blog.crox.net

Somehow, most of the time my Arduino-based EggBot clone outputs one byte of undetermined garbage before saying "Ready". This caused gcode-sender.rb to fail with "invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)".

Eventually I found the solution in a post by Wayne Brissette here: https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/4409620. Basically you need to treat the string as binary instead of utf-8. This small change in the code that waits for the robot to be ready fixed the issue for me:

--- gcode-sender.rb.orig
+++ gcode-sender.rb
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
   sp.read_timeout = 0 # Necessary for Windows.
   while line = sp.gets
     print line
-    break if line.match(/^Ready/)
+    break if line.force_encoding("BINARY").match(/^.?Ready/)
   end
   File.foreach(filename) do |line|
     line.chomp!

Recent changes introduced with iOS 10 prevent you from mounting an iPhone on a regular Ubuntu installation.

The PPA by Martin Salbaba used to fix the issue, but it hasn't been updated in a while, and now when I connect my iPhone (running iOS 10.2.1) the pictures are no longer accessible, although the documents are still there.

This solution worked for me (Ubuntu 16.04):

- install libimobiledevice6 + dependencies from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~martin-salbaba/+archive/ubuntu/ppa+libimobiledevice (follow the instructions there)

- install newer libimobiledevice version according to the "recipe" by A.B. here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/598940/libimobiledevice-1-2-ios-8-support-for-ubuntu-14-04-trusty

- install ifuse according to the same method:

cd ~/src/
git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse.git
cd ifuse/
sudo apt-get install libfuse2 libfuse-dev
./autogen.sh 
make
sudo checkinstall

You can now mount your iPhone like this:

mkdir ~/mnt
ifuse ~/mnt

I assume the same procedure would work for an iPad too.

This website is a really useful resource: https://realfavicongenerator.net/

Wondering what APA106 addressable RGB LED are? Get some from eBay, AliExpress or SparkFun.

In case this is useful to anyone else: here is my APA-106-F8 RGB LED KiCad library, including 3D model for pretty rendering.

The 3D model was made with OpenSCAD based on the instructions from Christopher J. Woodall. (The only difference is that I used meshlab to convert the OpenSCAD STL to binary instead of meshconv.)

You are free to use/change/distribute it in any way for any purpose. Attribution would be nice but is not mandatory.

If you are interested, here is the OpenSCAD source file.

As seen here, 7-Zip can extract the contents:

$ file PGPexch.ole
PGPexch.ole: Composite Document File V2 Document, No summary info
$ 7z x PGPexch.ole

7-Zip [64] 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: PGPexch.ole

Extracting  [1]CompObj
Extracting  [1]Ole
Extracting  CONTENTS
Extracting  [3]ObjInfo
Extracting  [2]OlePres000
Extracting  [3]MailStream

Everything is Ok

Files: 6
Size:       104336
Compressed: 108544
$ file CONTENTS
CONTENTS: PDF document, version 1.5
$ 

(If the OLE data is hidden in a WINMAIL.DAT file, you may have to extract it with tnef first.)