What's Next 10/12/2015

What's Next: A quick look into future technology news

Memristors and or 3d Xpoint Memory:

It's hard to believe how closely associated the tech companies are with their biggest competitors. HP and Intel both claim to have new memory tech that is 1000x faster than current gadgets. but neither has produced prototypes yet. I guess we will just have to wait.

New/Old Video Games

Dhewm3 is a modern revival for fans of the original dhewm3, it utilizes the original game content while updating and fixing the engine, to fix bugs and use up to date drivers and architectures.

What's Next 9/24/2015

What's Next: A quick look into future technology news

Today we have great innovations and developments in ease of use in the small CNC industry.

Printrbot Releases the New Crawlbot:

This new CNC router from printrbot does not include a table! Instead you attach it to the plywood or sheet material you are cutting (or alternatively it is sized large enough to build a table bigger than a sheet). But at its core it's "the size of a golf bag", so it can easily be transported to a site or the material. As opposed to other full sheet machines, that need a crane to be delivered.

I've had my eye on printrbot since they first debuted, they seem like an exemplary company from what I've seen.

Image Credit; Makezine Review;

GlowForge Looks to Revolutionize Laser Cutting:




Using advanced sensors and software (why has no one done this yet?) and even more advanced software, the Glowforge laser cutter takes the user interface completely out of using a cutter. Just draw a design, the cameras inside record the design and convert it to laser motions. Then hit go, basically. There's no CAD, no drivers, no illustrations,

Additionally no privacy, but quick don't think about that (every design goes into "the cloud" for the magic image processing and other mysterious things).

It looks like an amazing machine, the bigger one with an included pass through, (use any length material as long as it's no wider than 20in) the machine tracks the material as its pulled through.

More: Here; Here; and Here.

X Windows Graphics Drivers problems

Installing the graphics drivers in Linux can be rather tricky, but I recently discovered a way to get out of the command line and into the easier to understand graphical interface. These tips should work for most distributions, but the only one I have done it with is Ubuntu. If your in Debian or Ubuntu and using an ATI or NVIDIA card then Automatix or Envy are definitely the way to go for installing your video drivers. Although envy can also be run in text mode I couldn't get it to work.

I worked on the problem for quite a while and although there is a moderately easy solution I didn't see it anywhere that I looked on the Internet, I don't know if its one of the few remaining "everybody should know that" things in Ubuntu or if everyone else really does use the more complicated methods....

Anyways, here's how to get out of text mode so you can install your drivers. Just change the video driver to vesa!

The easier way to do this (in Ubuntu/Debian) is to type:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This command runs the Xorg setup script, the very first question is which video driver the server should use, there should be a Vesa driver in that list, just hit enter once you have it highlighted, then just hit enter for the rest of the options (unless you really want to change something else). Then after the program exits just type:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$startx

Of course there is also the good old method of manually editing your Xorg.conf

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then you need to find the part that looks like:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia" ....

Then just change Driver to "vesa" then save the file and:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$startx

X should start now, it might be a bit slower and not able to do Beryl, but at least you can use this mode to get Envy or Automatix going and get the proper drivers installed without having to muck about in the CLI. :D

(P.S. if I got anything wrong Please correct me in the comments)