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.

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.

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That jumbled mess is a Geek Code, a somewhat out of date, condensed representation of me.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…

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.

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.

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.

Why ditch the 700p? As much as I love Palm OS and the integration of PDA and cellphone, it’s fairly buggy. Before the latest firmware upgrade it had a tendency to freeze up when receiving text message, which was frequently infuriating while trying to hold a conversation via text. After the upgrade it likes to report an “Error 3000″ when you try to use data services, which requires turning the radio off and on to fix, a process that takes about 30 seconds, but gets annoying when you wanted to hop online to check something quickly. There’s also a problem where the 700p will go into a continuous reboot cycle, which can only be broken by performing a hard reset (wiping all data from flash, requiring a restore from backup.) I’ve only been hit by this problem once, a couple of days ago, but Delia’s 700p has done it on an almost monthly basis.

But for all it’s faults, I still like having a Palm OS device. I’ve accumulated a decent amount of paid software for it over the years, stuff like Pocket Quicken and Highway Manager, which I use on a fairly regular basis. If I decide to switch to the enV and the 770, I’ll be giving up some software I’ve been using for years without any good replacements.

I’ve considered a few solutions to this. There is a PalmOS emulator available for the Nokia 770/N800 OS. I haven’t tried it out yet, but if it’s usable, it might be enough to satisfy my appetite for Palm apps. If not, then I’m stuck either trying to find, or trying to write, replacements applications. I don’t think that would be hard in the case of a mileage tracker, but something to sync with Quicken might be harder to come by.

Of course, I could pick up another Palm device. A Z22 would suffice, though I think I’d prefer an E2, as it could tether to the enV for data access. Or perhaps a Zodiac, though discontinued and the company out-of-business, would make a good addition to my pockets. But with any of these, I’d be up to three devices, which gets to be a bit cumbersome. I think I’d have to carry either the 770 or the Palm; carrying both would be annoying.

Not sure what I’m going to do yet. I could just keep the 700p and deal with it’s issues, wait for another firmware upgrade, or maybe hope Verizon releases their version of the Treo 755p and hope that it doesn’t have the problems that the 700p has.

I’m also planning on getting a Bluetooth OBDII adapter, so I can run Carman, a pretty nice looking application for monitoring vehicle information. I think with a GPS and the OBDII adapter, I’ll be able to use the 770 in place of a car computer for a while. A second cover for the device could be mounted to the dash relatively easily to give it a stable place to sit while I’m driving.

There are a couple of slight annoyances with it though. For some reason Nokia decided to go with RS-MMC flash cards for it, which are probably the rarest of the sub-SD flash card standards. But that’s not too big a deal. The on-screen keyboard requires two taps to get to some oft-used symbols, like hyphen, which makes it a pain when I’m doing stuff on the command-line. I’m considering trying out a Bluetooth keyboard with it, maybe even a Frogpad, though I’m not sure if that would make text entry more or less of a pain.

I do like the built-in apps though. The e-mail and RSS feed readers are usable, though not terribly special. The default web browser is Opera, and does an excellent job of rendering pages for the small screen. They included a Jabber client, which works well for Google Talk, but can’t handle multiple accounts online at a time, and refuses to connect to our internal Jabber server at work.

Here are some gratuitous screen shots:

I think I need a new naming scheme for 2bithacker.net though. Final Fantasy enemies is getting kindof old, and I just don’t feel like it fits anymore. I like jtn’s scheme of disasters (hindenburg, titanic, etc) and work’s scheme of elements (titanium, chlorine, and so on) but I can’t seem to think of a decent non-overused system for 2bithacker.net. Any suggestions? (Don’t suggest anything Tolkien related, that’s done to death.)