Month: February 2008

Firefox

I have finally given up and installed firefox again. I was a little disapointed that the ‘Live bookmarks’ feature was not as good at displaying news feeds as Internet Explorer, however I quickly rectified this situation by Installing Sage

Lake District Holiday

I recently went on holiday to the Lake District with my girlfriend Johanna, Our Australian friends Micheal and Melissa, Johanna’s sister Trish and her boyfriend Chris. We arrived in Backbarrow on Thursday afternoon unpacked, settled in, and had a really nice steak dinner that Mike cooked for us. On Friday we went for a boat trip on Lake Windermere. The boat took us from Lakeside to Browness. We walked around Browness village before having lunch in a local pub. We caught the boat back to Lakeside in the afternoon, and visited an aquarium in Lakeside. On Saturday we had to get up really early as we had booked an assault course activity day in Grizedale, it was quite an exhilarating experience. On Sunday, we packed our bags and said goodbye to the cottage in Backbarrow, and headed towards Ingleton. In Ingleton we went for a 5 mile Waterfall Trail walk, It was really nice to get some fresh air and strech our legs.

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Mplayer on Tom Tom

I am now trying to run Mplayer on Tom Tom so that I can watch videos and drive anyone reading this to drink. I found however that Mplayer requires a lot of system resources that are being used by the Navigation application (ttn) So I needed a way to free up the memory and resources being used by the application. This should be as simple as just killing the application using

killall ttn

But the problem is that the ttn application is responsible for petting the dog. That is to say that there is a WatchDog Timer which resets the device after 15 seconds unless something continuously resets the timer.
All that was needed was a script to reset the timer instead, So here is my solution:

#!/bin/sh
killall ttn &&
while(true) do
echo '' > /dev/watchdog
sleep 10
done

The trick is to kill the ttn but also keep the Watchdog from reseting the device. The script also has to be invoked as a background job, so I used an ‘&’ after the command.

./free.sh &