Eleksmaker A3X Software

I switched to Linux over ten years ago, and never looked back - I love the freedom, stability and security that it provides. There are great equivalents for almost all Windows apps, but I found nothing for generating laser engraver gcode files.

So I either had to install Windows on an old laptop, or write my own cross-platform app. Guess which I did?

Eleksmaker A3X Build Notes

I've completed my Eleksmaker A3X laser engraver and I'm having lots of fun burning strange things. But the building instructions are extremely minimal and there are several things you need to know for a successful build.

In particular, there is one absolutely vital modification that everyone should make before powering-up their laser. Without this, it's only a matter of time before someone blinds themselves while building their machine.

Eleksmaker Laser Belt Fastenings

My latest toy is the Eleksmaker A3X laser engraver. While building it, I found the provided drive belt clamps didn't work, and I came up a better method of fastening them.

Korean IPS Monitors and Nvidia under Linux

The business is doing well, so I thought I'd upgrade my computer. Bye bye old laptop plus extra 23" monitor; hello new desktop system, SSD, a meaty Nvidia graphics card and best of all, a pair of awesome Korean 26" IPS monitors. Cool!

Actually, not cool - the displays wouldn't work due to what turned out to be a stupid bug in the Nvidia drivers for Linux. Read on for the story and a solution...

Migrating a Subversion Project to Git on BitBucket

Subversion is still the gold standard for version control (a.k.a. source control) systems, but the new kid on the block - Git - has undeniable advantages for many development models. Even for solo or centralised hierarchical development organisations, Git's agile branching and merging make it a joy to use.


But if you're going to go to the effort of switching version control systems, you probably also want to consider moving your repository to the cloud. This increases your options for off-site developers, and reduces the risks and maintenance costs of internally managed version control servers.

This article describes how to migrate a Subversion repository to Bitbucket, one of several online repositories.

High-Replication Migration Lessons

It's about a month since the migration, so how's it gone, what did we learn? What's it done to latency, error rates and CPU consumption? Most of all, was it worth the pain?

Migrating an App to High-Replication Datastore on Appengine

Google's Appengine now gives you the choice between the original master-slave datastore, and the new high-replication datastore. In a nutshell, high-replication provides more reliable storage (in terms of data security and latency) but has slower write times and costs considerably more.

The owners of almost all serious applications will choose the high-replication datastore. The extra cost is a small price to pay (literally) to escape the maintenance outages, datastore timeouts and high-latency requests that plague the master-slave datastore.

The following article explains how to switch a production application from master-slave to high-replication with the minimum impact on your users.