Quick little bit of geekery. I bought a new(er) car and have finally decided to start putting all of the “wouldn’t this be neat” stuff into it since I’ll be rolling on this one for awhile. First piece of gear that went in today was a zoom portable, battery powered access point that accepts a USB 3G card. I don’t have a USB 3G card, but I do have an ExpressCard one. So add to that a SIIG USB to ExpressCard adapter and viola, instant internet. I wanted to really geek it up and build a linux box using a Sheeva plug and an atheros wifi card acting as an AP, but all of the gear was just under $110, so it didn’t make much since to cobble. If you see me on the highway, I’m broadcasting /dev/car as my ssid. Hop on and have fun!
Nov
28
prep for baby number 2 has pretty much drained away any free time that might have been dedicated to anything geek. Experience has taught me that now is the time to get all of the more essential things done, because once the 2am feedings start, everything else stops. WHIA is still working, but hasn’t had to do much as the weather has been really nice. V2 has made no progress at all since my last update and is most likely going to be on the back burner for a fair bit. Hopefully the vacation fairy will visit my house soon, but for now it’s looking like nose to the grindstone.
Nov
1
First up, not a whole lot of change going on with the nerd stuff. The wife is having a harder time with this pregnancy, so I’m trying to pick up everything around the house that I can. Doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for being a giant dork, so pretty much all of the geek goodies are still on paper. I did get a new toy this weekend though to replace my broken phone, a Sprint HTC Hero. I love this phone. It integrates with all of the google services, has nice build quality, a great selection of software and is very hacker friendly. The google voice integration is great, but it does struggle a bit when it comes to notifications that come from google voice. You get the alert twice, once in the voice app and once in the phones SMS app. The app marketplace is very neat and I love the multitasking this thing does. I haven’t had any real slow down issues yet, but I have loaded taskkill just in case. The camera is one of the better cameras for a cell phone and the GPS receiver gets a signal in around 4 seconds. My only real beef with the Hero is that it could use about 500mah more battery. I haven’t run it dead yet, and I’ve been banging on it much harder then I will in real life, but that extra 30% would be nice. The SenseUI stuff that HTC has grafted onto Android is really slick, I can’t wait to buy one of these for my wife!
Sep
16
The iproute2 tools are default installed on most major linux distributions now, but few people know how to use them. Once you are familiar with them though, you will lament having to use ifconfig and route. Here is a quick chart on iproute2 replacement commands.
| Ifconfig Command | IP Command |
|---|---|
| ifconfig -a | ip addr show |
| ifconfig eth0 1.2.3.4 netmask 255.255.255.255 | ip addr add 1.2.3.4 255.255.255.255 dev eth0 |
| netstat -nvr | ip route |
| route get 1.2.3.4 (solaris) | ip route get 1.2.3.4 |
| route add -net 1.2.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev eth0 | ip route add 1.2.3.0/255.255.255.0 dev eth1 |
| ifconfig eth0 mtu 1496 | ip link set eth0 mtu 1496 |
| ifconfig eth0 down | ip link set eth0 down |
| ifconfig eth0 promisc | ip link set eth0 promisc on |
Jun
19
OK, so here is where I’m at and what I’m up to. WHIA is working really well, but I still haven’t put up pictures of the pressure sensor assembly and for that, I suck. I have picked up a Toshiba Magnia SG20 that was going to find a new home in my truck as an MP3/GPS/DVD/OBD-II/War Driving Wifi Sharing piece of geekery, but seems to want to live life as a firewall instead. It’s getting hacked to run either Linux or PFSense (BSD).
The small form factor PC that I had picked up for WHIA has been re-purposed for the truck PC now. I pulled the mobo out of it and smacked in a dual core Atom based board, giving me USB, SATA and a bit more umph and lower power to boot!
I’ve got a snow crash inspired Big Board project brewing on paper to give me a nice sized board with 64 or so RGB LEDs telling me all about the health of various monitored systems, but that one may be on the back burner for awhile. And during all of this, we are running new electricity and lights throughout the house, painting the whole thing and laying wood floors on the entire first floor. I’m not usually one for having so many irons in the fire, but it just kinda worked out that way.