Brian Jepson’s Weblog

CC-licensed Lolrus image from Pete Mandik’s photostream on flickr

Life here in southern RI is not quite as boring as I let on. A few weeks (or was it months?) ago, a story broke about a woman who was discovered in a sorority on campus, and in the process of being escorted out, the discovery of what are alleged to be burglary tools led down a rabbit hole that’s oh-so-deep. Now the woman stands accused of having robbed from numerous people in her neighborhood (which happens to be my neighborhood as well). One person I spoke to recounted the story of receiving an envelope with their last name on it from the police. At first, I thought, “that’s a very organized police department”, but in fact, one of the accusations is that this woman tracked the schedules of the victims, managed to collect keys, and kept them all organized. Very strange.

To this day, as far as I know, nothing was stolen from me. But a few days after the story broke, word started getting around that this woman had a couple dozen cats, and that police did not believe they belonged to her. That’s where it started to intersect with my life: we lost our totally kick-ass awesome cat Oscar last year, and hey, if this woman has him, well, I’d like him back.

We got in touch with the police, but they weren’t able to confirm the story about the cats, and they have yet to follow up with us. For the moment, I’ve written it off as a story that spread quickly and got exaggerated, but who knows?

Today, the story picked up for me again. I’ve been made aware of a blog that’s covering this saga with a mixture of news excerpts and random speculation. In fact, one post is consistent with my theory that the cat story was an exaggeration:

An officer may have said “there’s like 20 to 30 cats in that house” not meaning it literally but simply as an exaggerated expression. Somehow, someone, printed a flyer saying that there were 20-30 cats. This simply was not the case.

And that’s fine, because I’d like to move on and accept that I won’t get my cat back. But as I spent more time at the blog, things took a marked turn for the bizarre… as if this story could not get any weirder, it apparently includes a real-life version of one my favorite memes, the Lolrus Bukkit Saga. From She Had My Buckets:

He went around the side of the house and came back with my buckets. He put them on the ground and another guy took a photo of them. They then put them in my car for me. Now the buckets are back home…

So the only thing I can say for sure is that it’s still going to get weirder. And if a little more weirdness raises the possibility that my cat might come home, that’s fine with me.

When you plug a USB device into the EEE PC, it makes it look like it has a Windows drive letter by mounting it on something like /media/D: This is fine for a lot of stuff, but I have a USB drive I want to put a VirtualBox virtual machine on, and I don’t want to take the chance that it will be drive E: next week.

So, I made a change that seems to work: I created a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/01-local.rules that overrides the default usb handling just for this device (or devices just like it; I’m not certain that this uniquely identifies a particular device). Put this all one one line:

BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", SYSFS{serial}=="P975LEG4", NAME="VMs",
OPTIONS+="last_rule",
RUN+="/bin/mount UUID=5cc6f807-0ee2-46a8-a48a-90a2b9b1ab22"

To make this take effect, I make sure the device is unplugged, the run the command sudo udevcontrol reload_rules. I make sure I have a mount point for this device in fstab (and that the mount point exists):

UUID=5cc6f807-0ee2-46a8-a48a-90a2b9b1ab22 /mnt/VMs ext3 auto,users 0 0

Now, when I plug the device in, it doesn’t get a DOS-ish drive letter, no window pops up asking me what I want to do, and it gets mounted where I want it. I still have to umount it when I’m done, but this is progress. How do you find out the serial number of the device? Assuming that it’s recognized as /dev/sdd, you can use:

udevinfo -a -p /block/sdd

You can use the blkid command to get a list of all drives and their UUIDs.

Inspired by SocialBomb, a few of us AS220 geeks have started working on a similar project: Arduinos that pair off and get happier the closer they are together. The first iteration of this is the Arduino Buddies, but eventually, we’ll have this on a PCB and will include some ad-hoc pairing.

When we have the wearable version and a room full of these, it could make for a fun game. In this video, RI’s own Tom Sgouros helps out at the Maker Shed (the new version of the Maker Store we unveiled this year) and explains how the Arduino Buddies work. Tom kept pretty busy at the Faire: a couple of the authors whose work he edited were there, Tom put on a performance of his play, and he and his daughter Timi spent a lot of time in the store answering questions about the kits we had for sale.