2 Bit Hacker

So, I finally went and took the test to get my amateur radio license. I’m now have a technician class license, callsign KB1QYW.

Now I just need a radio so I can do something with the license.

I’m still primarily interested in doing APRS and other packet applications, so I’ve been looking at radios with built in TNCs. At the moment I’m mainly drooling over the Kenwood TM-D710A, which can do everything I want, and more, but runs about $600 new. Looks like an ideal mobile unit for what I want to do.

I’ve also been pointed toward the upcoming Yaesu VX8-R, which also appears to have a built-in TNC, but is a handheld, rather than a mobile. From what I’ve heard, it should be considerably cheaper than the TM-D710A, but is overall less functional.

Either way I end up going, I’ve got some ideas for integrating a radio in my automobile with a PC. I’m thinking the car PC could pull in APRS data from the radio, OBD2 data from the car, GPS data, and perhaps video from a forward mounted camera. It should be pretty easy to rig up something to read the locations of other stations from the radio and insert them into a database for GPSDrive to read waypoints from, displaying them on a map along with my current position.

I’ve also been tossing around the idea of correlating position to fuel economy, creating a sort of fuel consumption heat map which could then be used to adjust my repetitive drives to more efficient routes. I don’t think this will be all that hard, just need to figure out how to get the current MPG number from the Prius, record it along with the current GPS coordinates, and then perhaps hack up Kismet’s gpsmap to plot that data instead of wireless access points (or in addition to.)

As far as hardware for the mobile PC, I’ve recently been looking at the IEI IBX-500A, which has enough serial ports for all the inputs I want, along with built-in 802.11 wireless. Not sure if the CPU would be fast enough for everything I want to do, but I think it’d work. I’ve also been looking at the VIA Artigo, which is a bit smaller, and a little faster, but has a fan and no built-in wireless.

Not that I can afford to do any of this just yet, but it’s fun to think about…

I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.

2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.

3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.

4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occaisional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintainence roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rathered liked in Merrimack. Unforunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

Finally killed my WoW account the other week, not sure if it’s stopped working yet or not, haven’t really cared to check. Delia’s considering cancelling her account, but hasn’t made the decision one way or the other yet. Feels good to not be sitting in front of the computer the whole time I’m at home, though I usually wind up in front of the TV watching a DVD with my laptop going, but still…

With my new-found spare time I managed to get one of my projects done; I now have a working garage door opener remote! Ended up buying a 4-relay box from PepBoys and wiring it to a power supply from radio shack and velcoing it to the back of the door opener unit. Near as I can tell the relay box was designed to be used in a car to remotely turn on/off accessories like lights to show off to your friends. The outputs could be put in a momentary mode though, so it worked out perfectly for the door opener. As a bonus, I know have 3 spare relay channels in my garage that I could use for something, if I think of anything cool to put out there.

I’ve got a few coding projects I want to work on too, the most important of which is an online scheduling calendar for Delia’s De-Stress Center. I had started it in PHP, but now that I’m working with Mason all the time at work, I decided to switch over and use that instead. It should be relatively simple to throw together, I just need to sit down and get it done one of these nights. It’s harder than I think it should be to sit down and code after getting home from a day of sitting and coding.

I also want to take pieces of the old SimPro code and turn it into a home automation controller. I think the data collection and scripting stuff would work out great with an X-10 interface and a couple of tweaks. I want to scrap the website side of it though and rewrite that from scratch, which will take some time. It’s all in PHP currently, and I have a hard time following the code in a lot of places. That’s probably going to be a long term project.

Also, Evil Dave wants to build a recipe website, which I think would be really cool. I just need to make time to work on that as well. So many projects…

Finally got around to making some updates to my website today. I had been putting off working on the rest of the templates for WordPress, and finally fixed a couple of them today. I still have the archive pages to update to match my style, but the individual post pages work right now (for example, this one.) I like how the WP template system works, it’s a lot easier to deal with than MovableType’s, and you can use pretty much any PHP you want.

Also did some poking around to find a power and data cable for my GPS and found this site. They make and sell an alternative to the overpriced cables from Garmin, including the eMax cable. I think I’ll buy one once I have the money to spare. I figure it’d pay for itself after it takes the place of a few packs of AA’s that I usually go through on roadtrips with my GPS. I’ve also been thinking of starting to use the GPS with work, marking points for each dealership. I figure I could eventually make a map with all our customers marked on it, which would help out any new drivers that come along. At least, I would find such a map helpful.

And all that GPS thinking got me thinking about the Mobile PC project again. There’s a lot of slick hardware out there for the project now, including a Mini-ITX enclosure specifically designed for car PC’s. And I got to chatting with about it, and we got to thinking that having the box be able to participate in a mesh network with other car PC’s in the area would be pretty useful. Something like MeshAP would do nicely, then you could do all sorts of fun stuff like VoIP communication between vehicles and shared music collections and vehicle tracking information. The VoIP stuff got me thinking that using Bluetooth headsets connected to the Car PC would be pretty cool.

I think it’s something I should definitely spend some time on, especially if I can ever get the equipment together to actually implement such a setup.

Anyway, I think that’s enough rambling for now. I think my WoW addiction is fading, and my brain is starting to grind on all these ideas again.

Working on another plugin for Blosxom which I call GaimSmiles. The idea is to replace ‘:)’ sorts of things in the text with sorts of things, based on the Smiley Themes of Gaim. So far it seems to be working pretty well. Here’s a test using the SmallSmiles set:

Well, after months of procrastination and a few hours of coding, I’m pleased to announce my CrossJournal plugin for Blosxom. Since switching away from MovableType, I hadn’t been posting much on my website, due to the lack of automated crossposting from Blosxom to LiveJournal, but this should fix that.

For anyone interested in testing the new code, you can download it here. You may also want to read the documentation.

Note: In future, do not use release announcement as a test. I found several bugs and fixed them, so it’s now 1.0.1 instead of 1.0.0. The download link has already been fixed.