2 Bit Hacker

Last weekend was the spring LAN party of the Fists of Ra clan. Once again it was help up in Lewiston, ME, however this time it was in a rended meeting hall instead of a leaky, freezing warehouse. I had a great time, much CounterStrike was played, and a lot of WarCraft 3. Someone brought along a PlayStation 2 and a couple of DDR mats, so people were playing that for most of the weekend too. There are, of course, pictures of the whole event, some from me, and most collected from others.

Upon my return to NH, I learned that my new 802.11b card had been delivered. It’s an EnGenius EL-2511CD+EXT2 card. It has a 200mW transmitter, which is pretty high for this sort of thing, and two MMCX connectors for external antennas. I plan on using this to replace my modified SMC card, which has been acting odd recently. I just need to get an MMCX to N cable, and I’ll be all set.

I also got some new RAM for my PC before I left for the LAN. This replaced the bad stick that I had before, and allowed me to finally install Gentoo. I’ve been slowly compiling all the junk I want to play with, and installed the official nVidia drivers for Xfree86. OpenGL performance is great now. I’m planning on setting it up with distcc so that it can help compile things for the I-Opener.

The D&D group seems to be doing pretty well, we actually started playing last Thursday, and will be meeting again this Friday. I need to get some maps together at some point, and have been looking at various computer tools to help with that. So far I havn’t seen anything I really liked, and very few open source tools. I’m thinking I may have to learn a thing or two about GUI programming and just write my own.

I’m also looking forward to the release of The Matrix Reloaded, and already have my tickets ordered for the first showing near here, 10pm May 14th in Methuen. I can hardly wait, I hope the movie doesn’t end up sucking. Also, I’m kindof looking forward to X-2, which opens this Friday. Probably going to see it on Saturday or Sunday.

Guess that’s about it for now.

Not really into Easter much as a holiday anymore, so this weekend wasn’t all that different from any other weekend. Friday night was the first meeting of the new D&D group. It was decided that we’ll be playing using the AD&D 2nd Edition rules, and that I’ll be the DM. This will be my first time as DM for more than a session, hopefully I’ll do a decent job of it.

Saturday I went over to my mom’s house for breakfast. Normally we do big family breakfasts for holidays, but this one was just me, Mom, and Ralph. Brian was there for a bit, but left before the actual breakfasting. After that, Tim and I went into Nashua to visit The Tower. I was mostly looking for some gaming stones and a couple of books. Ended up buying a used Tome of Magic.

Sunday I didn’t do much of anything. Wandered around for a bit while the weather was nice, and played a bunch of Final Fantasy from Origins. They did a nice job with the remake, and so far it’s been fun to play. The target switching in battle saves so much time and frustration.

Time for a general status update, I guess. Work has been going pretty well, though the installation we did Monday somehow messed up the existing control system. It’s in a water pumping station for a housing community, our stuff was just supposed to monitor when the pumps were running and stuff, however it caused the pumps to stop running at all. So, we’re going up there again today to try and fix that part of it, and get a wireless link from the pumping station to some guy’s access point so that we can access our box remotely. Fun fun.

At home, the I-Opener is going pretty well, and I’ve started a new section of CCX for it. The only major thing I have left to do hardware-wise is rig up a bypass for the mouse data and clock signals around the cuecat. Shouldn’t be too hard, I’m just debating if I want to hack up the cuecat’s cable and wire it to the keyboard, or if I want to make a little bypass cable somehow.

Also, it sounds like I’ll be getting involved in D&D again. Tim and I toss the idea of starting a group around every once and a while, and this time it sounds like it might move forward. Dan and Tim’s friend Amanda (I think that’s right) are interesting in playing, so it should make a nice little group. Not sure who’s going to DM yet though, might end up being me.

Those who help are helped.

Got this one after the install on Monday. It reminded me of how Andrea used to always say that my friends were just using me. I figure, if a friend of mine needs help, I help. They need a lift somewhere, I’ll drive. They’re moving, I’ll help. It’s just something, in my mind, friends should do for each other.

Woohoo! Cowboy Bebop was pretty damn cool. Ended up going down the Harvard Square with Tim and Dan. We got there pretty early, so we hit the garage mall, I bought a couple of Discworld maps at Pandemonium, and the Final Fantasy VII OST from Tokyo Kid. After that, we just wandered around a bit till the movie started.

The style of the movie is pretty different from the series, and the music was of a very different style. Still damn cool though.

Also, Ken Butler and Pete were sitting two rows in front of us, which was kindof odd. It’s always weird to run into people I know in places outside of Milford.

Right now I’m just compiling a new kernel on the I-Opener with a patch to fix hard drive detection with the flash disk. After that I’ll flash the SanDisk with the Jailbait image, then start the Gentoo install, which should take a while, so I can go to sleep when it starts.

Couple of computer related things going on, first of which being that I found out that my RAM is bad in Vincent, my main PC. Apparently the only thing that’s actually breaking on it is installing Gentoo, everything else runs fine. I ran memtest86 on it, and it discovered a bunch of bad bits hanging out in the 430MB range. I’m trying to decide if I should just pick up a new stick or two of PC2100 to replace the bad one, or if I should use this as an opportunity/excuse to upgrade to a new mboard.

Also, I didn’t find the time this weekend to switch Tonberry (my laptop) over to an encrypted root filesystem. Unfortunatly it means reinstalling Gentoo, which will take the better part of a weekend. I hope to start it next Friday night.

I did figure out how to get Gentoo on my I-Opener though. I’ll use Slackware, which is on it now, to install Jailbait into the onboard SanDisk, then I’ll boot from that to install Gentoo on the hard drive. Roundabout way to do it, but it should work just fine.

And now I must be off to take my shower and head into Boston to see Cowboy Bebop, yay!

Had to go up to Goodrich Falls today. This is the first time in at least a month that I’ve had to go up there. Their SimLink-RS had gotten it’s power cut, and didn’t want to boot up anymore. On the way up I stopped at a Radio Shack to buy a small portable television to try and see what the machine was displaying, since they have a video output. It turned out that didn’t work, so I had to use my l33t computer empathy skills to type some commands blind. It turned out that the boot-time disk check was failing, so I had to get into single user mode and check them manually. After that, it booted and worked fine. Took all of about 30 minutes maybe, not counting the 4 hours of driving.

On the plus side, it means I got to spend the afternoon at home, working from the apartment. I’m thinking of heading out in a little while to do some wardriving, and maybe dig up some food.

Kicking around the idea of reformatting my laptop, taking WinXP Home and FreeBSD off of it and just running Gentoo. I figure in the process I’ll reinstall Gentoo, and this time use an encrypted root filesystem. Basically this means that everything on the laptop will be encrypted. “Why?” you might be asking. Firstly, because I feel like it. Secondly, because this way, if my laptop is ever stolen, people will not be able to get the data off of the hard drive without a lot of work. I figure I’ll get around to it this weekend, since it takes a while to get Gentoo compiled again.

Also, this Friday is the opening of the Cowboy Bebop movie. The nearest showing is in Cambridge, MA, and I think I’ll be heading down there for it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any anime in a theater, I think Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was probably the last one. If anyone is interested in going with me, drop me a line.