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Outdoor: Recumbing Running
Software: jnitodo squidefender Wormwarner
Latest books read: Lincoln Child - Deep Storm Lee Child - The Hard Way Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival Preston & Child - Still Life with Crows
Latest movies seen: Death Race The Objective Deception Hellboy - The Golden Army

23 September 2008

20:55: Today it is 5 years ago that I registered the jeroen.se domain.
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25 August 2008

17:46: Since a few weeks I use the jnitodo todo list manager for managing my todo list. jnitodo was written by myself, so it matches my requirements quite well and it might match yours!
more

13 August 2008

12:51: Yesterday I ran into a bug in my Samsung S1060 digital camera. If you press the view photos button while the red-eye flash pictogram is flashing white and red it hangs and becomes unresponsive.
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11 August 2008

12:59: While migrating my account to another machine which uses openldap authentication I ran into the problem that cron were not working on the new machine. A quick look in the logs revealed the following error:
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29 July 2008

17:50: I often get the question how I manage to survive my long commute time during the week. This question is often raised when in a conversation it becomes clear that I travel over 4 hours per day by train. In this blog post I will try to give a small insight in how I manage this.
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09 July 2008

13:23: Just a quick blog post about how to run a command like uptime in more than one screen window. Just do crtl-a then
:at "#" stuff "uptime\015"
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28 June 2008

21:58: I just reached the 1000 kilometer mark with my recumbent bike. It took me 46 hours and 24 minutes, averaging a 21.55 km/h speed. The last month however my average cycling speed is increasing, so I should do the next 1000 kilometer in less time.
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Using infrared to connect a Palm to FreeBSD

By Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen

I use a palm m100 as PDA, however my laptop does not have a serial port. My laptop does have a infrared port as does the palm m100. Therefor I started to investigate how to connect my Palm to my laptop using infrared.

Checking the installation

First of all I checked whether the infrared port was recognized:
[jnieuwen]$ dmesg | grep sio
sio0 port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on acpi0
sio0: type 16550A
The infrared port shows up as a serial interface. Because I have no other serial devices this one must be the infrared port.

Installing the software

To synchronize my palm to my laptop I need at least pilot-link which can be installed from the portstree. This is however not enough to use infrared. To use irda you also need to install the birda package from the ports tree.

Using the software

First off all you have to run irs from the birda package:
irs -v 1 -e -c -y /dev/ptypv -d /dev/cuaa0 &
The 0 in cuaa0 depends on the number of the serial interface, in my case sio0. After this we have a pseudo serial interface over Irda to communicate with the palm using pilot-xfer. Synchronizing can be done by:
pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttypv -s palm
Note that the pseudo serial interface ptypv is contacted by pilot-xfer using ttypv. It is also important to choose the right baud rate when using this setup. It is probably the best solution to start with a low value before trying higher transfer speeds.

Conclusion

Setting up FreeBSD to use infrared to synchronize a palm is straight forward. The only problem I had run into during this process was choosing the right baud rate for communicating over the serial interface.

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Generated by a bunch of M4 macros on Wed Oct 1 03:09:02 CEST 2008
$Id: freebsd_palm_infrared.m4 2194 2008-06-27 20:09:03Z jnieuwen $
© 2002 - 2008 Ir. Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen
I know I'm not perfect but I can smile.