Technology

Cloning a MacBook’s HDD with BootCamp

March 7, 2013

I bought a nice Samsung 500GB SSD recently to replace the ol’ spinning disk that came with my 2010 15″ MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard). Pricing had finally come down to reasonable levels ($280) and this helps stave off my itch to upgrade (eyeing the 13″ Retina MBP). Prior to the upgrade, I was running a triple-boot [...]

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MacBook Pro 6,2 (2010) issues with Ubuntu 12.04

August 21, 2012

Just installed Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin, x64) on my MacBook Pro (2010) and had a few issues. Many things are dealt with on the community wiki page, but I still had some problems: I can’t unplug/plug in an external monitor and have it automatically recognized. I have to pull up the nVidia X Server Settings [...]

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Bash return values

June 26, 2012

Debugging a Bash script today and ran into this problem – return/exit codes from functions may not exceed 255! My script backed up a subversion repository only when a new version of the repo existed, however, the function that checked the version had it’s output returned modulo 255, causing a problem. The solution was to [...]

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16GB SD Card Formats to 8GB in Camera

February 17, 2012

I have a Canon EOS 20D and recently I started using SDHC cards for storage in combination with an SD-CF adapter. Works great and SDHC cards are 1) pretty cheap compared to CF cards and 2) work with all the other devices I have that support SDHC, including my MacBook Pro. I got a pair [...]

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Upgrading to TortoiseSVN 1.7

February 15, 2012

A few notes:  1.7 requires upgrading your working copy, so after you upgrade, all the icon overlays in Explorer showing you the state of the working copy disappear, making it seem like they are not revision tracked. You need to right click on the root of each checked out repository and select SVN Upgrade Working [...]

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Speeding Up MATLAB

August 19, 2011

MATLAB is a great environment to quickly prototype scientific algorithms, especially with interactive debugging, decent data plotting facilities, dynamic typing, and all the built-in toolboxes. However, it’s definitely pretty slow when it comes to code-execution performance compared to, well, almost every other language out there. This is largely because MATLAB is an interpreted language – that [...]

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Olloclip – Removable Lenses for the iPhone 4

August 10, 2011

For a smartphone, the iPhone 4 has a pretty decent camera, with a backside-illuminated 5MP sensor and a fast fixed-aperture f/2.8 lens. Compared to it’s contemporaries, it’s held up pretty well. The image quality is good enough that I typically don’t bother lugging my point and shoot around for most casual events and only step [...]

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MATLAB MAT file 2GB limit

July 25, 2011

Got an “error closing file” today while saving a very large MAT file in MATLAB. I’ve been dumping my workspace into a MAT file at different stages of a very large computation for debugging purposes and today it broke. It seems that even though I’m running MATLAB 7.9.0 (R2009b), the default is to save MAT [...]

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Laptop RAID Performance Degradation On Battery

June 23, 2011

At work, we are developing a indoor modeling backpack system which is carried by a person through building interiors. Using cameras, lasers, and an IMU, we can reconstruct the 3D model of the areas the person walked through. The data is currently captured with a laptop outfitted with three hard drives in a RAID 0 [...]

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Power Distribution Boards

May 18, 2011

One problem I’m constantly having in building medium-sized prototype robotics systems is power distribution. I’ve got enough sensors and things that I don’t want to have one massive wire junction tied into my power supply. Terminal blocks are sort of OK, but I’ve always felt they were a bit lacking and also didn’t provide any [...]

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