nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

It’s @713

This probably should have been handled as a continuation of this thread, but, oh well. Does anyone here remeber Swatch’s Internet Time. It came to be around 1996 if I recall correctly. I’ve always thought something like this would be a great idea, but we could all do it with GMT. If everyone always worked on GMT, things would be a lot easier. Of course, this would be easy for geeks to get a grasp on, but imagine trying to tell ‘normal people’ that Friends comes on at 0100 and that they get up for work at 1130. Oh well. Just another point where tradition takes the lead over techonological innovation. Like Imperal and Standard measurement over Metric.

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal

XXX-XXX-XXXX

I think the whole world needs to use 10-digit dialing. The 248 area code almost got it right, as you need full the full 10 digits for local calls, but you still need to dial a 1 for inter-lata and interstate long distance. Why can’t the phone companies just tell people to suck it up and use full 10-digit dialing (without a +1, ever) for all calls everywhere? Just like cell phones, it’d work great. The only reason I can think of is that then people won’t know precisely if a call is long distance or not, but I’m sure an automated “Enter the number you want to call and we’ll tell you the rate” service could be set up.

computersmoved from livejournal

Homey Stuff II

Well, today I went and got the moulding for putting around the ceiling of my bedroom. I also got a router. A router is the one thing I’ve been needing in order to finish working on building my new bed. The best part of getting the router, though… I’ll start from the beginning. When I was at Home Depot earlier today getting the moulding, I saw this $59.99 Ryobi router that seemed to be just about everything I needed. It locks so bit changes are easy, pistol grip handles with a locking on/off switch on the handle, 1 1/2 HP, easily adjustable, and cheap. So, that all works out. I go home, get the $25 Home Depot Gift Certificate that I got from my sister and brother-in-law for my birthday, then head over there. Well, when I was grabbing the gift certificate, I found another one gift cert that I thought had maybe $1 or $2 left on it. I took it along, figuring I’d use it up. When I got to the cash register it turns out that this gift card somehow had $50 on it. So there we go. Free router! Woo!

I’m going to borrow my dad’s Black And Decker Workmate and his chop saw. Then I’ll be able to cut the moulding, route out the mortises on the bed, and generally keep progressing towards a nice looking, comfortable bedroom, complete with a big, soft, comfy bed. Yay!

But now, it’s time for bed. I’m Mr. Sleepyhead and tomorrow night is the Underworld show. Woo! I took Wednesday off, that will be a good day of rest. Maybe I’ll get started on the bedroom then. I need to pull everything away from the walls, wash the walls, patch the little nail holes, clean up calk overflow from when the place was build, then start tacking up the moulding. After that comes the hardest part. Picking out colors. Then painting, then I’ll move all the furnature out, clean the carpet with my parents steam cleaner, then it’ll be all good to go.

Somewhere in there needs to be time to clean the bathrooms, eat, do laundry, and just generally live. Gah! heh.

acquired thingsaround the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Saturday Afternoon Wardrive

This afternoon and I are supposed to go war driving around the Detroit area. I’m just putting the finishing touches on the notebook for logging everything. I’m getting Ethereal (a wonder packet capture/analyizer program) going, so Kismet can log to it via Wiretap. After this all I’ll go clear out my car, hook everything up, then head down to the prearranged meeting place. < giggle >

Ethereal is compiling away in the background, and empty bowl of Raisin Bran is sitting next to me, and some random programming from FoodTV is coming off the TV. I think I’ll go change the channel. You know, I really hate waiting for software to compile. It’s the best way to do things, though, I guess… Oh well…

computersmoved from livejournal

Parts!

Does anyone have a spare, two channel PCI IDE controller? I don’t care what speed it is, but DMA66 or DMA100 would be nice. I think mine is dead… I keep getting timeout errors when reading a certain part of a drive while in multi-user mode under FreeBSD. I wish I knew what was wrong, but when the drive times out, the whole box hangs. It’s irritating. I don’t like having to walk downstairs to reset my file server all the time.

computersmoved from livejournal

Well, shucks. What do you know? Kismet is now working, logging the exact locations via GPS, and everything seems good. I might go for a test war drive tomorrow after work. There’s still a bunch of manual stuff that needs to be done to get everything started. Maybe I’ll blow away the normal startup scripts and make it do just what I want it to do. We’ll see… Anyway, it’s bed time. Goodnight…

computersmappingmoved from livejournal

Look what a nice antenna gets you? Just FYI, when I drove this same route before with just the NIC I got 4 APs. This time I was using a Maxrad BMMG24005ML195NF.

I can’t wait to get a GPS.

computersmappingmoved from livejournal

Great… It seems that the latest Orinoco Client Manager does a “soft upgrade” of the firmware to the latest version. No wonder I haven’t been able to upgrade it myself. I think I might finally be downloading an old version so I can get the bloody firmware BACK to 6.06. Yay! That means no putting the Orinoco card in my XP box, though. Oh well. If anything, I just hope that this process is repeatable. It sucks having to deal with all of this. I just want it working.

Now if I had of left well enough alone and just slapped the card in a linux box to begin with, these problems wouldn’t be here… Oh well.

MORNING UPDATE:

Every version of the client manager seems to do this, but only to the latest version the client manager supports. So, who knows what version… The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that the problems I’m having are related to something that I somehow hosed in my LFS install. I knew I should have backed it up before I started playing with PCMCIA. The reason I think this is because the NIC *DOES* work fine under Windows, and if I insert another PCMCIA wireless NIC (the Belkin) the box will core dump/hang this way too. I just wonder what it is… Oh well. I’m probably going to blow it away tonight and slap a Slackware install on it. Upgrade the kernel and PCMCIA and see if it still dies. I just hope not.

computersmoved from livejournal

Wireless Saga…

Well, I finally got the wireless stuff working under Linux. I was browsing the web and pinging to my heart’s content.

But, I can’t make kismet work properly. With the lowest firmware version it doesn’t grab anything. With the highest, kismet crashes the PCMCIA driver looking like something’s failing and the card isn’t able to handle data that fast. Anything in between I can’t get to flash for some reason. So, I thought I’d try the absolute latest PCMCIA card services. Installed those, didn’t help. Installed the original version that I was using (3.2.1), rebooted, now the box core dumps every time it goes to load the PCMCIA stuff. But only with the kernel that I made. I think I need to somehow get in there and rip out all the PCMCIA stuff and start over. It wasn’t hard to make it work, I can do it again. However, I want it to just work.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to get the card flashed to a known-working firmware level with a Windows 2000 notebook at work. I hope. I don’t want to have to install 2K to fix things here. Gah, all I want is kismet to work so I can keep going on the rest of this project.

computersmoved from livejournal