March 3, 2013 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Seeing that I’m getting a lot of hits on this blog from people searching about the SliTaz servers being down right now, probably because I have a blog post with the words “SliTaz” and “dead” on the title, which was published over a year ago, I’d like to inform that I know nothing about the server situation other than the fact that the website is unavailable for me too.
(talking about SliTaz, I kinda stopped following the project, even though I find it interesting… note to self: pay more attention to it from now on)
November 17, 2012 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
I figured out I didn’t post anything here for quite a while – actually more than two months! There have been a series of events that have stopped me from updating this blog and, for a good part of these two months, have stopped me from doing anything besides checking my email and doing some school work.
The first cause for my online absence was that, a few days after I posted about this server having been reloaded, school classes have started. I happen to be taking probably the hardest school year I ever took – at least, that’s what older people said before it started, and which proved to be true now that two months of classes have gone by. Free time isn’t that abundant and I prefer to spend it doing actually something more useful than writing about random things on this blog. That almost explains why I haven’t been active on communities like FreeVPS. But there’s more…
Some time in mid-October I was left without a reliable, 24/7 Internet connection. This, after two or three months without an unlimited-traffic Internet connection, during which I had to hold the downloading of system updates for both Linux and Windows on all of my machines, plus the Android tablet; to keep to a minimum the access to online streaming media; and of course to hold any other big download/upload tasks. I had no Internet connection at home, which means checking the emails at school when possible. Checking anything other than email is horribly slow and unpractical on my old phone, and that’s why I repeat email is the fastest and most reliable way of communicating with me.
At the same time, I was being kept busy with school work. Free time was spent developing an Utilities software for my graphic calculator, a Casio fx-CG 20; this was probably the most useful thing I could do without an Internet connection, because at least gcc still hasn’t moved to the cloud.
Around 1st November, the technical problems that were stopping me from having Internet at home were solved (read: free wifi hotspot magically came back online!), and so the second cause for my lack of participation in the online life was solved. But there was still the first cause: school. So slowly, as I was having free time, I began to put me up to date on what happened while I was offline, and to make slow progress on my projects.
Apart from all this, I also have friends and family, and my real-life social life is way more active than it used to be one or two years ago (my brain must have installed some system updates, finally).
To conclude, on the IT side of things I’m now developing a JPEG image viewer for the Casio Prizm, using the picojpeg library (incredibly useful). The thing already works but is damn slow, plus selecting files is still a pain; this Prizm add-in isn’t yet published anywhere, or even announced on any place except this blog post (and don’t consider this an official announcement).
I finally had time to fix some bugs at tny.im and add some features: the optional short URL toolbar is now powered by Meny, which was developed by a guy which also has lots of other awesome work, namely a promising online presentations service called rvl.io.
I’m also trying to keep participating on online communities such as FreeVPS and Cemetech, and to keep my Twitter feed rolling, but the first cause for my online absence is still valid, and will only stop being on the beginning of July next year. This doesn’t exactly mean I won’t be online, but that you shouldn’t expect me to be as active as I once used to be. Again, if you need something, email me (admin at tny dot im, or my username on Gmail).
Until next post!
August 27, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was playing around with my cheap Flytouch Android tablet, using dd to create images of the different partitions of the internal storage (which is, in fact, just a microSD card).
Turns out I discovered that there is a 256MB FAT partition living on /dev/block/mmcblk2p6. By this time, geek users already know what to do: with root privileges, mount the partition in some directory..
So, open a terminal on your rooted Flytouch 3 (P041 and DK1031 models should have this partition). Type:
~# mkdir /mnt/sdcard/256MBfat
~# mount -t vfat /dev/block/mmcblk2p6 /mnt/sdcard/256MBfat
This should result in a new folder in your sdcard directory. This folder is a filesystem node, like the sdcard1, udisk1 and udisk2 folders.
This FAT partition is empty and should have about 256MB space. If it isn’t, or if the mount command returned an error, then that’s interesting đ
Why is this partition in these tablets? Well, I have a theory. These tablets support having a recovery partition, even though most firmware updates provide no recovery image files. The fact that this is a 256MB partition may indicate that it is meant to hold contents similar to the system partition, and in this case, it should be formatted as EXT3 and not FAT.
As most firmware versions for this tablet available on the internet don’t include a recovery image, this partition just gets formatted as FAT by the updater kernel at update time.
But what if the updater never touches this partition? This would be pretty good news. You could use this more or less hidden partition to store the owner information, so if your tablet ever gets stolen you’d always have a way to recover it.
If that was the case, you could also use this partition to store essential APK files and configuration so it would be easier to recover from a firmware update or factory reset.
As a last and kind of unrelated statement, I’d like to point out that the bootloader of InfoTM tablets is much more complex than it may appear at first.
Through a serial line that I believe to be the A-A USB connection used by IUW to burn updates, the bootloader can provide a serial console, that can be used to change the boot parameters for Android and maybe even boot other operating systems from the external SD card.
This thing of the bootloader is something I’m figuring out slowly by analysing the uBoot update file I have, u-boot-nand.bin.
If you have one of these InfoTMIC tablets, feel free to comment below with any important additional information.
NOTE: this post was written months ago but was sitting on a text file on my desktop for months, waiting to be posted. So this isn’t a recent discovery, but still an interesting one.
June 14, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Yesterday I wrote a post saying l.f.nu was down… and it still is.
So I bought a domain and moved my URL shortener to yet another domain:
This time, I’m sure it will be up for at least one year – if it goes down within this period, at least it won’t be because of the domain, as that’s paid for an year already. I didn’t pay it, some friends at Cloudstg did – I’ll pay them back gradually, by advertising their services and such. Again, thanks for investing $11 on my service: if it weren’t you, I’d have to spend my savings on buying this short domain, which would leave me with no money to renew this .com domain next October.
The tny.im domain is as long as l.f.nu, but with less dots, nicer, and since it’s a top level domain and not a subdomain, I have much more control over it. This is a important point, as I plan on adding IPv6 support to tny.im, and a FreeDNS subdomain wouldn’t let me have multiple records on a subdomain. With a real TLD, I can have both an A and an AAAA record for the same domain.
Like it was with the transition from 4.l.to to l.f.nu, no data has been lost, and 4.l.to and l.f.nu links work as long as you change the domain to tny.im. Statistics, link editing, etc. all work.
I hope you enjoy tny.im, and remember, this time it’s for real: the shortener will be around for more than a year, assuming I can get enough profit from it to keep paying for the domain. Having me profiting with tny.im only depends on you – by using my shortening service, you’ll help me earn some cents from ads (but, please, don’t click-bomb them!), which I’ll use to renew the domain and eventually pay for server(s), in order to offer you an even better service.
Again, I hope the ads are not annoying… if they are, make sure to drop me a line so I can fix them.
June 7, 2012 / gbl08ma / 39 Comments
All of my Prizm add-ins are unsupported on current OS versions. They have not been tested on these versions and I can’t guarantee nasty things are not happening behind the scenes which could damage your calculator. I have stopped developing for the fx-CG series years ago, I no longer follow the custom add-in development scene, my add-ins will not receive further updates. Their source code is available on GitHub for anyone who wants to fork them and continue development subject to the terms of their respective licenses.
Thank you for your understanding.
Own a Casio Prizm? Please take five minutes (probably less) to fill my survey on product IDs. It’s as easy as looking at the back of your calculator and typing 15 characters. No personal information is collected. Thank you!
I developed some add-ins for the Casio Prizm series of graphic calculators (fx-CG10 and fx-CG20; some add-ins are compatible with the fx-CG50 and Graph 90+E). The software is available for download directly from a server of mine, sometimes from Cemetech and sometimes from Casiopeia.
Utilities
The Utilities add-in is exactly what its name says: an add-in full of utilities not originally found on the Casio Prizm calculators. This includes:
- Clock, with time and date and the tools for adjusting them;
- 20 chronometers (can go up or down) with accuracy as good as the 128 Hz tick allows (it’s better than 1/100 of a second);
- Tool to fine-adjust the backlight level (from 0 to 244, versus the 1 to 5 provided by the OS);
- Tools to adjust the poweroff and backlight timeout to values not possible through the OS default tools;
- Power information (read battery voltage level, power source, battery setting and more);
- Many lantern types (make an expensive and inefficient lantern out of your Prizm);
- Calendar with agenda (add, edit, view and delete events on days, search events, week and month views, and much more);
- Task list (add, edit, view and delete tasks, which are basically calendar events without dates);
- File manager (rename, move and copy files and folders, with long-file-name support and non-capital letters support). Also allows for opening text files, compressing and decompressing files in a special format, and searching for files;
- Text editor (create and edit text files);
- Balance manager (manage your pocket money);
- Password generator;
- TOTP authenticator (like Google Authenticator and compatible with it, but on a calculator);
- Graphical memory usage viewing tool (check how much Main and Storage Memory is used with nice progress bars);
- Add-in manager (choose which add-ins are available for launching in the Main Menu without having to delete them);
- Function key color selection (select the color of the function key labels throughout the OS; I recommend blue if you’re tired of black);
- System information viewer – view the OS and bootloader version and timestamps, calculator model information, Renesas CPU version registers and the unique device ID.
- Calculator lock with numeric code (like CGlock but more advanced);
- A way to save the current time as a decimal number to the OS alpha variable T (you can use this on Run-Mat and almost everywhere by pressing ALPHA and then the division key).
- Lots of settings to make the add-in behave the way you like.
All this in a binary file under 185 KiB!
Version 2.1 of this add-in was released on June 21, 2016, with this most likely being the last release; at this point Utilities is stable and full-featured, as you see in the above list. New releases will only happen to fix bugs, without increasing the feature list. I have tried very hard to make sure this add-in provides something useful for everyone who owns a Prizm.
Download g3a
Download ZIP of edition with support for running PicoC scripts – More information about PicoC
Thread at Cemetech
GitHub repo
This add-in runs on the newer Prizm models fx-CG50 and Graph 90+E, and most things appear to work, but it has never been officially tested on these models. As always, use at your own risk.
Image viewer
View JPEG and PNG images on your Prizm. Progressive or lossless JPEG and interlaced PNGÂ not supported. Has strip functionality for linking (not embedding) images on eActivites. Stable version 1.1 is out! More information on the Thread at Cemetech, or download the g3a – just copy to your calculator (out of any folder!) to install.
This add-in supports the newer Prizm models fx-CG50 and Graph 90+E.
Eigenmath port
Screenshot of my Eigenmath port
I ported the Eigenmath symbolic math engine, by George Weigt, to the fx-CG 10/20 calculators. Version 1.0, stable, is available for download, with all the results matching the ones given by the PC version. Updating is heavily recommended, because there are lots of new features in comparison to the first release, not to mention more ability, stability, and many bug fixes.
This port includes a function catalog, ability to create and execute scripts, draw graphs, and much more. All 100+ Eigenmath commands work. Output is pretty-printed whenever possible, and 200 lines of output are stored for scrolling at any time. Command execution can be stopped. The state of the add-in is optionally automatically saved when exiting. This add-in can also act as a eActivity strip.
Download or find more, updated information on the thread at Cemetech. GitHub repo.
For the time being, this add-in does not support the newer Prizm models fx-CG 50 and Graph 90+E.
Discontinued software:
These add-ins do not support the newer Prizm models fx-CG 50 and Graph 90+E.
CGlock
An add-in that lets you protect your calculator with a 4-digit code. It can be set up to automatically turn off the calculator when it is locked, to not show the Casio logo (and consequently the owner information) at turn off, and to open Run-Matrix after the correct unlock code is entered. If the Prizm is rebooted or the batteries are taken off, the calculator goes unlocked – so this program only provides mild security for your calculator (you can always epoxy the reboot hole and the batteries compartment, but do so at your own risk).
It saves the code and the settings in the main memory. I have some ideas for new features, such as hashing the code for extra safety and implementing CGlock’s own owner information display, since the Casio one is easily crackable, which I’ll implement when I have time and feel in mood.
Download from Cemetech
OverClui
OverClui is a tool for overclocking the Prizm’s CPU based on the work of Ashbad and brijohn at Cemetech. The difference between this and their own tool, Pover, is that this one has a nicer GUI, and is more noob-friendly. It doesn’t let users overclock to 101.5 MHz but only to 94.3 MHz to avoid problems, even though recently I found out some calculators don’t handle the 94.3 MhZ speed and thus can only to 87 MHz safely.
Use at your own risk, no warranty provided. If the calculator shows a “SYSTEM ERROR” message when overclocking to 94.3 MHz, please press EXIT to reboot, don’t overclock to that speed again (which also means you won’t be able to run the latest version of the game Gravity Duck on your calculator) and let me know in the comments.
Download from Cemetech
May 30, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I have been very busy with my offline life: school, family and friends haven’t been leaving much time left for me to blog here. When I have some free time, I try to keep up-to-date with the online communities I take part in and also work on my l.f.nu URL shortener. By the way, have I told you that l.f.nu now supports editing short links?
When you shorten a new link, you receive a random code specific to it. Keep that code saved as if it were a password, as it is the only way to edit a shorten link through its Click Statistics page (add a + symbol to the end of the shorten link, then open the tab “Manage”).
This feature about link passwords (which I call “passcodes”) is something I developed just for l.f.nu, it is not available in the standard YOURLS installation. I have no plans to make it open source right now, as I haven’t implemented the thing as a plugin, and the code is a bit unorganized.
So no, I haven’t disappeared from the online world yet. I’m just a bit more silent these days…
April 13, 2012 / gbl08ma / 3 Comments
Looks like my servers and websites have all decided to take some holidays and go offline, fortunately not at the same time. Some weeks ago, it was 4.l.to/l.f.nu that decided that some days sleeping would be good, after its domain went down (causing the change to a new one and the whole service rebranding). And more recently, the VPS where I was (yes, was) hosting this blog, which by its turn was hosted in a friend’s dedicated server, went down the trash too: the guys at the provider my friend uses decided to play around with the hard drive of the dedicated server, and we ended up without any of data that was in it.
Unlike what’s usual, this time I had backups (yepeee!). But as always, they were outdated (from January!) and consisted of a WordPress export file. So, I didn’t have any backup of the server configuration or the other scripts and data I had in the server. Conclusion: I had to set up everything from scratch – but wait, first, I need to explain: my friend offered to install WordPress for me, (as I’m very busy with real life, I’ll explain later), but he used CentOS, and since I really don’t like CentOS and there were some tiny “wrong” details in the WordPress config (just a matter of personal choice: I do not like to use “admin” as the admin username, even for security reasons), I reloaded the VPS with Ubuntu.
*Ubuntu: I would have used Debian, if it weren’t for the fact the software in its repos is, although stable, far from being the latest version. And my idea of “stable-recent” ratio for software is not quite the same as Debian’s idea.
As I was saying, I had to setup everything from scratch on a new VPS, on another dedicated server that’s not from the same provider (but the dedi is from the same friend). That means some hours around the shell installing and configuring nginx, PHP and MySQL, as well as configuring WordPress-specific rewrite rules and other server settings – and I’m not finished yet, the current settings are not how I’d like them to be.
I said above I was very busy with real life: yes I am, I’m busy with lots of school work, and I’m also a bit tired of the online world for now (the part of the internet I use/follow has no news lately, things are pretty boring currently). But today I had a school trip for the whole day that got me really tired, and when I got home, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to study anything for the school tests I’m taking in the next weeks. I had a server to configure and a blog to restore, and thought I could use the free time… and here I am, blogging when it’s almost midnight on my clock.
Despite the hours spent, I’d say my work has been done without major problems. I’m getting either too used to installing nginx+php+mysql, or it’s because it is/was Friday 13th.
Yeah, is/was. It’s four past midnight.
EDIT: this server is now much faster, its host was suffering from some misconfiguration – again, my friends are awesome and fixed it đ
February 21, 2012 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
My last blog post has been about the fact that ReactOS is not a dead open source project, and that in fact they had just released a new alpha version. So to keep with my line of open-source-projects-journalism, today I talk about another open source project, this time a GNU/Linux distro:Â SliTaz.
You may have heard about this project before: SliTaz has been around since 2007, when the first âcookingâ version of the distro was released. But what is SliTaz? As it says on the official website, it is âa free operating system providing a fully featured desktop or server in less than 30 MBâ. And indeed, you download an ISO file that weights at about 30MB, which you can burn to a USB stick, CD or DVD, or run on a virtual machine. From there, SliTaz boots to a complete desktop with various utilities and office applications, server-side software and, of course, a web browser. A nice control panel lets you configure the system and install more applications.
The whole system runs in a small amount RAM, meaning you donât need to install it to a hard disk to be able to use it; when you turn off the computer, the changes made are lost. So, this is not more nor less than a LiveCD that has a size of ~30MB. It is very fast, even on older computers.
Is this news? No, there have been tiny Linux distros around before, and SliTaz itself has been around for a lot of time, as I told. Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and TinyCore are some examples of other GNU/Linux distros that have the goal of being small in size. I particularly like SliTaz because of its uniqueness: a unique packaging system (tazpkg), unique utilities, and a unique look too. DSL and Puppy Linux are already too âbigâ for me, and TinyCore is too small to be useful to me. So SliTaz just got it right for my concept of âtiny Linux distroâ.
I donât use SliTaz every day â itâs not my daily use distro â but I still like it very much and itâs been useful to me a few times. I use to keep around a USB pendrive with a copy of SliTaz installed â one never knows when it may be useful, specially after youâve installed office tools like Abiword and Gnumeric. Of course, your idea of usefulness certainly varies from mine, and thatâs why I like open source: just change it so it works the way itâs useful to you.
There have been no cooking or stable releases of SliTaz recently, and there was a lack of word from the developers. I started to think that the project was slowly becoming abandoned. Fortunately, today I checked their website, and this is what I see: news! Well, not really in the news section, but a blog post:Â Lack of news but work never stops.
So, in conclusion, it seems the project is still active, the only problem is that everyone is too busy to release cooking versions and write press-releases. And it looks like the team is working to get a cooking version out soon, which is great news, since the latest cooking was in May of last year and itâs out of date when compared to the work thatâs been done on the repositories since that time.
To the SliTaz developers: Keep up the great work! đ
Edit 23rd February 2012: Slitaz 4.0 RC1 is out! Check how the new version looks like.
February 12, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Looks like ReactOS 0.3.14 has been finally released. See the news here, on the official website.
I canât say I care a lot about ReactOS, as I mostly use Linux and other *nix and have no interest on NT-based operating systems. ReactOS is one of the OSS projects I follow by keeping a âsemi-closed eyeâ on them. But still, it is interesting to see how the project has evolved since its 0.3.13 release, almost a year ago. They now support Windows XP themes, wifi drivers, ACPI among other improvements.
But again, will ReactOS do any good when it finally achieves full Windows XP capability? I blogged about that some time ago.
December 24, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I know it’s a bit too late already, but since what matters is the Christmas spirit and not the timings, here are my wishes for a great Christmas and a happy new year 2012. Let the happiness and healthiness be with you this Christmas and new year eve, as well as throughout 2012 and, well, your whole life. I hope all your good wishes come true! đ
Now, my turn on Christmas wishes: let’s hope my new shiny, cheap Android tablet I bought (Flytouch 3, P041 model, not a Christmas gift!) gets fixed – its internal memory (a microSD card) is corrupt. Now I need to fix the microSD card in a Linux computer. Linux computer? Check. SD card reader? Check. microSD reader? Missing. Trying alternatives… microSD-to-SD adapter? Missing… Santa, all there is on my gifts list is a way to fix that tablet’s microSD, I want a microSD-to-SD adapter or a USB microSD reader (costs $1)!
I’ll let you know if/when I fix the device and get rid of that damn error the Flytouch returns when trying to burn the Linux kernel to said microSD!
Merry Christmas!
gbl08ma / Gabriel Maia