I was looking back at my Holiday Hours blog post from last year and I saw that we were nearly at order number 12,000, we're now over order number 17,000 so it's been another fantastic and busy year here at nicegear. Thank you once again to all our fantastic customers for another great year! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

I also noticed my miserable attention to the blog over the last year, with two measly posts about nothing particularly exciting. Sorry! I'll try and do better, I know there's at least a couple of people out there who enjoy my more technical posts about electronics projects.

We are a family business and think it's important to spend the holidays with family and friends, take a break and a chance to rejuvenate for the new year ahead. Our office will be closed from Friday 19th of December, the website will of course still be accepting orders but dispatch will be delayed until we reopen on Monday 5th January.

The last chance for orders to be shipped before the holidays is 3pm, Friday 19th of December. After that time orders will be dispatched after the break unless by special arrangement.

If you have any urgent requirements feel free to email. I (Hadley) will be sporadically checking emails and may be able to respond during the holidays, please don't be upset if I don't though.

All the best to you and yours for the holidays, enjoy yourselves and stay safe. Here's looking forward to another great year in 2015.

Cheers!

If you download CadSoft Eagle ready to install it on your new Ubuntu installation so you can design some PCBs you'll run into an issue. It doesn't work and the error message isn't helpful. You'll see something similar to;

eagle-lin-6.5.0.run: /tmp/eagle-setup.2645/eagle-6.5.0/bin/eagle: not found

What this actually means is that you're missing the required 32bit libraries to run both Eagle and it's setup program.

You can install the required packages like so;

sudo apt-get install libxrender1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libxi6:i386 libpng12-0:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libjpeg62:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386

Once you've done that you'll be able to install and run Eagle.

In 2010 and 2012 I posted with browser and operating stats. This is another follow up to that to see what's changed.

The graphs are a little different again, we're still using Piwik, open source web analytics instead of Google Analytics but there was recently a major version update which is really nice.

To the actual statistics. Browsers; Last year it was Webkit (Chrome/Safari), Firefox and IE in first second and third, this year it's the same, even more pronounced.

Operating systems haven't changed too significantly. Just to mention again, our site isn't typical due to the product focus and technical audience.