2 Bit Hacker

This past weekend, Meg and I celebrated our one year anniversary with a full weekend of running around and having a great time. Technically our anniversary isn’t until Friday, but with the housewarming looming up on Saturday, we decided to celebrate early before we get all stressed out with getting the house ready.

We started off heading down to Boston for a Cake concert at the Orpherum Theater. It was Meg’s first time seeing Cake, and my second. She had giving me tickets to it for my birthday, and the timing just worked out such that we made it part of our anniversary. It was a great show, and we both had an awesome time. Our seats were on the mezzanine, near the front in the center, so we had a great view of the stage.

After the show we took the subway back to our hotel, Le Meridien in Cambridge. We stayed there on Valentine’s Day, and it’s a great hotel. Very comfortable and nicely decorated.

In the morning we woke up early and set out for the Flea at MIT, a monthly flea market of computer, electronic, and radio stuff. I didn’t find anything that compelled me to part with my money, but Meg found a gas mask for a steampunk project. Last month I picked up a rack mount APC UPS for my garage datacenter project, but I still need to pick up some new batteries for it. We also met up with the Coopers at the flea, and we carpooled down to King Richard’s Faire for the afternoon.

We had gone down there last year shortly after we started dating, and I had bought a necklace for Meg at the time. This year she got a pair or earings from Uncommon Adornments and a spinner ring. I also got to see one of the jousts for the first time this trip, and we generally acted silly for the afternoon and had a great time.

All in all, it was a great weekend, and I’m very much looking forward to spending another year with my Meggy-girl.

I set out with a simple goal this evening, to change my Eye-Fi card’s upload destination from Facebook, where it was putting each image in it’s own album, to simply uploading to Hindenburg via FTPS. This led to a fun filled evening of debugging and data recovery!

The configuration change on the Eye-Fi Manager side was easy enough, simply selecting FTP as the upload mechanism and filling in a few fields. For the server side of things, I decided to go with ProFTPD, largely because I’ve used it in the past and the configuration is pretty simple. I’d never used FTPS before, but it’s pretty easy to enable with ProFTPD, just a few configuration directives:

TLSEngine on
TLSLog /var/log/proftpd/tls.log
TLSProtocol SSLv3 TLSv1
TLSRequired on
TLSRSACertificateFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.cert
TLSRSACertificateKeyFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.key
TLSVerifyClient off
TLSRenegotiate none

However, this doesn’t appear to work. Based on the xferlog and tls.log, it appears the Eye-Fi client was connecting, but the data session was failing, but it did give the helpful message of “client did not reuse SSL session, rejecting data connection (see TLSOption NoSessionReuseRequired)”. This option is undocumented, and is actually “TLSOptions NoSessionReuseRequired” (note the plural), but it does solve the problem. Apparently clients are expected to reuse the TLS session between the control and data channels, but Eye-Fi doesn’t.

So, that’s working, but now my Eye-Fi card isn’t able to be read in either of our cameras or my laptop. Not sure what happened, but it appears the partition table became corrupt this evening. The card still had the only copy of a lot of our Comic-Con photos on it, and I really didn’t want to lose them. First, I decided to get a disk image of the SD card using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility. Then, I had remembered hearing about some open source software for recovering images from damaged cards, and after a quick Googling, I came up with PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is extremely easy to use. It opened up a terminal window with a curses interface, prompting through selecting a disk to scan, a place to save the found files, then initiating a scan of the Eye-Fi, turning up all of my missing images, along with a handful of other files that I didn’t realize were on the card (including an SQLite database, maybe used by Eye-Fi?) So happy I didn’t lose all those photos, and will have to work on getting them uploaded. Unfortunately, I think I’ve lost the ability to geotag those photos though…

Earlier tonight was the first meeting of the new ManchLUG chapter of the GNHLUG at Wings Your Way in Manchester. I’d been tossing around the idea of organizing this chapter for a while, but hadn’t found the round tuits. Kenta came along and wrangled things together, and this first meeting at least turned out pretty well. We had 18 people registered for the event beforehand, and I think our total turn-out ended up being around 26 people.

The meeting itself was pretty casual, just some announcements and just general chatter for most of it. I’m hoping to have more organization for next month, perhaps with some discussion topics or a quick presentation. One person brought up the topic of media center computers, so maybe we can find someone to talk about their experience building such a thing with open source tech. I’ve taken a stab at it in the past with my MythTV box, but was never terribly happy with the results, and just use a WD HD TV Live to stream stuff from my storage server today.

Overall, I think everyone had a good time, and I’m hoping this will be a successful chapter.