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Posts Tagged ‘linux’

  1. Hardware development begins here

    March 5, 2014 by Sunit Nandi

    The first mid-semester exams are over. Things seemed to have settled down. At college, everything is just as any other day, with boring lectures and uneventful moments.

    What really kept me motivated was constant experiments and new ideas. That’s pretty much what keeps me active even at the worst times.

    I learnt a little bit of the Cisco router’s command line and am manage the network interfaces with it, by just random fiddling around when I got bored.

    Then Manjaro Linux 0.8.9 was released with a huge number of bug-fixes and improved hardware support. To add to the great news was that Manjaro now officially supports KDE and 0.8.9 release has an official KDE variant. So, just because I was bored, I installed KDE desktop and the K Display Manager and got rid of XFCE, LXDM and the optional GNOME components. And guess what? KDE actually runs better than what I had expected. The system-wide proxy settings are automatically pulled from the environment variables (set with /etc/profile.d/proxy.sh script). Also, it would be worth mentioning that the BlueZ 5 bluetooth stack works flawlessly with BlueDevil in KDE. Back then, in XFCE, BlueMan had stopped detecting my laptop’s bluetooth adapter after I upgraded to BlueZ 5 from BlueZ 4. Rest of the features work fine, and I’m very satisfied.

    I got myself an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 microcontroller board so that I can build circuits and DIY (do it yourself) electronics. At present, I’m learning the Arduino code.

    image

    Arduino Mega 2560 R3

    I also ordered Beagleboard.org‘s Beaglebone Black as I am very curious about single-board PCs.

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    Beaglebone Black A6A

    Right now I’m looking for a HDMI-to-DVI/VGA adapter so that I can hook up my old display to it and a externally powered USB hub to attach peripherals to the board. Hoping to get cracking and experimenting in a week or so.

    My workstation, a customised HP Z420, is going to arrive soon. So I have one more reason to be excited.

    Coming to blogging and WordPress, I have noticed an interesting finding. If you are a user of the WordPress HTTPS plugin, uninstall it as soon as possible. This plugin has a poorly written page filter than significantly degrades page loading performance and causes regular timeouts in the admin panel. For a month I was unable to figure out why the admin panel was working poorly on technofaq.org, until I disabled the plugin. Also, its interesting to note that trying to secure the admin panel with HTTPS and serving the site over plain HTTP can be a real pain. I’m not saying it has problems serving pages. What I am trying to say is that, if you are securely connected to the admin panel and are making a new post, any new image or media attached to the post will load from the secure site even when the site is served insecurely. This is an undesired behaviour. In my opinion, WordPress should integrate HTTPS options properly into the GUI so that we do not have to depend on tweaks and third-party plugins to secure the admin panel while serving the site as it is. For now, I stopped using HTTPS, until I find a proper fix.

    Right now, I’m writing my General Proficiency report for college.

    Also, Pyrokinesis, Assam Engineering College’s annual fest is on, and I might be attending it when I’m free.

    So its finally time for me to lift my hands off the keyboard. I’ll be writing again soon. Take care and have fun!

    Till then, enjoy this sandwich. 😉

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    Sandwich


  2. First year at college over

    July 20, 2013 by Sunit Nandi

    AEC

    Time flies swifter then you can imagine. The Techno FAQ website and the forums are finally ready as expected.

    Then came the second semester exams at college, with two months of gruelling theory and practical exams. And as luck would have it, IIT-JEE advanced exams also came in between.

    The college exams went fair. But I fared poorly in JEE advanced. So no IIT for me this year too. Funnily enough, I got NIT Silchar again this year in JEE mains (formerly AIEEE). My parents are in two minds, whether to send me to study there or whether to continue studying in AEC. I personally don’t feel like going, as I am not really interested about wasting another year for nothing.

    Only time will tell what my parents finally decide.

    Coming back to the topic, after exams, there was a one-and-a-half month long vacation. We all went to our hometown in West Bengal to spend time with family and get refreshed. My upcoming post will be about our trip in full detail.

    Today, I renovated my blog with a new theme called Liquorice. Its beautiful. I rearranged the pages and posts of the blog to make it look like a personal diary. From now on, I will be writing on serious topics and life stories and try my best to be a better writer.

    On the techie side: I changed my Linux distro on my tablet PC to Manjaro. I wrote about it too at Techno FAQ blog. The computer is running faster than ever, and management is easier from what I have noticed so far. Soon I’ll be getting my new camcorder and a workstation so that I am able to edit videos properly. The workstation will also be no doubt handy for experiments. I’ve also sent my old laptop (bought in 2001) for dust cleaning, and have plans of reviving it with Crunchbang Linux.

    Life has been like this so far. I’ll be writing my next post very soon.


  3. Exams coming! Tensions increasing!

    February 15, 2009 by Sunit Nandi

    Hello everyone,

    My exams are nearing date, will be starting on 5th of March 2009. I am feeling intensely tensed and wondering how will I perform.

    Other than that, I have enjoyed Acheringa ’09 as Sonu Niigam gave a rocking live concert. I will post the videos after my exams.

    Also, I have faced a lot of problems. A virus damaged my Windows OS on my computer and am currently fixing it. Right now, I am posting from my dad’s computer.

    Also, the Nandi Family main website is undergoing upgrades and I hope to get it done as soon as my exams end.

    I have also installed PuppyLinux on my computer which I shall be using until Windows is fixed. After that I will be installing it in a separate partition. This Linux distribution is only 95 MB in size, yet comes with a ton of cool features.

    Now I have to leave for studies. Will write later. Cya!