Arkadian.eu

Icons, photos & vectors for projects

admin — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 08:02:15 +0000

This is a post that I will edit from time to time, adding more links as I find them.

1. This company has free and commercial icons: dryicons.com. I like the iconika icons (available in red, blue, green, grey – here is a sample in blue: http://dryicons.com/icon/iconika-blue-icons). One thing I really appreciated from this site, is that you get the option to download the icons at the size you need. This saved me a lot of time messing around with image resizing…

2. Fotolia.com is a good site (the only site I have personally paid so far to buy photos and vectors). Not as cheap as it used to be, but still good value, considering the amount of material that’s posted there.

3. Vector Stock sells vectors from various creators: www.vectorstock.com
I like the concept of the hand-drawn icons from this artist: Azzzya. This is a great place to pick up nice designs for presentation backgrounds and office reports.

4. Another interesting site is Wikimedia. You can use whatever you need, but you may have to search a lot to find something you need/like. Definitely worth looking into, if you have the time.

openWRT device from Omnima UK

arkadian — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:30:53 +0000

29 Aug 2011
Omnima UK sell a tiny little board for less than £40, that runs on openWRT Linux and has ethernet, WiFi and a USB port. It seems to be a great base for simple projects, when we need more power than one arduino.

Link to product

I’ve ordered one to try something I have in mind.

Btw, at the openWRT site, there is a VM available. I downloaded and tried it yesterday, but I had problems connecting USB peripherals…. Never mind. I have to say I loved the web interface and the precompiled binaries and the fact you can ran python on it!

11 Sep 2011
I’ve now received the device. It runs Fonera (have a look at some screenshots and more info here). Easy to access through a web interface. I tried to load the latest Fonera software and it didn’t quite work; now the device won’t boot. I’m able to log in to it using telnet and a serial cable, but I haven’t been able to load the old bin file yet… I’ll keep you posted…

Kill a process from the command line in Windows 7

admin — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:49:01 +0000

From your command line type

tasklist

to see all the tasks that are running.

If you want to kill the instance of notepad++ which happened to crash (…), type:

Taskkill /IM notepad++.exe /F

Take Snapshots using Python

arkadian — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:05:00 +0000

1
2
3

import ImageGrab
img = ImageGrab.grab()
img.save('arkadian.png','PNG')

A quick and easy way to take a snapshot of your current window.
You can always use JPG, but the quality is better in PNG.

Works in Windows and requires PIL.

Merging pdf files in Python with pyPDF

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:25:19 +0000

Here is a very simple python script that marges two pdf files, using the pyPDF library.

import os.path
import pyPdf
 
pdfOne = "C:\\a.pdf"
pdfTwo = "C:\\b.pdf"
 
merged = "C:\\c.pdf"
 
if os.path.exists(pdfOne) and os.path.exists(pdfTwo): 
 
	output = pyPdf.PdfFileWriter()
 
	pdfOne = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(pdfOne, "rb"))
	for page in range(pdfOne.getNumPages()):
		output.addPage(pdfOne.getPage(page))
 
	pdfTwo = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(pdfTwo, "rb"))
	for page in range(pdfTwo.getNumPages()):
		output.addPage(pdfTwo.getPage(page))
 
	outputStream = open(merged, "wb")
	output.write(outputStream)
	outputStream.close()

AWS, SSH & Keys…

arkadian — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:38:41 +0000

Have you got problems connecting to your AWS instance?

Assuming SSH is running on your instance and the firewall allows SSH traffic to and from your instance, just save your key somewhere locally (in this example it’s: linux_us_key.pem) and try this:
ssh -v -i linux_us_key.pem root@xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Don’t forget to chmod 400 your key, otherwise your bash may throw an error saying you should do so…