A little vodka + Red Bull to get New Years Eve started :-)

Setting up my Pertelian LCD on my linux box showing recent tweets

If you didn't pick up on it from the title, this is going to be a pretty geeky post :-) I had a little time over Christmas break to finally play around with setting up my Pertelian X2040 LCD screen that Julie gave me LAST Christmas! How slow am I?  I ran into a couple snags and had to code up some things for it to display as I would like so I figured I would post it in case any fellow geeks started looking to do something similar. First, I had to get my screen talking to my linux box at work.  While it seems like a geeky little gift, Pertelian only lists it as being compatible with Windows (LAME!!) so I had to go looking around for an alternative means of connecting.  I came across lcd4linux that listed my screen as one they were working on supporting. I had to use the pre-release build for version 0.11 because the upcoming release is the first one to include the Pertelian drivers.  Getting it basically up and running was fairly simple (just a few edits to the included lcd4linux.config file to add my display.  

Display pert-lcd {    Driver 'Pertelian'    Port '/dev/ttyUSB0'    Size '20x4'    Backlight 1    Icons 1 }

  Anyhow, I got it so I could do some basic display things through the program so it was on to configure it for my exact application, displaying recent tweets!  I don't check Twitter that often, so I thought it would be cool if I could set up my little screen to constantly display recent tweets.  Twitter no longer provides an RSS feed for your timeline (all the tweets from people you follow), but with some searching I discovered this post describing using Roomatic to generate an RSS feed for you.  Once I got that, I put together a little bash script to parse out the 4 most recent tweets. Then I tried to use the Text layout from lcd4linux along with a readline to read each tweet in.  After much digging and frustration, I discovered that readline only reads the first 80 characters.  Not too handy for tweets that can be 140 characters!  So I resigned to just show the 2 most recent tweets each split across lines and was almost done with that when I remembered a brief example that I saw that concatenated strings. So I revamped my script to split each tweet into two 80 character lines, then concatenated them within my config file.  Here's an example:  

Widget Twitter1 {    class 'Text'    expression file::readline('timeline.txt', 1).file::readline('timeline.txt', 2)    width 20    align 'M'    speed 200     update tick }

  So everything that is displayed on the screen is done through widgets.  Then you have a Layout that tells the screen where to put each widget. In the above widget, I want to display the first tweet in my timeline. Since I parsed it to have half on line one and the other half on line 2, I use the . to concatenate these two strings.  I still find it odd that lcd4linux has no issue dealing with strings longer than 80 characters, yet readline has that limit. Anyhoo, I combine the widgets for each tweet into a layout for my screen.  

Layout Twitter {    Row01.Col1 'Twitter1'    Row02.Col1 'Twitter2'    Row03.Col1 'Twitter3'    Row04.col1 'Twitter4' }

  In the widget, you see that the align parameter is set to 'M' which means marquee.  This is what we want since a tweet can have over 140 characters, yet my screen is only 20 characters wide.  So the result is 4 lines, each slowly scrolling through the most recent 4 tweets in my timeline! Luckily, lcd4linux constantly performs the readline operations so I just tossed my timeline parsing script in my crontab to run every 15 minutes and as soon as it is updated the display updates with the current timeline. Success! The only thing I'd really like to tweak now is how exactly it runs.  If I try to run the basic lcd4linux command, it just starts and closes without doing anything.  To make it actually use my designated layout, I have to run it with the -F option that prevents it from forking and runs it in the foreground.  The odd thing is that if I run 'lcd4linux -F &' then it puts it in the background and it runs fine.  No idea what they are doing when they fork off, but apparently my machine doesn't like it. Yay for geeky projects!

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As with the other Harry Potter books, I really don't have a lot to write. I don't recall having much preference between the books in the series, and I have thoroughly enjoyed each of them. One thing that was noticeably different about this versus the past two is the divergence from the films. There were numerous times that I was struck by how differently things unfolded in the book than how they were portrayed in the book. I didn't think that they were necessarily bad diversions, but still pretty noticeable. Mark one more (pretty long one) off our reading list!

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Beautiful Christmas Sunset view over South Holston Lake.

My First (and only, since the program is ending) Miller High Life reward!



A Bull of Many Colors

A Bull of Many Colors, originally uploaded by fincher69.

A colorful set of bull figurines that we saw while we were in Sevilla. I would have liked to have the main bull a little more of a central focus (and have the one directly in the foreground a little more out of focus), but it was a fairly quick shot while we were shopping so I didn't put a lot of thought into it. Still a fun little reminder of our time in Spain.

What a slacker blogger am I

So I perused through the last couple of months of my blog, and it is readily apparent that I've let it be reduced to a collection of mobile photos and ridiculously long posts each time I travel. I need to step up. I need to add some variety. I'm thinking of choosing 1 or 2 days a week and having a themed post (e.g. video game related post, favorite news story of the day). At least, then, some variety will be added to this place, and I may keep all 3 of my readers entertained ;-) Who knows, I may even earn a new reader or two! I will try to mull things over during the Christmas break, but if anyone has suggestions about ways the think this place could be spiced up, feel free to share! :-)

Breathless by Dean Koontz

Breathless by Dean Koontz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am a huge fan of Dean Koontz so I was excited to read another one of his since it had been a while. I love his style of writing and feel like he consistently provides a visceral experience that I really enjoy. As with many of his books, there are several independent stories going on and each chapter switches between the sets of characters. With this style comes short chapters, which I like because it makes it a lot easier to pick up and read a bit when I just have a few spare minutes. All that to say, this is probably one of my least favorite of his books. To me, it felt almost as though he lost interest about 3/4 of the way through and just tried to find a lazy way to tie everything together. I thought it developed some interesting themes and story lines, then each and every one fell pretty flat at the end. Worth the read for a fan of Dean Koontz, but pretty low on the list for anyone looking to experience one of his books for the first time. View all my reviews

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't really know how to review Harry Potter books since everyone is pretty familiar with them. As always, it is an easy read, always entertaining, and always a good story. Only several of them are on our reading list, but I look forward to slowly making it back through the whole series.

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