About a year and a half ago, I purchased a cheap $15 multi-flash card reader from Newegg. I have had this stupid device plugged into my motherboard and wasting power ever since. I was never successful in plugging in my flash cards and having them detected.

Until now.

I posted about upgrading my machine recently, which included a kernel update to 2.6.21-gentoo. I figured it was high time to get this device working, so I spent a few hours and figured out my problem. I have a Neodio Technologies 7-in-1 reader as detected by lsusb:

citadel s1n # lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0aec:3260 Neodio Technologies Corp. 7-in-1 Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 03f0:8804 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

The problem I was having was the device nodes were never being created, with the exception of /dev/sda. Well I learned that USB flash card readers do not automatically report when a card has been inserted. The solution to this is to make sure that your kernel has the following option set:

CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y

The async scan option is a nice feature that can significantly improve your bootup time if you have several UMS devices or SCSI devices connected. This will make sure that all LUNs are scanned as the other devices may not be detected. In my case, the /dev/sda was actually just the CF card reader slot.

After rebooting, I found each card slot was detected and now associated to individual devices:

usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SMC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:1: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-CFC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:2: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-SDC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
scsi 8:0:0:3: Direct-Access GENERIC USB Storage-MSC I19B PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
sd 8:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
sd 8:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi removable disk sdd
sd 8:0:0:3: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

When I logged into Gnome, I found this lovely gnome-vfs icon indicating the flash drive from my camera that I plugged in. The mount options show up as follows:

/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=winnt,uid=1000)

Now that everything is merry in the hellkeep kingdom once more, I can move on to organizing my photos once more.

Okay, I spent many hours trying to find the best way to organize and publish my photos through this site. Since I use Wordpress fairly heavily, I’d love to use it as my content-management system for this as well.

I tried every plugin under the sun. I even contemplated writing my own plugin. But after some fiddling, I finally settled on fGallery. It’s actually a pretty decent plugin, but there were some issues to iron out with the lightbox engine. I should probably warn everyone from having two plugins with built-in lightbox support installed and enabled at once. They will work against each other and cause serious headaches for you.

So without further ado, you can now check out my photos on this page. Note that there is a link at the top of all pages with the rest of the page links. If you are interested in subscribing to the RSS for an album, I should warn you that I am still in the initial phases of adding all of my photographs, so it is likely that an album or an image will change names (you have been warned).

One other note: I added a page about my running. I am currently recovering from an IT band injury, so I have a little more free time and I figured I’d take advantage of the situation.

A few weeks ago, I finally purchased a Pixel Blocks set. I wanted to start with a smaller set to make sure that this is something I am truely interested in. I’ve been having the urge to construct, lusting to build with my hands. I’m not very creative, I don’t have any wood working tools or metal working tools, and I am a sucker for old school games. I am also very fidgety and have a slight case of ADHD (my brother was diagnosed).

I wanted to start by making 2D representations of my favorite old school games. Then eventually, I want to move onto 3D versions of the same. I found sprite rips for many of my favorite games online and used those to make pixel perfect recreations. After making a handful of things, I quickly found that I was unable to make many things from the NES and very things from the SNES due to lack of colors. The set I bought has 8 colors: violet, red, blue, yellow, black, white, orange, and green. I was given the larger set of 12 colors for Valentine’s Day. I just received the set and have ventured into larger more complicated sprites.

Putting these things together can be very time consuming, especially if there are many colors. I can put together a 1up mushroom in about half an hour, but a full-sized Mario (Super Mario World) took over 2 hours. If I make something one night, that’s about all I will usually end up doing for the night.

I have been cataloging my creations so far and will post them as I am able to pull them off the camera and add them to this site. I have even added a new category for these creations: Pixel By Pixel.