2 Bit Hacker

During Thursday’s ice storm I decided to power down my FreeBSD box at home, which acts as my router and file server. Unfortunately, it didn’t want to boot back up afterwards, and since it didn’t have a monitor on it, I couldn’t really debug it. This prodded me into finally moving my cable modem/router set up from the corner of the home office to the front closet. This led to the problem of how to get connectivity to the stuff in the entertainment center.

In the past I had used a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, configured to be a wireless client and acting as a bridge, but for streaming video and gaming I don’t really like using wireless. I had replaced the wireless bridge with a long piece of cable running around the living room and into the office, but that would have been really ugly to run into the closet. So, over the weekend I decided to pick up a Linksys PLK300, a pair of Powerline AV adapters, one with a built-in 4 port switch. Brought them home, plugged them in, and it just worked. I’m somewhat impressed, I was expecting some sort of issue, since I have one of them plugged into the surge protection side of a UPS.

So now in the front closet I have the cable coming into the apartment to a 2-way splitter (previously a 2-way then a 4-way, which may have been causing some of my signal issues) then into my cable modem, which connects to one side of my FreeBSD router/file server, which then connects to a WRT54g running dd-wrt, which provides wireless connectivity, then the single port powerline adapter plugs into that. Then in the entertainment center, it’s just the XBox 360 and TiVo connected to the powerline adapter with the 4-port switch.

Overall I freed up a 5-port switch, an 8-port switch, a bunch of Cat5, and some space in the office.

Next, I think I’m going to reconfigure the WRT to do some VLANs, trunking them into my FreeBSD box, and put my Fonera and DynWiFi Meraki on their own VLAN.

Geek Stuff dd-wrt, freebsd, linksys, plk300, wrt54g

Okay, LG is going on my personal vendor blacklist, at least for LCD TVs. I bought this LG 37LB5D LCD television back in December to replace my Sony WEGA CRT, and initially I was very happy with it. Then it started having audio issues, which I worked around. Then it started having video issues, where the screen would blank out randomly. I called a repair place, and the guy came out and swapped in a new power supply and control board, and everything was happy once again.

And so it went till today. The audio issue just resurfaced. I’m sitting here watching History HD off my TiVo, with no audio. First it was quick cut outs, now it’s just totally silent.

I suspect it’s something with the HDMI audio decoder. My suspicion is that it overheated and did some permanent damage to itself. I should probably contact the repair guy again and find out if the replacement parts were also under warranty, as it’s probably going to take another set of replacements to make this thing work again.

At this point though, I’m tempted to chuck this one off the balcony and go buy a Sharp AQUOS. We’ve got three of those at work and they’re running great. I suppose this is what I get for trying to save a buck and going with the cheap brand.

Geek Stuff broken, hardware, lg, tv

Recently someone pointed out that the contents of my e-mail signature are getting somewhat outdated, which stuck an idea into my head to update it. For a while now I’ve been using the following:

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>     http://weblog.2bithacker.net/
GCM/IT d+(-) s+:++ a26>? C++ UB++++$ P+++$ L- E--- W++ N@ o K- w O M+
V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t+@ R@ tv@ b++@ DI++++ D+(-) G++ e>++ h>++ r-- y?

That jumbled mess is a Geek Code, a somewhat out of date, condensed representation of me. Given that the guidelines of the Code haven’t been updated since 1996, I’ve started looking into alternatives.

The first one I came across was OmniCode, which offers a similar syntax and a greater flexibility. However, the actual guidelines don’t seem to be well thought-out and the resulting code takes up too much space.

My second finding was the Hacker Key, which is again inspired by the Geek Code, and provides a further condensced format with updated parameters. I created a key pretty quickly, and tried the following on for size:

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>        http://weblog.2bithacker.net/
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM

It’s a little wider, but only two lines overall, and conveys approx the same amount of information to someone who knows what they’re looking at. I thought it looked kindof odd though, so I shuffled the components around and added in my PGP key ID, resulting in:

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E

It’s still a little wider than I’d like, but I could trim out a parameter or two to bring it back down. Haven’t decided if I really like it overall though yet.

Maybe I just spend too much time on these sorts of things…

PS: Oooh, what if I put the Hacker Key under the URL/PGP key line?

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM

Hmm…

Geek Stuff geek code, hacker key, signature

It’s getting to be that time of the month again, when I start whining about how no one donates to the Hindenburg fund. Unfortunately, it’s gotten to the point where it looks like Jason and I are the only ones really using it, and it’s hard to justify the $90/mo to keep it operational.

So, I’m starting to think I need to start selling some services on the box in order to get a regular flow of money coming in. Cheap virtual web hosting seems to be the easiest to do, if I can find buyers who would rather go for my little locally hosted box over one of the larger services. $10/mo seems fair to me, and at that rate I only need to get 9 customers to cover the hosting costs. If I could even get 3 or 4 it would be a big help.

If anyone has ideas for other services, or would be interesting in hosting, let me know. I suppose I should do this in some sort of official fashion via 2 Bit Hacker Consulting.

Geek Stuff hindenburg

Happy holidays to everyone and all that. Delia and I just got back from her aunt’s house after eating far too much tasty food. I’m now the proud owner of a number of shirts courtesy of Delia’s family, a few more t-shirts, a neat mug, and PixelBlocks from Delia (in addition to the EV mode kit and floor mats for the Prius she already gave me on the solstice,) and a Garmin nüvi 250W from my dad.

Over the weekend Delia and I got the new TV hooked up, and it’s looking good. I also decided to go ahead and get the Xbox 360, and I’m rather glad I did, as the TiVo HD turned out to be dead on arrival. For some reason it was stuck in a reboot cycle and couldn’t get past it’s initial welcome screen. TiVo support was pretty cool about it and are doing an advanced ship RMA on it, so hopefully I’ll have that soon. The Xbox has been filling the time we would have normally spent watching TV, so it works out, I suppose. For games, we picked up Assassin’s Creed for me, DDR and Katamari for Delia.

Unfortunately my bad luck with new devices has extended to the Garmin my dad sent me. It powers up then complains that it has no maps and is therefore useless. Garmin’s online support is equally useless it seems, as they try to load pages from RFC1918 private address space, or try to redirect you to hosts that don’t exist in the DNS. Their phone support is, of course, closed for the holiday. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

All in all though, I’m happy. I still think Delia spent too much on me, and I feel bad that I didn’t get her more, which seems to happen every year.

Gaming, Geek Stuff gps, holiday, tivo, xbox360

It’s that time again, when I get bored waiting for Delia to get out of work and I don’t feel like doing anything productive, when I decide it’s time to update ye olde weblog. As usual, I don’t think much is really going on in my life, I continue to work, my left leg is still weird from my last back problem, my car is still running well, though the mileage is hurting in the cold.

One somewhat interesting thing is that I finally broke down and ordered a shiny new HDTV last week. It’s an LG 37LB5D, which is a 37″ widescreen LCD at full 1080p resolution. To go with it, I also ordered a TiVo HD so I’ll have some HD content to watch. They should both arrive tomorrow, at which point I’ll get to have fun getting CableCARDs from Comcast. Oh yeah, and if anyone out there is interested in a used 27″ Sony WEGA tube, let me know. It’s too big to really go anywhere else in my apartment.

The new TV has also got me thinking about picking up an Xbox 360. I haven’t really been doing a lot of console gaming lately, but it looks like there are some decent new games out there, and the whole online thing looks interesting. I think Delia wants one too, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll just get the PS2 hooked up again, and if we actually use it, I’ll get the newer thing.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Some people have asked what I want for the upcoming holiday, so I’ve started tagging some things as “want” on my del.icio.us. Nothing terribly fancy. I’m trying to get the apartment cleaned up and presentable so that people can actually come over. If that project gets complete soon, maybe we’ll have some people over for a holiday party of some sort.

Gaming, Geek Stuff tv, xbox360

It appears Palm has released a new update for the Verizon Treo 700p just a couple of days ago. I find it odd that they didn’t change the version number of the update, instead adding an underscore to the version string to differentiate this version from the last. I’ve installed it on my Treo, so we’ll see if it clears up the error I’ve been getting.

Geek Stuff treo