You may or may not have problem installing Linux Mint 17 on VirtualBox depending on the setting of your Virtualbox VM. I had this problem and took me a while to fix it. Basically, ensure that you set the system memory of your VM to be larger than 512MB, otherwise you might see black screen after booting your VM from the Mint DVD installation. Once the installation is finished, feel free to reduce the VM’s system memory to 512MB or smaller.

My USBAsp dongle arrived from China. It’s connected to the ISCP pins on an Arduino Nano, and also plugged to a computer via USB connection. According to lots of intructions on the Internet, to upload a sketch to an Arduino, we need to do the following steps: Tools -> Programmer -> USBasp File -> Upload Using Programmer Unfortunatly, it did not work for me. Here is the error message produced by Arduino IDE: ...

After doing patch-Tuesday update yesterday, my Windows 7 no longer booted. This is the second time it happened. Last time I fixed it, didn’t get to document and it took me a while to figure out how I did it. This version of Windows is Windows 7 Professional 32-bit. After some digging, MpFilter.sys is Microsoft Malware Protection Minifilter, which is a part of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). MSE is installed on my Windows 7 machine. ...

In the past few weeks, I noticed that data transmitting from one of sensor nodes got dropped dramatically. This sensor node is an Arduino Micro using nRF24L01+ as the transmitter. Well, it’s supposed to send data to the base station once every 30 seconds; however the transmitting recurrence time exceeded 2 minutes. By default the transmitting rate is at 1 Mb/s, so I dropped it to 250 Kb/s to see if had any better improvement. It didn’t help. ...

There must already exist a gazillion articles about how to do this; but one more won’t hurt, right? Suppose you have a list, called alist, as the following: In [2]: alist Out[2]: ['apple', 'banana', 'pear'] To create a string from “alist” with a comma separator, we can do this: In [3]: ','.join(alist) Out[3]: 'apple,banana,pear' Basically, you can place a desired separator in the ',' or omit it totally. Reference: http://www.decalage.info/en/python/print_list