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<wpwrak>
yeah, the spammers removed quite a few words from the written english language.
<arossDOTme>
hmm the smaller posts ant got though yet. I guess I just wait.
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<kristianpaul>
ha nice wr703n was reversed eng
<kristianpaul>
afaik not a free cad..
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<wolfspraul>
kristianpaul: links?
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<wolfspraul>
they worry whether it is 'legal' to do this. that discussion seems to be more important than this 'layout' only covering the top and bottom side and not the internal layers
<wolfspraul>
urgh :-)
<wolfspraul>
open hardware at its finest
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<wolfspraul>
and then the non-functional 2-layer 'layout' is dumped into eagle
<wolfspraul>
ha ha
<wolfspraul>
painful stuff
<wolfspraul>
I'm sure the industry is shivering in fear of that competitive threat there
<wolfspraul>
it reminds me of some sloppily taken and blurred pictures of a pcb that some other project posted as proof of their 'openess' a while ago
<wolfspraul>
they should take the whole pcb apart, photograph and enter into kicad/geda all layers, measure the values of all components and create an equivalent schematic
<wolfspraul>
the they should proceed with a little 'couple hundred' test run to fix some bugs
<wolfspraul>
and finally they could think about how to make money with an item that sells for 16 USD / pc, including box, case, usb cable, power adapter, etc. etc.
<wolfspraul>
so looking at all this, I guess a quick couple-hour job dumping 2 layers into eagle and posting something is all we can and should expect
<wolfspraul>
I'm curious how tp-link develops the sub-20 USD computer category that they have there...
<wolfspraul>
I have a whole bunch of these 703n around me, as wifi repeaters and what not
<roh>
and that done by people who can work for ridicilous low wages
<wpwrak>
that's the fab. but behind that, you need some engineers who are very good. ultra-low price means huge volume. huge volume means very little room for errors.
<roh>
wpwrak: thats what we think, from our pov. i guess there are different ones, else people wouldnt try to competen in 16E hw builing and sales
<roh>
i know i dont. nothing to win there.
<wpwrak>
why shouldn't they ? if they're good enough, and have access to the production capability (including ramp-up monay), they can pull it off.
<roh>
wolfspraul: btw.. i did some 'powertools (vibration sander) and pcb tests... not as difficult as it sounds. atleast a 4layer board is a thing of one night and a bit of patience
<wpwrak>
meanwhile, the giants are trying to kill each other in the high-end market ...
<roh>
wpwrak: still its single euros per device. and huge risks. so from my pov its bad business.
<wpwrak>
dinosaurs fighting dinosaurs, while the rodents happily evolve ahead :)
<roh>
not that i dont like hw so cheap, but i cannot recommend anybody competing there
<wpwrak>
we can't compete. but that doesn't mean that others have the same limitation.
<roh>
wpwrak: may be. but thats not my concern then
<wolfspraul>
let's see whether the market is big enough that qualcomm comes out with nice integrated follow-on chips for that segment
<wpwrak>
it's probably just a question of having enough money at hand. if you can afford to produce 10M units before seeing any revenue, and the occasional mishap (oops, we just made one cubic kilometer of worthless trash) won't kill you, then you're big enough to play that game.
<wolfspraul>
that's pretty much the only moving piece, and it would be nice if they would, no?
<wolfspraul>
yeah the economics are pretty amazing if you really wrap your head around it
<wolfspraul>
*selling* a whole computer with box, usb cable, power adapter, etc. etc. for 16 USD retail?
<wolfspraul>
that's unbelievable really
<wolfspraul>
even the tiniest expenses of 1 full-time engineer working on something for a while will need big big volume to be recouped
<wolfspraul>
I hope they sell those thingies in the tens of millions and qualcomm can come out with improved chips, would be cool still
<wpwrak>
hmm, i think all that only works at numbers where you can easily afford a bunch of really good engineers
<wolfspraul>
the numbers are just amazing I think
<wolfspraul>
it's under-appreciated as an economic achievement
<wolfspraul>
try to buy an iron, and you will be hard pressed to find one below 20 USD
<wpwrak>
yeah, a bit beyond our league. at least we understand enough of all that to be impressed :)
<wolfspraul>
I hope this is all the right way to do it, but I can only try...
<wpwrak>
damn. you beat fped (19.5 klocs)
<roh>
hrhr
<roh>
*sigh* quite depressing. i designed a series of devices lately and currently i can't even afford to prototype em
<roh>
and thats simple crap. i got variants in dip and smd, and made a modular one last
<roh>
could be sold as kit, but i need to invest a few hundred euro for parts and pcbs to be made and invest another bunch of time into software and finalisation of the mechanics/case
<roh>
even to get that back the devices would need to be much more expensive that such a router, even if they are much simpler. sucks.
<roh>
its a modular spdif routing/mux equipment which uses structured cat5 cabling as backend
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<kyak>
xiangfu: hi, could we please catch up with the latest openwrt, there are several important commits there (which allow us to use gettext at it's power)?
<kyak>
many failed packages, just as expected :) sorry for confusion
<xiangfu>
yes. that build take my too much time. so I come with this auto mark failed package as modular. recently. :)
<kyak>
that's good!
<xiangfu>
this whole build take ~80 hours. :-) but it build smooth which is good.
<xiangfu>
and I think I have a lot of 80 hours between release. :-)
<kyak>
strange, now 'make' fails at 'make[3] -C target/linux compile'. When i re-run as 'make V=s', i'm presented with kernel config and then the build goes on
<kyak>
running make kernel_menuconfig to update our config doesn't seem to help
<kyak>
i never observed inconsistency between make and verbose make before
<kyak>
perhaps kernel_menuconfig is not doing very godo job.. i'll try to add that option manually.. it asks about IEEE802154_6LOWPAN
<xiangfu>
strange...
<kyak>
after i added # CONFIG_IEEE802154_6LOWPAN is not set to target/linux/xburst/qi_lb60/config-3.3, everything works smooth
<kyak>
i'm reluctant to commit this change before you have a look.. not sure if you observe this problem on your side
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<xiangfu>
kyak, please commit. this option should take care by package/kernel/modules/wpan.mk
<paul_boddie>
Are Gtk+ and Qt actively maintained in OpenWrt? I can't say that I know how to do the git-related magic to pull in updates within the openwrt-nanonote build environment, but I didn't see much sign of activity on the various OpenWrt sites for those packages.
<xiangfu>
kyak, let's wait the release build and test.
<xiangfu>
paul_boddie, the gtk/qt is under 'svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/feeds/xorg'
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<xiangfu>
mirko is maintain the qt. because I saw he is always try to fix qt build etc.
<paul_boddie>
If I could perform magic and make lots of time, I'd try and do a Debian-based equivalent software image, if only because of the active maintenance of such things in Debian and the use of things like glibc/eglibc which make some things easier.
<paul_boddie>
Figuring out what the gtk maintainers were thinking and then patching their build systems is hard work!
<xiangfu>
yes. agree
<paul_boddie>
Maybe I can learn something from this... Loading a kernel module from a file descriptor: http://lwn.net/Articles/519009/
<kyak>
paul_boddie: don't bother with gtk update, since it doesn't support DIrectFB
<kyak>
the release we are usign now is probably the last one where DIrectFB works
<paul_boddie>
kyak: I'm delegating all such matters to Debian at the moment, although I'm also not using gtk actively, anyway.
<kyak>
do you run X?
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<paul_boddie>
No, just framebuffer stuff.
<paul_boddie>
I wanted pygame support with numpy, but I may change my mind again at some point. But I doubt that X is likely to be an option.
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<paul_boddie>
It's a shame Python uses 10MB of the RAM. Maybe it should go on a diet.
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<kyak>
if debian gtk packages run fine on framebuffer, perhaps we should have a look how it's done
<kyak>
in DirectFB that is
<kyak>
i once updated gtk2 from 2.17.0 (currently in Openwrt) to 2.24.4 only to see that DirectFB is broken
<kyak>
i then read at their ML or somewhere else that it's not maintained anymore
<kyak>
..and then it is planned to drop it completely from gtk3
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<kyak>
not planned, already dropped
<kyak>
everything is getting fat nowadays and needs a diet :)
<kyak>
better stick with qt4.. its support for DirectFB is far more superior
<kyak>
can even switch keyboard layouts
<kyak>
and more apps (at least in qi-packages)
<kyak>
btw, qt4 builds as i speak.. fingers crossed (maybe it was an intermittent problem on buildhost)
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<paul_boddie>
It feels like all these projects are going backwards.
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<kyak>
if they continue going backwards they will end up running fine on a PC with 32 Mb RAM :)
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<paul_boddie>
Sadly, they don't seem to go backwards in the resource usage department. I suppose the reason for not supporting the framebuffer any more is that we all have amazing 3D hardware now, or something.
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<qi-bot>
/msg xiangfu test
<qi-bot>
/msg xiangfu tes
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<kyak>
'msg' implied :)
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<whitequark>
paul_boddie: it actually makes sens
<whitequark>
*sense
<whitequark>
well, take for example wayland. it is a given fact that every desktop in last 10 years or so has at least Intel card, and that card is capable of compositing.
<whitequark>
it is also a given fact that every Android smartphone since 3.0 has a mandatory GPU.
<whitequark>
this comprises the overwhelming majority of systems where graphical Linux should run.
<whitequark>
on the other hand, what Ubuntu does with Unity, well, just sucks
<whitequark>
they are seemingly uncapable of programming
<paul_boddie>
What doesn't make sense is the churn in the software stack. That's how we end up with desktop environments that are less functional than the ones they "replaced", and only after huge amounts of extra work and disruption.
<whitequark>
yeah, let's stay with 1987's crap
<whitequark>
bits do not rot; true. unfortunately, architecture of X11 has like nothing to do with the modern desktop. it's an obsolete abstraction.
<whitequark>
take even network transparency. both gtk and qt in a network-transparent mode basically transfer pixmaps, which means that even VNC is more efficient, not even talking about a wayland network transport module (yet to be developed)
<whitequark>
and per usage department... people like fast software, and so time-memory tradeoffs are almost always solved in the favor of time.
<whitequark>
which unfortunately means that you spend limited resource (memory) instead of unlimited (cpu cycles)
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<whitequark>
paul_boddie: and if you're speaking about gtk3/gnome3, well, it was the reason I've switched to KDE.
<paul_boddie>
Not everything in 1987 was crap, though. ;-)
<whitequark>
paul_boddie: what wasn't? If we are talking about software.
<whitequark>
I don't really see any piece of software from 1987 or its descendant which I would use except for compatibility
<whitequark>
except, maybe, games. nethack is pretty cool.
<paul_boddie>
Interesting question. I thought we were talking about hardware, but I'm pretty sure some essential software from 1987 is still around and isn't crap.
<whitequark>
well, 1987 hw wasn't exactly bad per se, it was just not very developed
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<whitequark>
just as latest steam engines weren't crap
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<whitequark>
emphasis on "latest". hardware went a very long way from those times, software is still commonly written in C with mostly same errors and patterns.
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<larsc>
even C was crap back in 1987, at least by todays standards ;)
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<kyak>
if you look back, you might say, that, yeah, SW from 1987 is crap. But it wasn't crap back then. I don't like it that i feel like crap with 1Gb RAM, even running minimalistic Linux
<kyak>
so the difference is that the today's SW is crap right now
<kyak>
while you can only call the SW from 1987 crap after 20 years
<wpwrak>
i daresay that sw from 1987 should be impressibly fast on today's hardware. around 1987 .. i think i had an ~8 MHz 8086-based PC with 640 kB of RAM (Amstrad PC-1512). floppy disks as mass storage. all that old sw would still run on my modern (just a few ywars old) PC, at several hundred times the speed. my floppy collection would comfortably fit in a RAM disk.
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<mth>
wpwrak: there are a lot of good games from that era, but we emulate the old hardware rather than port the games
<mth>
eh, I meant whitequark
<mth>
should have typed two letters before tab...
<mth>
porting wouldn't really be an option anyway, since most of the source code is proprietary, probably a lot of it is lost and a big portion was written in assembly rather than C
<mth>
about X11: I ran a remote desktop for a few years at work, where I had to use Windows for company-issued applications but did all development in Linux
<mth>
but I used NX rather than plain X11 because it performed better with KDE3
<mth>
remote X works very well with applications from 15 years ago, but not so well with GTK/Qt since they introduced theming and gradients etc
<whitequark>
indeed, and people want theming and gradients
<whitequark>
honestly, I would _not_ want to work on a 15-year-old desktops. it wasn't minimalistic because that's better, it was minimalistic because hardware was stupid.
<whitequark>
(apart from the fact that my main application runs in jvm and requies 1g+ to just start. it's a server one through, and that is well justified.)
<whitequark>
*15-year-old apps for plain X, if you'd like.
<whitequark>
wpwrak: it's indeed impressively fast, but is also very significantly featureless. e.g. C compilers.
<whitequark>
you still have tcc which would perform amazingly on a 25-year-old hardware
<whitequark>
but you also have "slow" and "bloated" LLVM which performs optimization better than humans do.
<whitequark>
and, well, there is almost no problem fitting a modern _equivalent_ of 15-year-old software on a floppy disk
<whitequark>
the problem is that people don't want an equivalent of black-and-white windows and dumb compilers and naive memory managers, they want more
<mth>
I still want to write a Z80 backend for LLVM one day
<whitequark>
heh
<wpwrak>
hmm. i use fvwm as window manager. that one's about 18 years old, more than the 15 you find unacceptable. and it still serves me very well.
<mth>
there are still people writing games for Z80 machines, but the C compilers they use are very poor at optimization
<mth>
really small fonts have to be hand-optimized to be readable
<whitequark>
mth: on my DPI I had to turn off hinting
<whitequark>
it was making fonts significantly worse
<whitequark>
srsly, once people see how do fonts look like on my display, they start saving money for the same notebook like I have.
<whitequark>
and I mean that literally. well, at least in two cases.
<wpwrak>
(vision) hmm, probably not. when wearing lenses, i'm having trouble to see fonts of that kind of size (6x10 or even 7x14) on my 211 dpi laptop. the joy of getting old ...
<whitequark>
to be honest I've no idea how big my letters are in terms of pixels
<whitequark>
it's 10pt
<wpwrak>
if that screenshot is your normal environment, then they must be some 50 pixels tall. useful if you have very long arms, 10 m or so ;-)
<whitequark>
wpwrak: indeed it is, let me get a photo of me working then
<mth>
at least KDE understands that DPI is implied by the combination of screen size and resolution and is not a setting
<whitequark>
mth: actually, I had to choose it as a setting in KDE
<mth>
really? that's a regression then
<whitequark>
might be. non-native resolutions on LCD displays are pointless anyway
<mth>
ah, there is a "force fonts DPI" setting, but it's disabled on my PC
<kyak>
whitequark: what's your notebook anyway?
<mth>
I can imagine it's useful if you have bad eyesight and want larger fonts from web pages
<mth>
but in theory it shouldn't be necessary for normal use
<whitequark>
wpwrak: http://imgur.com/k38Nr should give you an idea of how it looks in real life
<whitequark>
kyak: asus ux32vd. highly recommend as a linux machine for work. i7, discrete gpu, up to 10Gb RAM, very good quality.
<whitequark>
mth: Chrome ignores it anyway, I had to set default scaling to 125%
<mth>
but Chrome uses GTK, right? I think GTK does see DPI as a setting, which is plain wrong
<whitequark>
mth: it's an open bug in Chrom[ium]
<whitequark>
or rather in webkit
<kyak>
whitequark: it's a good time, right now i'm looking for my home laptop replacement :)
<whitequark>
mth: the point is, for two decades web designers thought that dpi==96.
<whitequark>
and now if you just change the dpi in webkit, half of web breaks
<mth>
yeah, I still have to tell people who write CSS that they should be using points rather than pixels except when dealing with bitmaps
<whitequark>
bitmaps, ewww. blurred web is also a norm for me nowadays :/
<mth>
well, if you have something like a screenshot, a bitmap is unavoidable
<whitequark>
mth: for UI
<whitequark>
e.g. gradients or buttons
<whitequark>
especially icons on buttons
<whitequark>
so awful
<mth>
and unfortunately IE was very late with SVG support, so if you want fancy icons bitmaps are still the only real option
<kyak>
whitequark: oh, 13.3" and Full HD? i currently have 15.6" and Full HD, and everything is pretty tiny (this is my WIndows machine at work)
<kyak>
i was looking for something 17" :)
<whitequark>
kyak: yeah, it's 13.3", Full HD _and_ IPS!
<kyak>
what's IPS?
<whitequark>
in-plane switching
<kyak>
uh. let me google it for me :)
<whitequark>
a technique of making LCD displays which makes white look like white and black like black
<whitequark>
and not like some dim, boring crap
<mth>
and it's got a much better viewing angle than TN panels do
<whitequark>
yep, 178 of 180 degrees
<whitequark>
i.e. any way you could want to look at it.
<kyak>
yeah, i'm thinkinh about it
<mth>
I got an S-PVA monitor for my desktop, that also has a good viewing angle
<kyak>
i was not considering anything below 15", so this laptop didn't catchmy attention..
<mth>
I really dislike it when colors change if you tilt your head a bit
<whitequark>
mth: especially if the most convenient looking angle does not match with the optimal LCD viewing angle
<whitequark>
annoying like hell
<mth>
with a laptop that often happens, with a desktop it's not so common
<whitequark>
yes
<mth>
but a desktop monitor is larger, so you are looking at sharper angles more often
<mth>
put an even color on the desktop background on a large TN panel and you'll see a gradient
<whitequark>
well I don't generally collect posessions of significant size. I like it if I can just pack all my stuff in a single backpack and go somewhere. so... no desktops as you can guess
<mth>
I'm pretty much the opposite, I only travel if I really want to be in some other place
<whitequark>
mth: I don't generally travel much
<whitequark>
rather the opposite
<whitequark>
I just like that I can do that.
<mth>
ah ok
<whitequark>
reduces amount of cruft in the place where you live, forces you to optimize consumption
<whitequark>
etc
<mth>
I don't like to throw away stuff that still works, so I've got quite a lot of old hardware around
<wpwrak>
whitequark: seems excessively huge. but well, maybe when i hit 60, i'll appreciate such sizes too... :)
<whitequark>
mth: I don't either, I give it away to those who need it
<wpwrak>
btw, white on black may help. allows the eye to use a smaller aperture, which increases the field of vision
<mth>
it's not huge at 170 dpi though
<whitequark>
wpwrak: hm. seems pretty normal to me.
<whitequark>
not really significantly bigger than on my previous notebook with an ordinary display
<wpwrak>
that's a good trick to know when suffering age-related farsightedness
<whitequark>
wpwrak: (white on black) I hate that combination. It always happens that I open the lid at night and, ow, my eyes are in pain
<wpwrak>
(not specifically for displays but for any reading/viewing situation)
<mth>
whitequark: I give away my old PCs, but I like to keep old game consoles around in case I want to play old games again
<wpwrak>
whitequark: that's what you get for trying to work before the hangover has subsided ;-)
<kristianpaul>
the only think i look when i buy a computer is display actually, if it reads ok no much bright and high resolution in small package is a way to go for me
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<kyak>
mirko: a bunch of qt4 packages result in the following error: Package qt4-drivers-gfx-directfb is missing dependencies for the following libraries: libQtGui.so.4 libQtNetwork.so.4
<kyak>
apart from qt4-drivers-gfx-directfb these are *mouse drivers and qt4-mysql (missing libmysql_r)
<kyak>
adding +qt4-gui and +qt4-network in DEPENDS for these packages yeilds strange results - these entries dissappear from .config
<kyak>
adding +PACKAGE_qt4-mysql:libmysqlclient-r to qt4-mysql DEPENDS solved the problem for qt4-mysql.. But for other packages, the situation seems different
<kyak>
i guess there is some cyclic dependency with qt4-gui and qt4-network
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<kyak>
mirko: running with the following patch now: https://gist.github.com/3874950 . Hope it helps, trial-and-error iterations over qt4 take so long
<FrankBlues>
:D
<FrankBlues>
Ack, wrong window, heh
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<qi-bot>
[commit] Marcos Paulo de Souza: media/radio/radio-rda5807.c: Use devm_* when allocating memory (jz-3.6) http://qi-hw.com/p/qi-kernel/dbd96db
<qi-bot>
[commit] Marcos Paulo de Souza: media/radio/radio-rda5807: Use module_i2c_driver instead of module_{init|exit} (jz-3.6) http://qi-hw.com/p/qi-kernel/a96c584
<qi-bot>
[commit] Marcos Paulo de Souza: media/radio/radio-rda5807.c: Wait for seek complete before return (jz-3.6) http://qi-hw.com/p/qi-kernel/7b4d427