Death dealing radiation beams are just part of the day.
GPSd and xGPS on OSX 10.6.8
Just documenting how I got GPSd and xGPS running on a Mac running OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
First off, install MacPorts – this is a bunch of *nix tools, utilities and applications packages for OSX. After you do the basic install of MacPorts, do a self-update and upgrade:
sudo port update
[Lots of output will happen, no errors should occur]sudo port upgrade
[Lots of output will happen, no errors should occur]
If the two commands above work, then you should be able to install gpsd quite easily:
sudo port install gpsd
Then try xgps with the command “xpgs”
If this briefly draws a window on screen then complains that gpsd isn’t running then all is ok, and you can skip the next section. If you get errors suggesting that either gobject or gtk are missing, you need to do the following:
sudo port uninstall gpsd [yes, we uninstall it, because it leads to a missing library problem when we add python27 – this seems to be a MacPorts bug]
sudo port install python27 Â py27-gobject py27-gtk
sudo port select python python27
sudo port install gpsd
You should then be able to start xgps, but it will most probably complain that gpsd isn’t running. To correct this you need to know what terminal device your gps receiver is attached to, if it is attached via a usb to serial converter, then a reasonable device to try is /dev/tty.usbserial. In my case I can start up gpsd and xgps like this:
gpsd -n /dev/tty.usbserial
xgps
When everything is running and your GPS receiver is talking to the computer, you’ll see satellite and position information displayed in xgps – success.
Revenge
Fixing the archives has thrown up this post I drafted in 2006 and never got around to publishing. The dog and the old git are long since vanished – no idea whatever happened to them.
The 2006 post starts below this line.
Reminded of this by a post from Scaryduck today.
DTL vs the Fluff-Ball
The was and still is a misrable old bastard up the road from me. He walks a yapping bundle of fluff up the road twice per day, letting it shit where ever it wants. Complaints about this are shrugged of with
“its only a fuckin’ dog. I can’t stop it shittin'”
and several days of the dog ‘deciding’ to drop a load right outside your house.
It was after the poo stared to pile up on the pavement outside my house I decided to get revenge.
From the juices of the Sunday joint, I made up some of the tastiest gravy known to man or dog. Poured into a cup and left by the microwave ready for the evening dog walk.
Seven PM rolls by and the yapping gives away the approach of the dog. The microwave goes on to warm up the gravy and thirty seconds later I’m at the door, cup in hand. Waiting until the Miserable Bastard can see me, I pour the gravy over pile of shit remaining from the morning walk.
Fluff-ball scampers up seconds later and starts wolfing down the gravy covered shit in full view of Miserable Bastard. My job done, I head back inside to watch dog being dragged back home in disgust with the Miserable Bastard ranting and raving at the dog
“stupid fuggin dog”
and the world in general
“bastards!”
I’ve had no trouble with that dog shitting outside the house since.
Fixed archives / woken up from winter sleep
It took a spam comment here to make me realise that the archive links have been broken for some time; there was a problem with a .htaccess file (it didn’t exist).
The site has fallen into dormancy over the winter again, it’s about time I started using this domain or finally let it lapse. It would be nice to make it to a full decade of posts here, so time to generate some content.
Bells
Something like thirty years ago, I was on a bus with my grandfather passing The Whitechapel Bell Foundry; he told me a little about the place and promised to take me for a visit when I was older. Three years ago, I bought a ticket for a tour the following year, then forgot to go. Yesterday I finally toured the foundry with around 25 others, I was probably the second youngest in the tour party – very few other the others were below retirement age.
The bell foundry is the oldest manufacturing company in the UK, having been formed in 1570 (and with good evidence that it may date back to 1420 from earlier foundry works in the area). The foundry site on Whitechapel Road dates from 1738, originally having been The Artichoke coaching inn, built c1670.
The tour was interesting and through, we learned the bell-metal casting temperature, 1170 degrees C; the composition of the casting molds, a brick core covered in goat-hair, clay, sand and horse manure shaping mixture (photo); the number of harmonics a modern bell is tuned for, 5 – the same note in 3 octaves and a minor 3rd and a 5th.
At the back of the works, in the yard, a new set of bells and mounts (photo) were being prepared for St Dunstan in the west.To make best use of limited space, the hand-bell workshop and the woodworking workshop are built above the foundry floor. These workshops have rather low ceilings and beams – no one taller than 5’8″ works there. In the wood workshop where bell wheels are made, is the foundry “graveyard” commemorating those that have died while working (no details give for those, possibly an interesting story) and in retirement.
I’d love to re-visit when they actually cast a bell, but understandably they prefer not to have members of the public around when sloshing tons of molten metal around.
DG visited in 2008, around the time I booked my first, forgotten, tour.