Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • You can never have enough R2D2.

    You can never have enough R2D2.

    You can never have enough R2D2.

     

  • Me and R2D2

    Me and R2D2

    Picture testing.

  • Just trying out posting from WordPress.

  • Distraction free writing tools and hardware

    After I stumbled across the Hemingwrite – A Distraction Free Digital Typewriter by Hemingwrite Kickstarter, I started looking at different ways to accomplish the same task but without spending $500 on a device. I’ve always had an interested in different writing setups, and would love to be a writer. For some reason, my lack of grammar and my legendary skill at procrastination has not resulted in the next great American novel. Here are some of my setups I’ve been trying.

    Macintosh SE/30 running System 6 with Microsoft Word

    I have written a few posts on my Macintosh SE/30 and about bringing it back to life. It works really well as a distraction free system, it’s very fast, quiet, and reliable. Pulling documents off of the machine is as simple as copying them to a floppy drive.

    IBM Thinkpad T51e running Ubuntu at the console and using vim

    This isn’t that bad of a machine, the keyboard is really nice. Unfortunately, I can run multiple consoles and can still chat and surf (all at the console) but it’s harder to not be distracted. It’s really nice in the fact that I can use Dropbox or git on it, and reconfiguring the console font gave me a pretty nice font.

    Atari 800 running The Last Word

    Writing on my Atari 800 is fun! The keyboard is really nice, and The Last Word is a fantastic word processor. Pulling files off is a little bit of a pain (saving to a disk image and then extracting the file from that disk image) and I haven’t figured out a good way to send files to it for editing.

    Atari MegaSTe running Protext

    I love the keyboard on the Mega STe, but writing in Protext wasn’t the best. I don’t know if it was the weird interface or what, but it just wasn’t a nice experience. I will probably go back to ST Writer the next time I write with it.

    Raspberry Pi with a Nook Simple Touch display

    My newest experiment is using a Nook Simple Touch as the display. That was one feature of the Hemingwrite that I really liked, the use of an e-ink display. E-ink is the display used in the black and white e-readers,and has a very low power usage profile. The other advantage is the fact that it works well in bright light situations, such as outside.

    I have this working as a prototype in my house. The Raspberry Pi is connected to my wifi, and running tmux at the console. With a rooted Nook Simple Touch, I connected to the local wifi and ran vx-connectbot which connected to my Pi. After connecting, I ran tmux -a, which then connected the vx-connectbot session with the console session, and I used the keyboard connected to the Pi but the display was on the Nook Simple Touch. I had to configure some vx-connectbot settings to get a good experience, but it worked really well. Next up is to figure out how to package the parts into something that would be portable.

  • My conference checkist – 2016 edition

    As I get ready for the Ohio Educational Technology Conference this week I though it would be a good idea to revisit my conference checklist.

    1. Charge devices and battery packs

    My devices I’m currently taking are a 2010 MacBook Pro, iPad Mini 3, and iPhone 6 Plus. I’d like to take my Kindle and a Raspberry Pi, but I get tired of lugging a 30 lb backpack around for three days. My current USB battery pack of choice is the PowerGen 12000mAh External Battery (unfortunately, it looks like it is now unavailable). The nice thing about this battery pack is that it supports pass through charging, which means I can power a Raspberry Pi and plug it in to charge without disrupting the Pi.

    During the conference I’ll rely on my iPad Mini or iPhone a majority of the time. Even though I now get almost 7 hours of battery life out of my MacBook Pro, that’s still not enough to get through three days of a conference.

    2. Set up IFTTT to capture my notes and tweets

    If This Then That (IFTTT) is a web service that can interact with services and do things on your behalf. To facilitate my note taking during conferences, I set up IFTTT to automatically append all of my tweets with the conference hashtag to a file. With this set up, I can share what I learn in the sessions and automatically save them to my notes.

    3. Set up a keyboard shortcut for the conference hashtag

    And, to make it easier to use the conference hashtag, I will use the iPhone keyboard shortcuts and set ooo to be the conference hashtag #oetc16. I’ll also have oxx set for the OETCx unconference hashtag #oetcx.

    4. Add a workflow to Drafts for tweeting during the conference

    Drafts for iOS is my go to app for creating notes and automating tasks on my iPhone. For conferences, I’ll set up a workflow that will tweet the draft with the conference hashtags. With this set up, I click Drafts, type my tweet, and then run the conference tweeting workflow which will append the conference hashtag to the Tweet and then send it. Pretty nifty.

    5. Get gas, cash, and Ho Hos

    The Ho Hos should not need an explanation.

  • SCSI2SD with my Macintosh SE/30

    As I was working on my SE/30, I knew I didn’t want to go with a SCSI hard drive. I started looking online and came across the SCSI2SD. I purchased mine with a 256MB SD card from Inertial Computing on eBay. Now that it is up and running, I’m very happy with it.

    When using with an older Macintosh, you may have an issue when it comes to initializing and using a non-Apple drive. The first time, Apple HD SC Setup wouldn’t find the drive. I then found this forum post. I followed dougg3’s directions when setting up the SCSI2SD.

    • Set the vendor to the string ” SEAGATE” (yes, there is a single space in front of SEAGATE for a total of 8 characters)
    • Set the product ID to the string ” ST225N” (10 spaces in front for a total of 16 characters)
    • Set the revision to the string “1.0 ” (with a space after, for a total of 4 characters)

    Apple HD SC Setup then saw the drive. The other thing I had to do was re-partition the drive after it set it up, since Apple HD SC Setup only create a 16MB partition and left the rest of the drive unpartitioned. I deleted that partition and then created a 256MB partition.

  • The Macintosh SE/30 lives

    Tonight, after just a little bit of tinkering, was a good night for my Macintosh SE/30. After I swapped the 2GB SD card in the SCSI2SD drive with a 256MB SD card, I was able to initialize the drive correctly. At first it only set up a 16MB partition, so I did have to re-partition the drive, but after that, the installation of System 6.0.7 was a breeze. And even though this thing only has 2MB of RAM, it is quick! I don’t know if it’s the SCSI2SD device or the fact that System 6 doesn’t require a whole lot, but Microsoft Word 4.0 loads almost instantly. I’ll have to measure the boot time when I get a chance.

    The Macintosh SE/30

    I’m writing this blog post in Microsoft Word on the SE/30. The worst part is the fact that the keyboard needs a good cleaning. I’m not too impressed with the Apple Extended Keyboard II, although I’ve heard people rave about it. I think I have an IIgs compact keyboard around here somewhere to replace it. The smaller size fits better with the SE/30 anyway.

  • Bringing my Apple Macintosh SE/30 back to life

    Several months ago an Apple Macintosh SE/30 came across eBay at a price I was willing to pay. It had a dead hard drive in it, but that wasn’t a big deal to me. I had already been looking at the SCSI2SD devices so the plan was to use one for the drive. Old hard drives are way too loud anyway. 🙂

    Last night I finally unwrapped the beast. The Apple Extended Keyboard II appears to have sustained some damage in shipment, but I think it still works. I cracked open the case and put the SCSI2SD device in place, but after Apple HD Setup chewed on the drive for 20 minutes, it said initialization failed. Ugh. Searching the Internet brought up something called Lido, so that’s what I’m going to try next. Unfortunately, I don’t know how I’m going to do it on the SE/30 because I only System 6 on a floppy, so I’m going to attempt to set it up from my 20th Anniversary Mac.

  • My blogging at RyanCollins.org vs Eduk8.me

    I’ve been struggling with my online identity and what I want to share. Too often I try to spread myself too thin, but if I’m not trying to learn it all I feel like I’m missing something. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve taken a different route with RyanCollins.org and Eduk8.me. For now I’m going to use RyanCollins.org for more nerdy pastimes, such as Raspberry Pi hacking and command line tomfoolery, and Eduk8.me for more general purpose Edtech tips.

  • Searching bash history when it’s in multiple files

    When I look for previous commands that I have ran in bash, I use history | grep COMMAND. That works well when you’re history is in one file, but I now save my history in multiple files from each shell and my simple command doesn’t work.

    With my history files saved in ~/.bash_history_log/ I needed a different solution. The one I came up with is grep -ri COMMAND ~/.bash_history_log/*. That seems awfully long, lets make it shorter. You can’t pass arguments to bash aliases, but you can to functions. In .bash_profile (or .bashrc, which ever runs for you by default) I added the following function:

    function searchhistory() {
    grep -ri "${1}" ~/.bash_history_log/*
}
alias shistory=searchhistory

    And now a simple shistory COMMAND is all it takes to find that command I ran a long time ago.