2 Bit Hacker

So, last weekend’s FORLAN 8 went pretty well. I think it turned out being around 25 people, and felt pretty small compared to 7. I managed to take some pictures, but didn’t take many. Once again I’ll be trying to collect up other people’s pics, but so far no one has voluteered any yet. Played a bit of CS, Warcraft 3 (mostly tower defense), a lot of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 on Sunday morning (1-3am?), and I played Day of Defeat for the first time. That is a fun mod, though I’m terrible at actually hitting anybody. I saw some people playing Neverwinter Nights, and a bunch of people got hooked on Postal 2, though it has no network mode. Overall it was a fun weekend, and I’m looking forward to number 9, which I’ve been told will be sometime around October.

Havn’t done much since getting back though. Andrea and I watched The Iron Giant last night, which was a pretty good movie. We also wandered to B&N, where I picked up the new 2600. I’m considering firing off an email to them, since they’re article quality seems to be steadily declining. Ah well.

I did get my laptop up and running again though. Still finding packages constantly that I need to install, which is annoying, but I did manage to save my home directory off the old drive before it completely died, so that wasn’t too bad. So far I have the /home partition encrypted, and did some encrypted swap stuff today. I eventually want to encrypt the whole drive, but havn’t quite figured it out yet.

I’m thinking after I’m done writing this that I’ll pull the HTPC out of the entertainment center and do the video card switch thing. Just not really feeling like doing anything at the moment though.

Over the past week or so I’ve been spending a decent amout of time working on the I-Opener, and at this point it is booting into Gentoo and able to run X just fine, so I’ve decided to add a section to the website about it. I’ll be posting more info in a little while, such as my XF86Config, kernel config, and whatnot, but first, I have a couple of issues to work out regarding the CueCat. The easy problem is that it doesn’t pass through the two reserved pins on it’s PS/2 connector, so the mouse on the I-Opener’s keyboard doesn’t work. I just need to rig up a bypass for those and everything should be fine.

The other problem is using the Cuecat in X. I want to run batchelor in an X terminal of some sort, but the CueCat’s output gets messed up in X. With some pointers from rgm I think I can work it out, just not sure how yet. Apparently instead of sending plain numbers for the barcode, it’s sending Alt-xxx codes, which in the console get translated to their ASCII equiv, but X doesn’t work that way. I think maybe an intercept script wrapped around batchelor will do the trick.

Also, I’ve got some pictures of the system that I’ll be uploading soon.