2 Bit Hacker

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Over the weekend Andrea and I spent most of our time dealing with Halloween related things, mostly giving out candy at her parents’ house. Now I know some of you may be thinking, “Hey, Halloween isn’t until Thursday!” and indeed you are correct. However, the city of Manchester doesn’t like Thursdays (who can blame them?) so instead our official Halloween Trick-or-Treating time was on Sunday afternoon.

However, that’s not when we were giving out candy. For some reason, the neighborhood that Andrea’s parents live in feels the need to do things differently from the city, so they had their official Trick-or-Treating time on Saturday night. Andrea dressed up as Buttercup of the Powerpuff Girls to hand out candy. I dressed up as Chip. It was easier that way.

Also over the weekend I got Gentoo installed on my laptop. It went considerable smoother than on my desktop PC. So far I like the Portage system, it seems to work well and make a lot of sense. The Linux kernel however is another matter. I don’t really understand why the PCMCIA drivers that everyone says to use are not part of the kernel, and need to be compiled separately and loaded as modules. But they don’t work from modules.autoload for some reason. Ah well, it works fine when loaded by hand for some reason. Overall it seems pretty speedy, and for once everything on my laptop works, including sound.

In other news, I just received an 80GB hard drive for Hindenburg from Matt. Hopefully we’ll get that installed soon and get some people moved over onto it. Our current drive for holding virtual web sites is pretty much full, and has been for a while.

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Thinking of attempting to install Gentoo again. This time, I think I’ll try it on my laptop. If it works, I should be able to ACPI along with GpsDrive and Kismet, and maybe even get working audio, which would be nice.

Also eyeing the Sharp Zaurus, which would be a neat toy, but I can’t really justify the cost of. Ah well.

Basically, I’ve now become addicted to wardriving. I suppose it’s not really much of a hobby, but I enjoy seeing what I can find. I’ll probably get sick of it in a week or two. For now though, I really want to be able to at least try out Kismet, since it has some really neat features that dstumbler is lacking. Unfortunatly, Kismet doesn’t work very well under FreeBSD.

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Helped Jason and Mike move the OshaSafetyWear server successfully. There was a wacky IRQ problem with the SCSI controller and the built-in ethernet, took forever to resolve, but in the end it was all good. After that, ason and I went to grab some dinner at the 99, then I drove him back to Tom and Marci’s.

On the way home, I decided to do some wardriving, and went along route 3 through Merrimack. Drove around some apartment buildings near the Land Rover dealership and picked up a ton of stuff. It amazes me that people there even know who’s AP they’re connecting to. Unfortunatly my laptop’s battery died just as I walked in the door at home, so I have to wait till tomorrow to plot the data.

Also Andrea decided to spend tonight at her parents’ house. It’s really weird being here without her around at night. I was quite surprised when I came home to an empty apartment. Oh well…. I guess I should get to sleep so I have a chance of getting to work somewhat on time tomorrow.

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Life’s been fairly quiet since I got back from my trip. Mostly just plodding along on streaming audio stuff for NetBSD. It’s acting a bit weird at the moment with horrible audio quality. Not sure if the microphone and sound chip just suck, or if I’m doing something wrong.

Last Friday Andrea’s parents, Andrea, and I went to the Shogun Japanese Steak House in Manchester. Very tasty, and it’s pretty cool seeing them cook your food right there. Definitely a place to go back to. Saturday we didn’t do much of anything, mostly just hung around the house watching movies. Sunday we did some grocery shopping, and I tried playing with Gnome2 on my home computer.

Unfortunately, Gnome2 really isn’t all that great in my opinion, and I decided to reinstall FreeBSD to get rid of it (and my ports collection was pretty messed up at that point anyway.) At some point I must have chosen the wrong option, because I accidentally set the active partition to the FreeBSD partition, instead of the Windows one (which has a boot selector) so that kindof messed up my PC for a bit. Ended up fixing it on Monday night with the FreeBSD install CD.

Tonight I’m going to be helping Mike and Jason move the OshaSafetyWear server from JLC to MV in Manchester. Should be interesting, and a good practice run for when we move Hindenburg later on. We still haven’t seen money from a lot of the people being hosted, so the move could be fairly expensive.

Oh, and I got a PCMCIA serial card off of eBay. I had some troubles getting it working together with my wireless card, but it seems to be happy now. I plan to use it with my GPS when I go wardriving, so I don’t have to lug around the docking station for my laptop.

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As many of you know, I was out of town last week on vacation. It started on Friday the 4th, heading out after work and beginning to drive to my dad’s house in Michigan. I got there on Saturday afternoon, having stopped in Syracuse, NY for the night. I spent the week there, just hanging out mostly. It was nice to get away from work and OSW for the week. On Friday the 11th, I drove down to Seymour, IN to visit mrsjtn, then on Saturday I drove over to Cincinnati for my cousin Andy’s wedding. Sunday, I had the fun task of driving all the way home.

Overall it was a fun trip. I got to help my dad with some plumbing repair (note: don’t try to put a lot of pasta down the garbage disposal then run your dishwasher) and I fixed a problem he was having at work with some VPN stuff. It was his birthday on Wednesday, and it was cool to be around for that, since I’m not normally.

Stacey, Simon, and Molly seem to be doing pretty well out in Indiana. Their duplex is pretty nice, several orders of magnitude better than living above JLC. The floors are flat and everything.

The wedding was nice, and I got to see a lot of family that I haven’t seen in a long time. There were a lot more people around than I expected, and as usual I got a little uncomfortable being in church, but overall it was nice.

Upon getting home, I got to see Andrea’s new hair color. She’s dyed the hair on the front of her head a bright red. It looks really cute, but she also managed to dye part of the tub a bright red as well.

Oh, and with all my driving I got to play with my new toy, a Garmin eTrex Venture GPS receiver. During my drive there and back I had the GPS connected to my laptop running GpsDrive. It worked out really well. It’s nice being able to see what roads are ahead and get an idea of where you are on your trip. Very spiffy indeed.

I also started a new LJ community, . I figured it would make a good place to post wardriving experiences and whatnot.

Thought I’d throw this up here. I’ve released version 4.02 of my cmail software. It’s a simple program for checking how many messages are waiting in various email boxes. As of this release, it support mbox, Maildir, POP3, IMAP, POP3/SSL, and IMAP/SSL. You can grab it from my projects page.