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Quick and Dirty Tablet Dock

Hacking, Hacking and Robotics, News, Personal No Responses »

Apr 242011

For those of you who have picked up a tablet, but have yet to pick up a nice case, here is a quick hack for you. I’ve taken a paper feed tray, a PCI slot cover, and a standard dell usb keyboard and screwed them all together. I covered all the screw heads and rough edges with hot glue, and I sit here now typing a comfortable 80+wpm on my tablet. As I’m running a kernel that supports USB host mode on my GTablet, I simply plugged it in via USB and found a way to attach the tablet to the back of a keyboard (screws and hot glue). Fun, and it works great!

Distributed Java, Fortran, and ARM to X86 Cross Compilation

Business, Discursive Labs, Programs No Responses »

Jan 202011

A very cool and strange thing (for me at least) has happened. Having spent a great deal of time digging through my Google analytic reports, I can say with certainty that my personal site traffic is on the rise. What’s most interesting to me is that a good portion of that new readership linked into my site from my corporate blog. Even more interesting, our corporate blog over at www.discursivelabs.com has far eclipsed the readership of my personal blog here at www.hunterdavis.com. As such, I thought I’d share the link to my newest article.

In the fifth article in our ongoing series on low power compilation clusters, things are really starting to get interesting. I run you through a distributed Java, Fortran, and ARM->X86-64 compilation using an updated set of scripts we created in our previous articles, as well as post an update on the real-world Pogoplug compilation cluster (hint: twice as fast).

Writing Your Own Distributed Compilation System

Business, Discursive Labs, News, Programs 1 Response »

Jan 102011

As the title implies in our latest article over at Discursive Labs we walk you through the creation of a fully distributed compilation system (i.e. a fully federated system not based on DistCC, Sun’s DMAKE, or other existing distributed compilation tools). The scripts are available in the article and can be dropped into an existing compilation node or as a base for future development. While I have posted a few articles over at Discursive Labs since I last posted here, I thought this one in particular may be of interest to anyone wishing to make their own cluster for compilation or scientific computing. If you’re interested in cross-compiling, low power ARM clusters, virtual clusters or distributed computing and you’re not reading our continuing series then you should really catch up.

*UPDATE — These articles have been collected into the volume ‘Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster’, read more at it’s information page here.

Active Compile on 6 Virtual Nodes

Jailbreaking a PS3 with Trackball Style (With Video)

Hacking, Hacking and Robotics, News, Personal No Responses »

Oct 132010

After a particularly long (but rewarding) day of prototyping and contract hunting over at Discursive Labs, Mark and I weren’t quite ready to stop creating when the work day ended. Already having his trusty iron handy, and me with my parts (and MY AXE), we decided to unwind and relax by hacking something. Typical Wednesdays right? Anyway, after reading about how the PS3 homebrew scene is blowing up, we decided to see if we could build a PS3 jailbreak device with parts we had around our workbench. After finding an old ‘atari in a joystick’ TV game we had previously stuffed into a PS1 trackball, we had the spark of an idea. Read on for photos, video, a ridiculously scatterbrained photostream, and all around good times.

Finished building my first guitar

Hacking, Personal, Zipit Hacking 4 Responses »

Mar 292010

Mark brought over his copy of Make, and it turns out this last Makezine had a great article on building cigar box guitars. It sounded like a really interesting project, so we went off to the hardware store to purchase some oak timber. Many days/hours/blood stains later, the fruits of our labor emerged, tuned and ready to play. . Lots of hack potential, and an easy fix if I break something. Bonus, tablature looks fine in links browser on the Z2, though you will have to scroll quite a lot. I’ll see about getting gnome guitar working, should be interesting (mono bleh). Yet again another use case for the Z2 I wouldn’t have imagined.