Long Day Behind

It’s been one of those long days. It started off a little too early with baby waking up at 6am. But Things went well after that. There were a few meetings at work, I ran one of them. I was pretty nervous; the meeting went pretty well. For lunch I took back the Rototiller I was borrowing from my parents, and helped get our two little ones to sleep. It’s been a fun day, but long. Our little toddler is sick with a bug, and hasn’t been feeling well all weekend. I hope she gets over it soon.

Snow Ball Fight

At My wife’s mom’s house she has a plant that’s know as the Snow Ball plant. The flowers look a lot like Snow balls, We had a lot of fun throwing the Snow Balls at eachther. Our little girl got pretty good at throwing them. I think we’ve decided to have one of those plants in our yards now.

Box Gardens

I’ve finished putting together our garden boxes! They are 4 feet x 4 feet, made from left over 6 inch x 6 inch x 4 feet pressure treated beams. Not perfectly level, but it’ll get the job done.

I’m very excited to see these boxes work. One of our neighbors highly recommended the box garden approach as outlined in the book, Square Foot Garden, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_foot_gardening ). We’ve been working really hard to deweed, and tarp the ground underneath to get these boxes ready and in place. This garden is coming together nicely. It’s our first real garden, since this is our first house. I’m really excited to start growing melons and tomatoes and grapes, oh my.

Gardening

So today we worked a lot in our garden. I was putting together our garden boxes, and my wife was gathering in some plants in our garden that are ready to eat. We have two types of lettuces, some spinach, and radishes!  The radishes are very sweet, but super spicy. I almost couldn’t eat them they were so spicy

We had to wash and dry the lettuce leafs. That took a long time. Very manual process. I think our next purchase is going to be a lettuce tosser to make that job a little easier by spinning off the water. That will hopefully speed up the process.

Though our garden has a lot of weeds and rocks in it, it’s coming a long nicely. Once I finish our second garden box, I’m going to post pictures of them, and talk about why Square foot gardening is easier to maintain and do over row gardening. I’m looking forward to getting our 4 foot by 4 foot boxes finished.

X Forwarding in webtop

Today at work we had a lot of meetings as we’ve move from getting the release out the door to developing the new features. That usually means lots of design meetings. During one of them, my coworker showed me that he was able to X forward Firefox 12 from his dev desktop to his webtop (He has an Atrix with a bionic lapdock that has been modified to work with his Atrix). So I thought I’d play around with mine in this regard. I got Google Chrome 18 working, and I was suprised that it was just as snappy if not more so then the Firefox 8 browser included in our webtop 1.2. I also got eclipse working, and it was very usable.

It’s very simple to get X Forwarding to work with any linux system. ssh -XC ipAddress -p Port

once you’re logged in, you can go and fire up a few programs and background them by adding an & at the end.

$ firefox &
$ eclipse &

cake walk.

Chuck E Cheese

Tonight we went to Chuck E Cheese ( http://www.chuckecheese.com/ ). Our baby girl had so much fun! She ran to all the kid motion toys, she handed us the ball in Skee-ball. Though she was too short to climb up the normal way on the play set, she figured out how to climb up the slide, and then spent 20 minutes up on the play set hanging out. She was so tired she fell asleep on the way home. We had a lot of fun as a family. I look forward to many more trips to Chuck E Cheese.

Innovation

Game of Innovation

Innovation

So tonight we’re playing Innovation. It’s a pretty complex game for being a card game but it’s fun! An average game lasts about 45 minutes if you know what you’re doing. The real fun comes from the different card effects called Dogma. Some cards are very powerful and highly sought after. We bought the game recently for my brother’s graduation. and have played it twice now. It was a very good purchase!

Linux on Android

So my coworker sent me his daily link for me this morning, and it was on Arch Linux running on Android, more specifically the Asus Transformer Prime (Which I also have). It was neat seeing how he set up his environment to get a terminal with a chroot into Arch Linux.

I’ve been studying how Motorola got webtop working on the Atrix. This website is most helpful when trying to figure out what’s going on: http://sites.google.com/site/androidnothize/nebtop/webtop I’ve I’ve been Hacking on the Atrix’s webtop getting it just the way I like it. I’m writing this post now from my Atrix. Here’s a little bit about my current setup:

I’ve Rooted my Atrix. Then I followed a few steps to move webtop to the SD card: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1294523

Webtop2sd copies the webtop partition (osh) from the device to the sd card, and then remounts things so that webtop starts from the sd card not the internal flash. This allows you to give webtop much more space, (I’ve given mine 7GB out of my 16GB card). it also allows to you safely install things and tweak things to your hearts content without really damaging your original webtop.

After you get webtop2sd install and working, and you’ve setup your new webtop environment, you’ve got to setup lxterminal and fix apt-get dependencies. webtop2sd places a few new icons on the awn tool bar in webtop, and the webtop connector one allows you to install lxterminal and it begins the fixing of apt-get. (follow the directions in the xda thread above)

after you get your terminal all setup if you want to fully run apt-get without issues you need to run webtopscripts. http://code.google.com/p/webtopscripts/ is where they are located.  The latest version as of this writing is version 1.7. This version includes a new gui to walk you through the install. it takes a while, maybe 20 minutes? and prompts you several times. After you get through it, you are ready to start installing some fun software!

I’ve installed a few apps to make life more fun on my webtop.
sudo apt-get install abiword konversation ssh vim

I believe lxpanel is already installed, if not install lxde. So I swapped out AWN for lxpanel to give me more of a kde/windows star bar/menu feel, and it chews up about half the space of AWN does, so that’s really nice.

To get lxpanel to start at boot edit the start-oshwt-2.sh file in /usr/local/bin folder.

edit this file:
sudo vim /usr/local/bin/start-oshwt-2.sh

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          start_lxde2.sh
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:
# Default-Stop:
# Short-Description: started by adas user at login
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

log_action_msg "Will now start OSHWT 2 scripts"

# start OSHWT 2 scripts
sfalv -i "lxpanel"
#sfalv -i "awn-autostart"
sfalv -i "webtop-panel"
#sfalv -i "webtop-wallpaper"
sfalv -i "evbridge"
sfalv -i "window_switcher"
sr-test avahi_start &

as you can see I added lxpanel and removed awn-autostart and webtop-wallpaper. I’ve discovered that lxsession is already running and doesn’t need to be started.

after that reboot of the phone you’ll find a nice new panel to great you and lots of free ram.

htop rocks

 

htop screenshot

This is a screenshot of htop

My coworker introduced me to htop today ( http://teom.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/color-your-shell/ ). htop is like top, a command line tool to explore processes, but it’s much more cool. It’s got Mouse integration, Kill process menu, Bar graphs for the processors, memory and swap. It’s overall a slick console based app that works great over ssh too!

You can see in my screen shots (htop above, and top below) the differences between the two. I’m really liking htop now.

top screenshot

This is a screenshot of top

Getting the most out of busybox

On XDA I’ve posted a little bit about busybox and what subprograms are inside. Here’s the link: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1509517

I’ve found busybox’s vi, find and grep most useful when I’m poking around in a terminal on my Motorola Atrix. I hope this helps someone, I believe busybox can be installed stand alone from the market, and is included in some other applications. Once you have busybox installed, sym linking it’s apps to the /system/bin (or something else on the path) makes Android a little bit more like linux.