Staticfree Blog

Lauren and I have been going on some adventures recently. We've hiked two mountains, chased after a randomly-placed location on the map, and taken to the skies, trying hang gliding. It's been a ton of fun and there more planned. Without adieu, more photos!

After disabling bitmap fonts in Debian, the default alternative to Helvetica is Nimbus Sans. As you can see below, its on-screen rendering is ugly. Thankfully, Debian makes it pretty easy to disable Nimbus Sans and make fonts look nicer.

I just got a Zoom 4312 PC Card Bluetooth Adapter for my laptop, as I wasn't lucky enough to get a laptop with it built-in. For the Google record (because I wasn't able to find this information anywhere): this card works in Linux (tested in 2.6.15+), using the BlueZ Bluetooth stack and the hci_uart module. It is unfortunately a Bluetooth v1.1 card, but I've yet to find a PCMCIA Bluetooth adapter that had anything better. Additionally, this card is a clone (or rebranding?) of the Billionton PCBTC1 card, so those will work in Linux as well.

To make it go in a 2.6.15+ kernel, just compile the hci_uart and serial_cs (located in: Device Drivers → Character Devices → Serial Drivers → 8250... → 8250 PCMCIA) modules. Then use the hciattach tool to connect the /dev/ttySx device to the HCI.

At the moment, the driver seems to not be able to restore from suspend. Hopefully that will be an easy fix.

Minor note: I initially had trouble, as the BlueZ hci_uart driver doesn't properly depend on serial_cs which provides for the necessary serial port bits that make it go (a bug will be filed).

If you've ever wondered, "Gee whiz, what is that Steve fella running on his tiny laptop? Shucks, it sure doesn't look like my computer back at home." then you may wish to check out my new section of software that I use. It has some descriptions of my favorite open source applications and why I'm so fond of them.

I am very picky about computers. As I use at least one, in some manner, over 90% of the time I'm awake, I figure I should have a good user interface for it; something that lets me worry about the things that matter, and let the computer sort out the things that don't. That's why I started using Ion. I have reached a form of interface zen with my computer and I'm never going back.

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