Kingfisher FM is now broadcasting radio for Redditch and the local area. This is a 28 day RSL broadcast license in a bid towards a permanent broadcast license from Ofcom.

Kingfisher FM is on 87.7 FM and on the Internet at www.kingfisherfm.net.

I tried to find the radio station this morning after they started broadcasting, but my car radio was unable to detect the radio station. I also had the same problem on my way home from work, but after a few tries I was finally able to tune in. If you have a digital radio you may have similar problems. If you can manually tune the radio then select 87.7, if not (or you don’t know how) then try in different parts of Redditch and you should be able to tune in eventually.

Fortunately once I’d tuned the radio station in – and added it to my pre-set stations (on digital car radios this is normally done by hold down the button of choice for a few seconds) then I was able to receive the radio including in areas where the auto-tune did not work.

Reception varies around the Redditch area with some areas where the signal cannot be received. Unfortunately the signal is very faint at my home in Redditch, but I can listen to the station on my journey to and from work. This is comparable with other radio stations that can be received from transmitters outside of Redditch, although when they were broadcasting Radio Redditch had a slightly better signal at my home than Kingfisher FM does.

The radio also broadcasts over the Internet if you unable to receive it through FM radio.

I have only heard Kingfisher FM briefly today, so I’m not able to comment on it’s broadcasting, but they have already proved they are able to provide a useful service to the residents of Redditch during the snow earlier this year. When we had the snow Kingfisher FM used their website to provide information on school closures and other events cancelled due to the snow.

Related posts

• Radio Redditch – off air for now
• Radio Redditch and Kingfisher FM – Trying to get a full time radio license for Redditch
• Radio Redditch vs TomTom MP3 broadcast

There is a new version of the Processing programming language released version 1.1.

Processing is an easy to use programming language designed for creating visual programs designed for use in creating computer art. For non-artists as well, I think it’s an ideal language for anyone learning programming, or that wants a easy way to create visual applications.

It is easy to create a graphical application without having to worry about complex layout managers, but it doesn’t have the standard menu or pull down buttons which are a standard feature of most GUI programming languages. This may not be an issue if you are creating an application with a non-standard interface (such as a game) or an applet to run inside a web browser.

When the code is compiled it generates Java code which can be run on any computer with a recent Java Virtual Machine.

It’s a great language to learn programming with and it’s easy to move on to Java if you subsequently want to make use of the Swing libraries etc.

Related Links

• Processing programming language – on Ubuntu Netbook Remix Karmic
• jEdit – adding syntax highlighting for Processing
• Book Review: Processing A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists
• Book Review: Head First Java
• Book Review: Java, Swing: A Beginner’s Guide
• Book Review: Java The Complete Reference

Today is World Book Day.

Many schools and nurseries throughout the UK are celebrating with book related events to promote reading amongst children. It’s not just schools that should do something special for World Book Day, but it’s something all parents can involve their children with.

As a parent I believe that reading with my children and encouraging my children to enjoy books and reading is one of the most important things that I can do to help their education. I am an avid reader myself, which includes the books (fiction and non-fiction) and magazines, but also following tweets, reading blogs and reading other information on the Internet.

My wife and I try to read to or with our children every day. This varies from just reading a bedtime story to sitting with our child to read her school book or, when we have more time, reading a book to them and then talking about the story.

Last night we read “Little Red Train: The Runaway Train” and “My Daddy is a Giant“. I’ll need to wait until tonight to find out what tonights story will my wife is taking our dauhter to a school book sale after school today.

Reading doesn’t have to be expensive. Many charity shops sell books at very affordable prices and it doesn’t need to cost anything if you visit your local library. We are lucky in Redditch to have a newly refurbished library. Our children love going to the library to choose books to read and most libraries run a reward scheme for young readers where they can gain a certificate through regularly borrowing books from the library.

What will you be doing to encourage your children to enjoy reading?

• World Book Day web site

I’ve been looking for a way to make a semi-permanent connection to the connector on the Arduino micro-controller.

The onboard connectors are female PCB header connectors. These are ideal for prototyping as you can stick solid core wires into the connectors, but these are not so good for connecting to another PCBs or external devices.

There are expansion PCBs available known as shields, but they are expensive and a bit too elaborate for the circuit I’m creating as I need to connect to an external PCB for space and heat reasons. I’d also tried soldering direct to straight PCB male headers, but they are very fiddly and the connection was not very secure.

I posted a question on the Arduino Forum – Making physical connections to the Arduino board which had some good suggestions, but still not quite what I was looking for.

I’ve now found an alternative in the form of right angle headers that can be used in conjunction with standard PCB connectors, which are easy to crimp and solder to stranded wire. These are available in a few different sizes, in the example above I have used a pair of 4-way connectors, but these are also available as 8-way connectors. They also take up a lot of space (not an issue in this project), but the good thing is that they do feel fairly secure.

After some searching I found these connectors from Rapid Electronics (rapidonline.com). I think Maplin sell a similar product up to 4-way, although it’s not clear from the photo they sound like the same type of connector.

2.54 Right Angle Header at Rapidonline.com

0.1 Inch Series Right-Angled PCB Header Plugs at Maplin

I’ve still got some way to go on the project, but I’m making steady progress.

You can follow the progress on my Arduino based, computer controlled disco / theater light project by following PenguinTutor on Facebook or Twitter.

The LPI practice exams on PenguinTutor are now fully updated to the current LPI exam guidelines.

The Linux Professional Institute updated the objectives in 2009. At the time I went through validating the questions on PenguinTutor.com were still valid, but it looks like I didn’t make all the changes required.

Most of the questions are still correct, but some were under the wrong exam category.

In somecases it appears I have not moved the question to the appropriate exam or I’ve ended up with the question in both the new and old categories. This looks like it was just a human error when I worked my way through the questions. I’ve hopefully fixed it now and I’ve also taken the opportunity to add some new questions which I didn’t do before.

I’ve also used this opportunity to add a few more questions related to some of the objectives that did not have many questions before.

So hopefully the LPI practice exams are once again all up-to-date and relevant. Thanks to those that pointed out the errors and if you notice any issues please let me know using the email form.

• Try the LPI test questions

This is a book review of a book for artists. The review is being written by someone that is not much of an artist. You need to keep this in mind when reading this review.

I am an engineer and experienced programming, perhaps the complete opposite of the target audience of this group. Although Processing is designed by and for artists it has a lot to offer others as well. The reason I was looking at Processing is it’s relationship to the Arduino programming language, but I’ve since taken a likening to this as a programming language in it’s own right. It’s an easy language to learn and it’s easy to create a graphical (GUI) application without needing to learn the intricacies of window managers etc. (*); it’s good for designing novel GUI programs which are not constrained by conventional button design and it’s portable (based on Java) allowing you to create either applications or applets for any operating system.

As the language is designed for artists, so are the books that explain how to program in processing. This book has some really good reviews (from artists) and that’s why I chose this book.

The book starts programming from a very basic level. Anyone with any past experience of programming will find this a bit tedious. In most beginner books you can just skip the early chapters, but that’s not quite so easy with Processing as the programming is quite different to creating GUIs in other languages.

As the book progresses the book covers some of the more complex parts of the language including object oriented programming and some complex graphics programming. It also includes programming for mobile phones – another example where Processing could be an advantage over some other programming languages.

The book maintains the artist theme throughout, with explanations of how this is applied to creating art and with case studies looking at artists that have used programming for art. This makes a welcome change at first, but I found myself skipping many of the case studies as I went through the book. [did I mention already - I am not an artist]

Something that is good is the time given to the explanations of drawing vector graphics. I’m sure that when I was at college I knew more about triganometry, but I couldn’t think off-hand how to find a point on the circumfrance of a circle (needed to draw a X in the middle of a circle), this will clearly explained in the book along with a lot of other 2D drawing aspects.

The final chapter in the book covers programming the Arduino (#). Built on the previous content this is quite useful and includes code for the PC and the Arduino including communicating between the two.

I am quite happy with the book although it did feel a bit slow at times. As I said at the beginning I am not an artist; if I was I’m sure I would have liked this book more. The book which covered everything needed to get me started with Processing and programming the Arduino with excellant explanations of drawing shapes and 2D graphics. I would have rather seen more programming and less case studies, but otherwise I am very happy with the book. A worthwhile investment for anyone interested in the Processing programming language, particularly those new to programming.

Note:

(*) – admittedly this also means it doesn’t have the benefits of a GUI Window Manager either, but that’s another story
(#) – About the Ardiuino

I have recently been having a go with the Processing programming language.

You can see my first attempt in the Interactive Diode circuit demonstration – Processing / Java applet on PenguinTutor.com.

I really do like the language. It was ideally suited to the applet that I have created and I hope to add a few more soon.

I did come across a problem running on Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 (Karmic). It only seamed to apply to my netbook (it worked fine in a VM running UNR 9.10), so I’m guessing it may be a problem with Java and / or the video driver on the netbook. The problem was that when running a Windowed application compiled in the Processing Development Environment (PDE), but not an applet or fullscreen app, then X would restart leaving me back at the login prompt.

I tried the Ubuntu Forums: Solved – Re: Processing restarts X on UNR Karmic, but with no response I also posed to the Processing bug tracking tool.

The response directed me at a FAQ page – which I had seen before, but this time I noticed that Processing required Java 1.5, but I’d got 1.6 installed. My other machines also had 1.6 installed and worked fine, but I tried installing 1.5 and it now works fine.

If you find similar problems here are the steps I took to get Processing working:

To get it working I had to install JDK 1.5 and then link to that instead. You have to jump through a few hoops to get to the appropriate download page on the Java site which I found at: https://dct.sun.com/dct/forms/reg_us_0809_958_0.jsp

I then had to register to get a link to actually download the JDK (note must be JDK – JRE is not sufficient).

Once downloaded I ran the .bin file as root into the /opt directory. Then deleted the java directory in processing and replaced it with the following symlink:
sudo ln -s /opt/jdk1.5.0_21/ /opt/processing-1.0.9/java

There is now a new pre-release version of Processing – released this weekend, so I’ll give that a go and see if that works better with 1.6.

It looks like the future will see Processing for the Android smart phone which sounds exciting as well.

I have changed the copyright rules for the First Aid Quiz printable questions. I have relaxed the rules to make it easier for the questions to be incorporated into a commercial training session as this is something I have received enquiries about in the past.

I would like as many people to be able to access the questions as possible and so I think this is a positive step. I feel that I still need to retain elements of the copyright in particular where it relates to online distribution. One reason is that it means that I have control over the questions and when they are updated in future there will not be any out-of-date questions on other peoples site which are from my quiz. Another reason is that I have had bad experience in the past with commercial sites ripping off my content and then selling it commercially – they are therefore profiting from my efforts without providing anything back to the community.

I believe this is now a good compromise with an appropriate level of copyright to protect the availability of the quiz and making it easier to use in commercial training. Please feel free to let me know what you think either leaving feedback to this post or through my contact form.

Updated copyright rules for first aid quiz offline questions.

I’ve recently been learning the Processing programming language. This is a programming language created for artists which is also the basis for the programming language used to program the Arduino. Processing includes an IDE called the Processing Development Environment (PDE), but the editor is quite basic.

The IDE has an option to use an external editor. One of my preferred editors is jEdit due to it’s cross-platform support. Jedit has built-in support for over 170 languages, but not processing which I guess is still a little bit too niche at the moment.

Adding a new language is fairly easy – and I’ve cheated a little to make it very easy.
Processing has a similar syntax to Java (as it’s based on Java), so I’ve just copied the Java syntax highlighting file with the option to tweak if I want to change in future.

The syntax highlighting is defined within xml files in the modes directory.

On Linux this is usually /usr/share/jedit/modes
On Windows this is c:\Program Files\jEdit\modes

As I was just using the java one I copied java.xml to processing.xml

Then add an entry to the catalog file “catalog”
Load the catalog file (eg. /usr/share/jedit/modes/catalog) into your favourite text editor [that'll be jEdit then] and add the following entry at an appropriate point; the file is in alphabetical order, although I don’t think the actual position matters it makes it easier to find.

<MODE NAME="processing"		FILE="processing.xml"
				FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.pde" />

The FILE_NAME_GLOB says to apply this rule to any files ending .pde (which is used by processing files) treat them as processing files and use the mode as described in processing.xml.

In my case this reloaded straight away, but if not then you can force a reload using
Utilities -> Troubleshooting -> Reload Edit Modes

In future it may be worth tweaking the processing.xml file to ensure any differences between Java and processing are highlighted properly, but the standard file appears to be working fine at the moment.

I’ve now completed a major reorganisation of the PenguinTutor web site. This is the most significant change to the site since it was launched in 2006.

The first reason for the change is to reorganise the content. Although it appeared to make sense at the time some of the categories were not as logical as they could be. Hopefully it is now easier to find the information.

I also I wanted to move the site search to be included on the pages rather than having a separate search page.

Most significantly I have now created a new section and changed the aim of the site. Previously the focus of the site was Linux and Linux certification (specifically LPI), with only the blog going a bit further to include other technology related news items. I have now expanded the site to cover all aspects of free and open source software and hardware.

The new section created is on electronics hardware and projects including projects based on the open source Arduino microprocessor based circuit.

I will be adding more content in the future as I’m currently working on an electronic circuit. With the new site redesign it will have a much more logical position within the site rather than just being tagged as though and afterthought.

There are still a few little bits that need fixing (search bar missing on some of the deeper web pages etc.), but it appears to be working okay and I’ll be cleaning those up over the next few days.

Follow the progress and updates on the PenguinTutor Facebook Page, or follow PenguinTutor @ Twitter.