One of my most interesting projects is to remove as many of the conventional bulbs as possible and replace them with led-based lighting, some home-built and some bought.

Nice led calculator:
http://metku.net/?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/ledcalc/index_eng

Some experiments with D-bus programming. Goal is to control and get info from the mediaplayer VLC.

A script to get the songinfo from VLC:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
info=$(dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.mpris.vlc /Player org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetMetadata $@|grep variant|grep string|sed 's/^.\+"\(.\+\)"/\1/'|grep -v http)
dt=$(date)
echo $info $dt
echo $info-$dt > /home/patrik/vlcInfo.txt
sleep 10
done

The text is printed to vlcInfo.txt and then used by a screensaver that shows the info. VLC must be launched like "vlc --control dbus".

Some notes about using the ELM-327 ODB-II scanner with the Scantool software in Ubuntu.

Install Allgro dev lib and texinfo:
apt-get install liballegro4.2-dev texinfo

Download Dzcomm: http://dzcomm.sourceforge.net/

Unpack
cd dz099i
sudo chmod +x fixunix.sh
./fixunix.sh
./configure
make
make install

Download Scantool source. Unpack and make like this (from http://www.scantool.net/forum/index.php?topic=2672.0;prev_next=next):

make DEFINES="-I ../dz099i/include -DDZCOMM_DJGPP -L../dz099i/lib/unix -lm -lXpm -lXxf86vm -lXcursor -lpthread"

ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyS4

An old project where a computer was fitted inside an old amplifier. No special components were used, it was tight!