pmeerw's blog

Mon, 01 Jan 2024

Brio to Duplo converter

Making good use of a 3D printer.

posted at: 19:45 | path: /fun | permanent link

Wed, 14 Dec 2022

Fun with a pixel art frame

Got a 16x16 Divoom Pixoo pixel art frame, a Bluetooth connected device with a small battery in a nice case. It can blink pixels. There's an app and Github repo with Python code.

Still, getting the think to run was a bit of a challenge on Ubuntu 22.04... First, it show up as a Bluetooth device:

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
	11:75:58:xx:xx:xx	Pixoo
Then, one can check if RFCOMM is available using sdptool:
$ sdptool browse 11:75:58:xx:xx:xx
Browsing 11:75:58:xx:xx:xx ...
Service Name: Serial Port 1
Service RecHandle: 0x10004
Service Class ID List:
  "Serial Port" (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 1
Note the channel number (1), older Divoom devices use (4) here.

Next, there's an issue with Ubuntu's python3-pybluez package (0.23-4build1) in 22.04/jammy:

self.sock.send(bytes(package))
  File "", line 3, in send
SystemError: PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN macro must be defined for '#' formats
It's an issue with Python 3.10 and apparently a special flag macro must be #defined when compiling the library. Luckily, this can be easily fixed by installing the python3-pybluez 0.23-5 package from 22.10/kinetic.

posted at: 13:11 | path: /fun | permanent link

Tue, 26 May 2020

Finally: LaTeX.css

CSS library that turns your HTML document into a website that looks like a LaTeX document. Write semantic HTML, add <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://latex.now.sh/style.css"> to the <head> and...

posted at: 00:18 | path: /fun | permanent link

Thu, 30 Jan 2020

Emojis and Unicode codepoints

The "pinched fingers" emoji, the Italian hand gesture ma che vuoi, has been added to Unicode 13.0 (end of January 2020, new in Emoji 13.0), codepoint is U+1F90C.

Does your font already support it? 🤌
Pile of Poo (U+1F4A9, 💩) has been supported since Unicode 6.0 (2010) and was added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

posted at: 16:49 | path: /fun | permanent link

Tue, 12 Jun 2018

Henry on stage (green screen)

Playing with a green screen (chroma keying) and recording with Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio).

Using two USB webcams and my Alpine email window as video sources.

There is a video recording as well.

posted at: 23:57 | path: /fun | permanent link

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