Nathan's Notepad


Field notes from a software developer

Building a Thermometer with an Arduino

In an attempt to better understand the effect of temperature and humidity in weather forecasting, I decided to build a small thermometer with an Arduino and a temperature sensor. In a future article, I will explore some of the data that I capture and the software that analyzes the data. This article will focus on the thermometer.


Running Debian 0.91 in qemu

Yes, you read that right. In this article, I am going to detail the process of getting Debian 0.91 up and running in qemu on an Ubuntu 16.04 host. The adventure promises to be a fun one since Debian 0.91 was released in… 1994.


Why I Stopped Buying Nexus Phones

I have always been a big fan of the Nexus product line. I first wrote about the Nexus 5 back in January of 2014. It was a truly excellent phone. When the Nexus 6 was released, I grabbed one of those as well and thoroughly enjoyed the increased screen size and turbo charge. That would prove to be the last Nexus phone I purchased.


Icon Themes

One of the most confusing aspects of packaging applications on Linux continues to be icon themes. Despite the simplicity of the original concept, getting your application’s icon to display correctly in a broad range of desktop environments continues to challenge even the best of programmers.


Building Packages in Raspbian with sbuild

Getting sbuild up and running in Raspbian can be a tricky process. This article will describe the process from start to finish.