Over time I have ended up with a couple of customisable Tipro MID keyboards without the custom lead to connect them to a PS2 port. These leads are no longer available for sale so I decided to figure out the pinouts. This is a quick summery of that work.

As the keyboards have a pass-though port for other PS2 devices and were unlikely to have a common ground and 5V line I could use a multimeter to check what was the “Gnd” and “Vcc” easily. This worked and I had those figured out after a few minutes.

Now I had the power sorted I just had the clock and the data pins to figure out. I realised that there were only 30 possible combinations and the keyboard were already programmed so would behave like, well, a keyboard when a button was pressed. Rather than mess bout I decided to just try all combinations and to wee what one worked. There was a remote change this could damage the hardware but that was very very unlikely and I had little to loose. As luck would have it it worked on the 3rd attempt.

So now we have the results. The layout is not dissimilar to that of a a PS2 connector albeit mirrored. Hopefully this will be of use to at least someone and save some hardware from the skip.

My next challenge is to reconfigure them. The configuration utilities (MIDWIN and MIDDOS) are still available from the Tipro drivers archive although it is recommended you use Windows 95, 98 or 2000. Wish me luck.

This is a question that I ask myself a lot and keep having to look up almost every time. Sometimes I am not certain what distribution I am actually using. Here is the summery version that hopefully will save me having to look the command up each time, and perhaps help you as well.

To find out all the version information about the Linux kernel you are running run the command…

uname --all

To find out the OS release (such as the Ubuntu version) have a look in the os-release file…

more /etc/os-release

…and on most systems you can look at that same information neatly formatted using…

lsb_release

As part of my ZX Keyboard project I wanted to run a Spectrum emulator in full screen on the Raspberry Pi.

The good news is the Spectrum emulator Fuse has already been ported to the Raspberry Pi and is easy to install if you are using Raspbian. The bad nest is that all the guides I found were to install the “GTK” version that runs under X windows, and I wanted to run in full screen on an old CRT TV. To install the Fuse “SDL” version (that will run in full screen from the command lane) just log in and from the command line run the following command…

sudo apt-get install fuse-emulator-common fuse-emulator-sdl fuse-emulator-utils spectrum-roms

Next we should make it start in full screen. From the console type in “fuse-sdl” and the emulator will start. Next press F1 (yes, sorry, the ZX keyboard does not have an F1 key so you will need to use another keyboard for now), select “Options”, and “Full Screen”. To make this the default press F1 and select “Options” again, then select “Save”. To exit use the F10 key.

Now I think we will need a good old game to play. The best place to look for Spectrum games that are distributed legally is at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ . The simple way to load a game using the ZX Keyboard is from the command line. For example we can load Manic Miner (assuming we downloaded the game and extracted it to the working directory) with the following command.

fuse-sdl –tape “Manic Miner.tzx”

Annoyingly I have come across one problem with Fuse and the ZX Keyboard. Fuse maps each key to a Spectrum key, letter to letter, number to number, shift becomes Caps Shift, and Ctrl become Symbol Shift. All other keys are ignored. This is a problem as we are interpreting and translating the symbols already. For example the Symbol Shift P as a double quote (a shifted 2), but the emulator treats this as the Caps Lock being pressed. We could make the ZX Keyboard work flawlessly by turning off our translation, but we would lose compatibility with PC software. I might look at building in a way to changing modes but we will have to cope with this for now.

Recently this blog has been the target of a silly amount of spam comments and I am having trouble keeping it up because of that, so I have disabled comments for now.

4 years ago my blog received about 200 spam comments a month caused me to install Akismet. The spam continued to increase slowly until it got to an average of 2,000 comments a month. Even with this number Akismet was doing a good job and blocking almost all of it, leaving just a handful of comments for me to moderate manually.

Annoyingly things have rocketed now and last month I received 68,897 spam comments. That is around 90 spam comments every hour. This I could still cope with easily, but they tend to come in short waves and I am having trouble keeping my site responsive when that happens. If you have experienced an unexpected wait for up to 20 seconds and them the site just works again, then this is why. Ironically it is using Akismet that is causing the delay, but not using something like this would be clearly be impractical.

The truth be told I do not blog as much as I did, and that most people interact with my blog externally on Twitter and Facebook instead of the comments, so I have just disabled all comments for now. I am considering using nginx instead of Apache to better cope with this kind of traffic, or using a service such as Cloud Flare, but for now I hope disabling comments will keep the site fully responsive all the time.

Update: I am experimenting with some WordPress plugins to block some bot nets before Akismet is called. Fingers crossed this will reduce the spam to a level that my server and Akismet can cope with again. Very few users should be blocked in error but if they are then they can click back, wait a minute, and try again.

I have had a lightweight “nettop” computer on my desk running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for quite some time. I use this almost exclusively for accessing the web with Chrome, and doing some admin tasks that are just more simple to do on a Linux machine. Unfortunately Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has not been fully supported since earlier in the year, and more recently Google stopped updating Chrome for it so I decided it was time to move on to something more modern.

One reason I have not updated yet is that the desktop has changed from Gnome 2 to Unity that is like moving from Windows XP to Windows 7. I don’t dislike the new interface like many, but it does take up more memory and processing power, and this little machine does not have much of either. I was originally intending to migrate it to Linux Mint using the MATE desktop but decided to give Ubuntu 12.04 LTS a try first as it was a simple auto upgrade. Granted it took a few hours in the end but did mention this machine is low on processing power.

The update went smoothly but needed a lot of confirmations over the process so needed checking on frequently. Unfortunately it was a little laggy as predicted and used a large percentage of the small machine’s memory.

I then had the mad idea of trying to install the MATE desktop on top of the Ubuntu installation I already had instead of a complete reinstall. I followed the install instructions on the MATE web site and it all went very smoothly. My exact script is below but I would recommend checking back to the original web site in case the distribution changes.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu precise main"
sudo apt-get update
# Ignore the error. We were expecting it.
# The following line will fix it but we needed to do the update first.
sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment

After logging out I needed to select MATE from the cog icon by my name before logging in again, and then I was up and running with MATE. I did need to change almost all the desktop colour settings to be able to read all the text, but most of the other menu setup has been brought across from the old setup. I still need to tweak the font settings to improve the general look and feel further, and some of the apps still have colour settings so there is some tweaking to be done, but all this is a lot less hassle than a complete reinstall.

Also most importantly it did the trick with only 230MB RAM being used (approximately the same as before give or take a few meg) and the boot time is only a little slower at 100 seconds. Shutdown is about the same at 15 seconds. Chrome also works as well as it did and that is what I was after.

Granted it is annoying to have to do this at all, but to keep the security patches coming I needed to do something, and I would find it tricky to argue that it would have been sensible for anyone to support such old systems. If you are in the same position then give it some thought and I hope this proves useful.

A few years ago I blogged about locating on off road point on Google Maps. This apparently proved quite useful to a number of Geocachers and ramblers. Recently the Google Maps apps has change on most (or perhaps all) platforms and this hack will not longer work on mobile devices. :-(

The only solution I have found to date is to use the original hack on the Google Earth app instead. Other than using more battery this works well for me. You can turn on roads to simulate the hybrid mode, and I have started saving locations to a map on My Maps and then they are shown automatically on the mobile. I hope this helps (again). If you can figure out a better way then please let me know.

Update: It appears that searching for Lat Long coordinates on there own (without the original hack) will now drop a marker on that exact spot. This is working on the old and new maps online, and the iPhone app, so I presume it will work on all platforms. Let’s hope this continues working from now on.

This month I am saying goodbye to a couple of services that I have been using for a while.

First Posterous. At the end of last week it was announced that the micro blogging platform Posterous will be closing down at the end of April 2013. This has been anticipated for a while since Twitter bought it in March last year and assured users that they will not close down without notice and will create an official data backup path.

I started using Posterous when I moved my “Vox Blog” to it (actually migrating to TypePad and then Posterous as it was easer) after Vox was closed at the end of September 2010.

As this is a second blog of “silly stuff” that I do not upload much to it nowadays I have decided to just kill it off. I did consider moving it to another service such at Tumblr but it is not simple to get the archive in there and I have other things to do that are more important. I will however place a full copy of my Posterious blog on my web site and redirect from the original URL so the content will not vanish from the Internet.

There is a small bug in the export where the original Import from Vox is listed backwards, and the Image URLs are mashed, but I fixed the URLs with a little .htaccess hacking. If you need help to do the same please do ask.

Next is Dopplr. Dopplr is a service where you log where you will be travelling to and it allows you to see if your friends are going to the same location. When you attend a lot of events like I do it can actually be useful. The service has been running unchanged since it was bought by Nokia in September 2009. I give it a lot of credit for running apparently untouched for almost 3½ years. Sadly it has just started to play up by not allowing trips to be created, edited, or deleted. It is clearly not being maintained and about to die.

Rather than move to another system (I only know of Tripit and it is not quite the same) I have imported my last Dopplr backup in to my Google Calender. Clearly this is not going to duplicate Dopplr’s social element, but will help with my planning and this is what I have mostly used it for in recent times.

So that is two services gone and I suspect there will be more going before the end of the month. The Internet is always exciting because of the constant flow of new and exciting things on it, but most will eventually vanish or be swallowed up by other services regardless if they are successful or not. It is sad but the way it is.