Following are some articles and presentations related to Open Source software, discoveries and hints that have solved problems for me, and software that I have developed implementing and maintaining my personal systems that I hope others may find helpful.
This article and resources support a presentation I made to the 2022-10-25 meeting of the Calgary Unix Users Group.
This are the slides of a presentation I made to the Calgary Unix Users Group 2019-01-22.
"Internet of Things" is easy to say, but hard to do. Building the robust systems required for remote sensing and field data collection has traditionally required specialized skills, development tools, and hardware. Micro controller based solutions lack the libraries and community support necessary to easily implement sophisticated applications or integrate with other systems. As a result, solutions for smaller scale problems are considered uneconomic.
The piCore Linux distribution, a port of Tiny Core Linux to Raspberry Pi hardware, offers an alternative approach. Undemanding of hardware and resilient to interruption, piCore facilitates the development of embedded systems using the tool sets and libraries already familiar to developers, which can be deployed on readily available, inexpensive, and broadly supported Raspberry Pi hardware.
Label is a BASH shell script that prints labels on a Brother P-Touch label printer from the command line.
The script is dependent upon GhostScript, spell, bc, netbpm, and the program pbmtoptouch, which can be downloaded from ftp.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/moraes/ptouch.shar.gz.
It was developed and is used with the original, serial connected, Brother P-Touch PC label printer. I suspect it works with later versions of these printers as well, but until I run out of label stock, or my printer dies, I won't be able to test it. A manual page is included.
There are a number of environment variables set at the beginning of the script, which can be edited to configure the script as required.
The article Open Source: A Strategic Overview provides a general introduction to the concepts of Open Source software. This article is a compilation of a series of articles that were originally published in CIPScene, the newsletter of the Calgary section of the Canadian Information Processing society in 2006.