Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything to my blag, but since Hindenburg is up and running again and I just upgraded WordPress, I suppose I should actually write something.
Work is going well, with the next couple of months looking to be pretty busy. I’ll be traveling to Virginia next week to rework our servers there. It’s the first time I’ve been to a datacenter other than Boston, so it should be pretty interesting. Sounds like I’ll also be going to Chicago and San Jose, but I don’t know the details on that quite yet.
On the home front, I’ve got a couple of projects I’ve been working on, a NanoBSD based home router using a MiniITX board I’ve had sitting around for the past couple of years, and I recently purchased an inexpensive Dell system which I plan to use as a Home Theater PC running Ubuntu. I’m planning to rig it up to pull shows off of my TiVo and automatically transcode them into formats suitable for watching from my Treo or iPod. Should be pretty neat once I get it set up and running.
I’ve also been studying to get my amateur radio license. I’ve been taking practice tests on my Treo using EggsHam and am getting to the point of only getting 2 or 3 questions wrong per test. The next testing session in the area is on June 16th, so I’m hoping to go down then, get my license, then head to the MIT Flea on the 17th and maybe find a handheld transceiver.
September 18th, 2004
Chip
For some reason my Linksys WRT54G running the Sveasoft firmware died this morning. Originally I thought Comcast had gotten mad and killed my service, but when I checked on the router its little Power LED was blinking away, indicating that it had lost its poor little mind. Luckily we had Delia’s Netgear router from her old apartment on hand, and got back up and running pretty quickly, but I’m annoyed at the Linksys now. I think I’m either going to flash it back to the default Linksys firmware, or try for the OpenWRT stuff. Though I’m planning to stop using it as a router anyway, just using it as an AP.
Which brings me to my plans for the weekend. I’m taking Mage, my server from the office, home with me, going to trade it’s EPIA mainboard for one of the other boards around the apartment and build the EPIA into a home router. I plan to throw OpenBSD on it, which should allow for all sorts of fun. Hopefully I can setup some better packet queue management stuff to keep the VoIP line sounds good even when someone is downloading something. Should be a simple matter.
Just a list of stuff I would like to do computer-wise at the moment. Most of them will probably never get done due to lack of money or time, but I can still dream, right?
- Get a VoIP phone for home. Currently looking at VoicePulse, which has some pretty good rates, like unlimited local and 200 minutes long distance for $15/mo. I might actually do this in the near future. I’d like to build my own voice system thing with Asterisk, but then I’d need to buy more expensive parts to use analog phones again, or buy VoIP phones.
- Build a home router. Been thinking of this for a while. I’m currently using Interceptor, my sparcStation 10 for this, but it’s hard drive is noisy and it’s extremely slow, so I can’t really play around with Snort on it. Ideally, I’d like to build a small box using a VIA EPIA CL board, but they’re kindof expensive. I might build up one of my current systems to do it first, just taking out the hard drive and putting in a flash device. Probably going to be putting OpenBSD on this one.
- Reformat my HTPC and put Windows XP on it instead of Linux. I’ve had way too many issues trying to get Linux to get decent TV output, so I’m going to let Windows have a shot at it. Also, I’ve been eyeing a bundle from SnapStream that includes their TiVo-like software, their RF remote control, and a Hauppauge TV tuner with MPEG encoder. I’ll see how it goes. I don’t really watch enough TV to justify it at the moment, but I would like to be able to catch a few things.
- Reformat my WinXP box. It needs it anyway, it’s got a bunch of funky things going on, so it probably needs a good brainwashing. I think I’m going to try dual booting it with Linux again now that the 2.6.6 kernel is out, along with some patches to make it more stable (hopefully) on nForce2 boards (which I have.)
- Redoing the I-Opener. I never really got it to the point I wanted to before, so I’m thinking of taking a stab at it again. I found a neat CF board that’s the same size and shape as a 2.5” laptop hard drive, so I was thinking of replacing the drive in the I-Opener with a flash card, so as to cut down on noise. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to put the stock heatsink back on, then it would run fanless. I’d like to be able to use it as a basic terminal for checking email and doing IRC and AIM.
That’s all I can think of for now. I still want to do the car computer at some point, but my bank accounts are telling me to wait for a bit on it. There’s also the 1 terabyte storage server I’d like to build, just for the fun of it, but again, those drives get expensive. Maybe later on in the year.
