Re-recognizing an internal SD card reader

Last week I accidentally hit the "Safely Remove Drive" option instead of the "Eject Disk" option for my internal SD card reader in Ubuntu. After doing this, I could not get the computer to show the card reader, even after following forum advice to unload and reload modules and at last resorting to a reboot.
I recently picked up a cheap used usb video-in device, and when trying to get it to work in Ubuntu I tried running lsusb to find out if the device was recognized. lsusb took a long time to run, and when I checked dmesg I saw a number of errors of the form

device descriptor read/64, error -110

Searching on Google turned up this page, where users reported that shutting down and unplugging the system fixed their problem. I gave it a try, and sure enough it worked. I'm posting this because I didn't see anyone suggest this fix for the problem caused by using "Safely Remove Drive". Hopefully someone else with the same problem can find the solution here.

Segfault write-up

I finally got around to documenting some info about my homemade balancing scooter. See here.

Watching LDS General Conference on the Nintendo Wii (and other devices)

This weekend is one of the biannual General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church). It's a chance for us to hear timely counsel from the inspired leaders of our Church, including men we believe to be God's prophets.

We have an Nintendo Wii hooked up to our TV, so I wanted to find a way to watch General Conference through it. The Church's website has a streaming video player, as well as a link to a low-resolution mms stream. I have WiiMC installed on our Wii, and the low-res stream works in it, but has a bit of lag and is low-res (not that it matters that much when you're just listening to people talk). After some poking, though, I found the source of the video in the streaming player. The current stream (Saturday morning session, October 2011) is at http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satameng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190841497001. I'll update this today and tomorrow if it changes.

I expect that this will work with other devices, e.g. XBMC on the Xbox, the PS3, and possibly various set-top boxes.

Update: Saturday afternoon - http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satpmeng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190861917001

Indic script convertor

I found this a while back and it has taken me a while to find it again the few times I've wanted to use it, so I'm going to post about it here. It's an online tool that converts between a number of Indic scripts, including Thai and Khmer.

http://www.virtualvinodh.com/aksharamukha

Map of LDS Missions

I couldn't find a good map of the missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS or Mormon Church), so I made one. A .kmz file (for use in Google Earth, etc.) is here, and you can view it in Google Maps here. The data was generated from an unofficial list on the LDS Mission Network website. The markers are in the city for which the mission is named, not at the location of the mission office.

Stuff white people like

Just in case you haven't seen this already, I thought I'd share. Michelle and I watched it four times yesterday, and the kiddo thought it was awesome.

Free Hugh Nibley (and other authors) ebooks

I posted about this elsewhere a little while ago, so apologies if this is old news for some of you. I recently discovered that the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, has made the text of many or all of the books they publish available online. This includes the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.
I've been wanting the read Nibley's books for some time. Now that they were available electronically (and for free), I wanted to be able to read these texts within FBReader, the ebook reader that I have on my Nokia N800. I put the first one into a epub-formatted ebook by hand, but then, seeing as there are many more of these books that I am interested in reading, I decided to write a Python script, GetBook.py, to generate ebooks directly from the website. Given the book ID encoded in the book's URL, it grabs the book title, author, chapters, and text, and formats it into a epub ebook. It works quite well, although I am aware of at least one small bug that I haven't fixed yet. The script and instructions for using it are posted on my website. Let me know if you need any help with it or have any suggestions for making it better.

NB: I've had a number of requests for me to send the epubs to people. I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I'm not sending them to people at this point.