Folga 29 Marzal

Hoxe estou de folga en contra da reforma laboral. Aínda que teño a sorte de traballar nunha empresa na que non me teño que preocupar por se vou ser despedido xa que son socio dela, considero o meu deber loitar tamén polos dereitos dos demais e tratar de botar para atrás algo que vai acentuar a precarización do traballo e sumirnos aínda máis na maldita crise. Eu achegareime á
manifestación da Praza de Vigo á convocada pola CIG, metade por quizais algo máis de afinidade política, como outra metade por aletoriedade a causa do patetismo que me causa que non se poñan dacordo por algo tan importante coma isto.

Unbricking my SheevaPlug

More or less one month ago, my SheevaPlug went bananas and didn’t turn on again. After talking to a colleague at Igalia who googled a bit, we found out that it could be a problem with the power supply unit. The issue seems to be known and it happens when you keep an external harddisk taking power directly from the USB port for a long time. It seems that power is not enough and you get a burnt power supply unit.

What I did was opening the Sheeva and taking the power supply unit to electronics specialized shop in my city and they told me that they didn’t have so small power supply unit, but that I could use an external one. He explained me what I should do.

I needed a couple of pieces not to cut the new power supply unit cables and a soldering iron (with some solder, of course). Then I could cut the connector of the broken power supply unit as you can see in the picture:

Next step was soldering the red cables to the inner pole of the adapter and the black ones to the outter pole (if I am not mistaken, you can recognize in the picture that the outter is negative and inner is positive). As I was bad doing this manual works at school and I still am, we (my wife and me, yes the pole soldered by her was in a better shape than mine) had to insulate them with a bit of insulating tape. You can see this in the picture.

The rest was just putting the external power supply connector thru the hole left by the old one and keep the cables where the old one was. I connected it to the motherboard, closed it and voilà!

Now I have the again the Sheeva with the external hard disk, but I provide external supply with something similar to this not to have the same problem again, but I wonder if just using a more powerful power supply unit would remove the problem of having the harddisk with external an external one.

Me and Igalia

Me

This is going to be my first post at Igalia’s planet a I just wanted to talk about me and my company. First of all, my presentation. I am Xabier Rodríguez Calvar but everybody on computer’s world knows me as calvaris. I grew in Marín a village in Galiza. I studied ‘Computer Engineering’ in the ‘Universidade da Coruña’ where I met my girlfriend and some colleagues who founded Igalia, where I am currently working on GNOME Mobile technologies, specially Maemo and fighting with Epiphany and WebKit.

Why did I write my when talking about Igalia? Because it is my company. Actually it is not because I’m still a partner on trial but if everything goes as expected I shall become a partner in a couple of years. This is one of the things I love in this company. Others are good working environment, working with Free Software, specially with GNOME, company facilities and specially the feeling of working for my own company, where I have the right to say whatever I want and that my opinion is so important as all of them, because there is nobody over me. That’s all! Join Igalia!