I’m brushing up on some technical skills and working on a few small projects. One of those is to create a TramTracker app for my Pebble Smartwatch, so I can just glance at my watch to see when the next tram is coming.

As a precursor, I got a handle on the TramTracker data source and made a Python module to quickly fetch the info my watch will need. I’m mentioning it here for the benefit of anyone with similar ideas googling around in the future. It’s on GitHub and in PyPI. I also made another module, pdfpipe, which is a python command line tool that takes text and spits out PDFs. I’ve found it quite useful.

The Pebble App is now up on the Pebble App store. So if you are one of the one (1) other Melbournians I know with a Pebble, go grab it. The source is available as well.

I recently had a reason to want to boot Linux on my Mac which already has a Windows Bootcamp partition. I wanted to just install Ubuntu onto a USB stick or hard drive and boot from that. The first bit turned out to be easy, but getting it to boot was quite arcane. I found lots of conflicting information on the web, and even after drinking from this fire hose of useful information it took a lot of trial and error to get it working.

It is possible – you just have to install like normal but requires a third-party boot loader and bit of jiggling before it will boot on its own. I’ve documented what I did below for posterity and others beating their head against the same issue.

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