My big haul (in a little box) of Lego™ bits turned up. I bought them from the Brick Artist Depot, run by a very pleasant and accommodating bloke in Atlanta. Very happy. Go and make him a rich man.
I now own another two motors that look identical to those that come with the Lego™ Mindstorms kit. Slightly worrying is that these are known to fail. Conversely the four turntables should come in quite handy.
This looks interesting: a Wikipedia-style collaborative robotics textbook. Sounds like a great idea.
A three speed automatic transmission built out of Lego™. Wow.
I've put off trying out darcs for ages, indeed, longer than I've been
putting off checking my stuff into a crusty old CVS repository. My main
operations are diffing (to see if I've screwed things up more than I'm aware
of) and finding that little bit of code from ten revisions back that hacked
around that little problem that came back. pcl-cvs in XEmacs was
good for the former, and I just dug around in the repository itself for the
latter.
It seems there's a pcl-cvs-equivalent for darcs in the pipeline, and
moreover is being actively hacked. Find the repo here, darcs'ed, of
course.
Well, it works, and that's a good start. A Haskell program doing useful things? Unheard of!
I've been meaning to get a new X-server for a long time now, as the one I
have is bug ridden. I thought I'd managed to upgrade it in the past, as the
build process for these X.org servers continues after fatal errors... and
restarting with make World kicks off a big clean, which makes
this behaviour both misleading and somewhat useless to non-hardcore hackers.
The short story is that at this point in time X.org R6.9.0 does not
readily compile on Mac OS X 10.4 (using GCC 4.0), but R6.8.2 does
after you do some fiddling. Most of the trick is to replace the files that
fail to compile with their updated selves in a R6.9.0 tree, and the rest is
a small tweak to darwinKeyboard.c. Here's a patch that does it
for you. Apply it with:
patch -p1 < patch-Xorg-R6.8.2-OSX-10.4.3-GCC-4.0.1
in your <build-dir>/xc/ directory.
Thanks to Torrey Lyons for the pointers.
Too arty for me.
Fay Grim — a sequel to his masterpiece Henry Fool? Could it be?
