Stew’s Spot

I’ve been using Globat as my hosting provider for a couple of years now.  The problem that forced me to change was that you don’t get ssh or root access to your webserver. This means that you are stuck with what ever languages and features you hosting provider installs.  I wanted to run a git repository and ruby stuff, so I was out of luck.

I’ve moved all my hosting to Rackspace Cloud servers.  This gives me a virtual Linux box that I can do what I like with.  At the moment I’m running on the smallest VM (256MB RAM and 10GB HDD).

So if you notice anything funny, ie missing images or links that don’t point to the right page.  Just drop a comment so I can fix it.

I’ve been looking for some video editing software for Linux, it was not a big need so I never really spent much time looking and testing.

On Sunday I wanted to edit a shot clip and kdenlive was recommended to me by a friend. So I gave it a try.  All I can say is WOW what a pleasure to use.  It’s fast,  easy to use and seems extremely powerful.

So if you need to edit video on Linux (or Mac), I can highly recommend kdenlive

This is a bit old news  but what the hell…

I gave a talk at my old university’s LUG, TLUG, on Embedded development with FOSS.  I was expecting 10 people or so to attend so it was a bit of a surprise when about 60 showed up.

The basic idea was to give software only people a glimpse of the Open Hardware world without getting too technical and focused on implementation details.  So my talk covered the basics from “What is an Embedded System” then moved onto “Hardware Design Tools” and  “Software Tools”.

I also created a couple simple demo projects. Firstly showing a proximity controlled motor using a AVR with Arduino and a  Sharp GP2D12 distance sensor.  The Second demo was a simple LED controlled via a web browser, it was implemented using a foxboard(complete overkill, but effective) and klone.

You can download the slides, example code and a audio recording here: Embedded development with FOSS.