Over the xmas break I bought myself an Arduino Mini, which was a wonderful distraction from all of the revision I was supposed to be doing.
One of the things I did with it was to hook it up to an oscilloscope, in order to draw stuff on the screen.
Someone’s just asked me how I did it, so I figure now’s as good a time as any to write it up.
Even though it’s now the distant future, my university still insists on serving all web traffic through a single, archaic, annoying proxy server. So, when it explodes, like it has this evening, no-one on campus can surf the web. That includes the thousands of residents who live in university managed properties. There are no 24 hour technicians, so we will all have to wait until tomorrow until we can do any study that involves the internet (which is most of it, these days).
But! I’m posting this journal entry! Which means I can access the web. But how? The answer is not that I’m paying $0.002, nor even 0.002ยข per KB for mobile phone internet access. No; my saviour this evening is a combination of SDF public access unix system and SSH pretending to be a web proxy server.
At last, somewhere to collect useful unix one-liners.
Unix/linux is great. It’ll do anything for you. You just need to know how to ask it.
So anyway, the thing that prompted me to set up this online journal was my recurring desire to share things that I create with the world. In this instance; the thing that pushed me to actually do something about it, was a perl script I had just written which creates a wall of videos. I created it to optimise my porn viewing, and because I couldn’t find anything to play multiple video files side by side, in a grid.
So after an evening of not too painful bash scripting, pivot is now1 available as an auto-install tool on SDF.
See http://motd.org/ for more details about SDF’s web tools collection.
1 Once I’ve squashed whatever bug is causing the dubious file permissions.