IT

Send message to user logged in to an X11 session at a remote host

There are occasions when you want to contact a user working at a remote computer, but his/her phone is switched off. If the remote user is running an X11 session, and you have ssh access to the remote computer, and you have root privileges on the remote computer, here is a solution.

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Turn your desktop computer into a wireless access point

My desktop computer has a wired connection to the internet and so the built-in wifi card is normally not used. I decided to enable and use it as a wireless access point.

Unfortunately NetworkManager will only create an ad-hoc wifi network, and Android devices will only connect to infrastructure access points. Don’t ask why… A rooted Android phone or tablet can be configured to connect to an ad-hoc network, and if a separate program can configure a Linux box to act as an access point, NetworkManager should be able to do the same. As far as I can see, there are no good technical reasons for either of these deficiencies.

The solution is hostapd:

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Install or update mplabx, gputils, gpsim and sdcc

This is a summary of the steps involved in setting up development tools under Linux for Microchip PIC microcontrollers.

I have created Ubuntu Trusry packages for the most recent versions of gputils, psim and sdcc, and also updated the MPLAB X toolchain plugin for sdcc.

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gpsim, Ubuntu and the case of the missing GUI

Update 13/1/2015

Following an upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 I wanted to install gpsim again. I was pleased to see that it was included in the standard repositories and so I duly installed the stock packages. However, as soon as tried to use it the problems started. After a bit of fiddling around it became obvious that gpsim was compiled for the stock package with the GUI disabled and so a recompile was in order.

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