it's own) and get an OpenGL 3.x and GLSL 1.5... So it's back to old school GL'ing, but anyway some things are working, albeit they have their quirks.
So for all of you battling the OpenGL 2.1 war, here's how I made VAOs work with a very simple shader.
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For those of you still interested, I've made the move to using Qt and QGLViewer in the SfM-Toy-Lib project. Getting rid of PCL dependency (I think it's a bloated library), and burying FLTK long in the past, I feel much better about it now.

Get it on github: https://github.com/royshil/SfM-Toy-Library

Tags: gui, qt, sfm, structure from motion

So QSerialPort only became part of Qt core on Qt5.1, but what should all those Qt4 projects do for an easy serial port access?
There is the excellent QExtSerialPort project, but it only has a QMake build system, and I like CMake!
Not to worry, a CMake build is easy to set up...
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Tags: cmake, qextserialport, qt, serial