Archive for the 'Hardware' Category
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I’ve been fooling around a bit with my network, just trying to understand how some things work (this is an area I’m pretty clueless in). I have a Linksys WRT54G router, and I’m running the Sveasoft Firmware (2.00.8sv). This firmware apparently enables DNSMasq by default, and I’ve checked that it’s marked enabled in the web interface.
DNSMasq is a combination DHCP server and lightweight DNS server, designed to handle DNS for local machines on your network. It’s supposed to handle name resolution for the DHCP clients on your network that supply machine names. By viewing the DHCP clients table via the web interface, I can see that all my machines are reporting names to the DHCP server.
In spite of this, I (mostly) cannot get name resolution on my local network. The two Windows machines on the network (both wired, incidently) can ping each other by name, but can’t ping other machines. Other machines on the network can’t ping any local machines. I suspect the windows machines are cheating (via WINS?). Running NSLookup shows that each machine is using my ISP’s DNS server directly, not the router. I’m not sure if that’s how it should work or not. Directing NSLookup to talk to the router directly yield no results for any local machine name.
So I’m stuck. I’ve googled a bit, and looked around Sveasoft’s forums. I kinda have the impression it should Just Work. If anyone has any knowledge to share, I’d be greatful.
Much noise has been made in the last year or two about WiFi as a revenue stream. On the one hand is T-Mobile HotSpot, the 500-pound gorilla of paid wireless access. I don’t know if they’re making any money, but they’ve got access points HotSpots all over the place. Borders, Starbucks, and Kinkos are among the many places with HotSpots… over 4500 at the time writing. The problem, like so many new services, is pricing. As of April 14, 2004, T-Mobile offers 4 pricing plans:
Unlimited Annual - $29.99 per month, if you sign a 12 month contract.
Unlimited Monthly - $39.99 per month, with no contract
Day Pass - $9.99 for 24 hours. This might be a good deal, except it’s for a consecutive 24 period.
Pay As You Go - $6.00 per hour, minimum connect time 1 hour ($0.10 per minute after the first hour).
Granted, the Unlimited Annual may not be a bad plan if you travel all the time. Most of us, I suspect, don’t want to pay as much for mobile WiFi as we do for our home broadband connections, as we are likely to use it much less. I could see myself buying a Day Pass, if I were in a pinch. For someone who only wants 15 minutes of service to check email, both the Day Pass and the Pay as you Go option seem a bit high.
On the other hand is free WiFi. Panera Bread Co. is the best known example (at least to me) of a company that offers free WiFi as a service to customers, and as a way to bring in customers. Like many others, I’ve commented on them before. Many people hope that this will become the prevailing model of public WiFi service. in January, Best Western announced that they will be offering free broadband (a mix of wired and WiFi) in all of their hotels before year end. Once this is complete, I will certainly give Best Western a higher consideration when choosing a hotel. Also in the mix, of course, is wardriving, but for this discussion I’m more interested in intentional public WiFi, and WiFi as a revenue stream.
While I certainly hope to see more businesses take the lead of Panera and Best Western, today I read about a promising third option, from McDonalds (you want WiFi with that?) of all places. Via Scripting News, The New York Times reports that 13,000 McDonalds restaurants will be offering WiFi at the rate of $2.95 for two hours. Wow. I recall reading about a WiFi experiment at several McDonalds in Manhattan several months ago. Guess it went well. It will be very interesting to see how active T-Mobile’s ubiquitous HotSpots are once McDonalds super-sizes cheap WiFi.
My birthday present from my wife arrived today (it was backordered)… an Orion Skyquest XT10 Dobsonian Telescope. This is a 10″ Newtonian Reflector (primary optical element is a parabolic mirror) mounted on a Dobsonian-style alt-azimuth mounting.
I’ve been an astronomy buff ever since I was a kid. We used to take family vacations to an island off the coast of Maine, where my father grew up. The view of the night sky on a clear summer’s night was breathtaking. Far from the light polution of the cities and suburbia, the sky was awash with stars. On some nights the Milky Way was so bright that it could be mistaken for a cloud at first. Ever one to need to master my environment through knowledge, I bought books on astronomy and began to learn my way around the night sky.
Last summer, we had a real family vacation… my parents, my brother and his fiance, and my family all rented a house on the island for a couple of weeks. As always, the wonderfully clear night sky rekindled my interest in astronomy. In addition to picking up a couple of new books, I picked up a magazine, and learned about the upcoming (at the time) Mars’ opposition in August, which would be the closest Mars and Earth had been to each other in around 30,000 years. After we returned from vacation, I continued to spend time outsite at night, albeit with alot of light polution. I continued to improve my knowledge of the constellations, and tracked Mars’ progress as it grew in brightness each night. Adding to my interest was my son, who at 8 years old is intensely curious and loves to learn about the planets and stars. Teaching him is as much fun as learning myself.
Since that time, my interest has continued. Over the past few months, first Saturn, then Venus, and now Jupiter have come onto the nightly scene along with Mars, which is still visible although much fainter than it was last August. Through it all I’ve lamented my lack of telescope. I have a smaller telescope my parents gave me years ago, but the eyepieces are lost. Every time I considered buying new eyepieces, I ended up contemplating a larger scope instead. It’s finally here, and it’s even bigger than I expected. Of course, tonight was cloudy, but not a total wash. The clouds were mostly high, thin cirrus clouds, so some celestial citizens were visible, if a bit hazy. I got a nice view of Jupiter, including four of the moons, and some visibility of the darker cloud bands. I spent alot of time tryng to see Saturn (I still need to better align my finder scope in daylight). When I finally found it, I giggled like a madman. When I increased the magnification a bit (100x), I was stunned. Incredible. I called everyone outside.
My first supplemental purchase will be a Barlow lens, a device that increases the magnification of any eyepiece. While magnification is not the most important feature of a scope (light gathering power is), for planetary viewing, higher magnifications are very useful. After seeing Jupiter’s clouds and Saturn’s rings at 100x, I’m reallying looking forward to a closer look. Common Barlow options include 2x, 2.5x, and 3x; any of these will make a nice improvement to my views of the planets.
Eventually, I’d like to start a second blog dedicated to astronomy. I’ve tinkered with it a bit locally on my Powerbook, and I have some ideas for how I’d like to set it up. However, I have a couple of projects I need to deal with first. For now, I have a lot of sky to explore.
After giving my father a Linksys WRT54G Wireless (802.11G) Router for Christmas (the same model I have), I once again became interested in extending the range of the little beastie. While I have seen a Linksys 802.11B router cover some big distances with a good signal at work, my ‘54G has always had trouble getting from one end of the house to the other. Dad’s router does okay, but doesn’t quite penetrate all the way across his house either.
Linksys offers a signal booster, but it’s only approved for use with 802.11B networking. Some reading I’ve done suggests it should work with an 11G router, but there may be some issues due to differences in antenna configs. Besides, it costs money.
It turns out that the WRT54G is notable for a few features. First of all, it only transmits with about 1/4 of max power. Second, it’s a Linux box. So you know what that means… Hackage. SeattleWireless.net has a great wiki page on hacking the WRT54G.
It seems that if you have an older firmware, you can run short commands via the “ping bug” - a security hole in the router’s web interface’s ping utility, that accepts backticked unix commands. Wireless transmit power can be changed this way. Of course, my firmware is up to date, and the ping bug is fixed. Oh, and you can’t downgrade firmware anymore. (Details for all of this can be found at the SeattleWireless.net link above).
However, to borrow a Perlism, There Is More Than One Way To Do It. In my case, this meant getting a third-party firmware. Since Linksys has GPL‘d all of the code, and even published instructions on building a custom firmware, this isn’t as radical as it seems. (Way to go Linksys/Cisco!) I’m using the Sveasoft firmware (Info, Downloads), and it’s fantastic. It allows you to change the transmit power via the router’s web interface, and adds other cool things like ssh access via sshd. There’s a ton of stuff you the firmware adds (check out the changelog), and it’s under active development.
( Useful tidbit: After turning on sshd via the web interface and inputting the authorized RSA keys, you need to: 1) Reset the router. 2) Run ssh with user root, like so: ssh root@192.168.1.1. Password isn’t needed because of the RSA key, but the user id is.)
The transmit power can be set from 1 to 84, and the default is 28. I think the figure is either mW or 1/2 mW (i.e., default tx power is either 19 or 28 mW). Many sources tell you to just set it to 84, but I found this post at short-media.com claiming that 84 is too high without some kind of cooling mod, and produces unreliable results. The recommended setting of 48 seems to be working beautifully, and I can roam wirelessly to the corners of my house now.
And all this because of open source software. Sweet.
Santa brought me some new toys! Well, my wife and children did, at any rate. Here are the goodies for my Powerbook:
- Powermate from Griffin Technologies. I have the aluminum model. Just about the coolest USB device I’ve ever seen. I’ve got it configured to act like a mouse scroll wheel, which is wonderful when reading long web pages. In iMovie, it acts as a shuttle control. The only issue I’ve had is that the light doesn’t work after a reboot unless I unplug/replug it, or reset it in System Prefs. I appear to have the latest driver. I’ve emailed support, I’ll post more here when they respond.
- Firewire Harddrive from LaCie. 160gb, “Design by F.A. Porsche” model (whatever… but it is slick looking. There will be several more posts about this one.
- DVD Burner, also from LaCie (D2 design). Haven’t played with this one yet. I recently got a new MiniDV camcorder (which I’ve been meaning to blog), which neccessitated this. It has analog in, so one of my first projects will be to import all my old analog Hi8 stuff (now you see why I wanted the Firewire HD), and burn it to DVD for archival purposes.
I received other gifts as well… most especially, another wonderful Christmas with my family.
And I love my Tivo. I watched Enterprise the other night live (as in, not from the Tivo). I’d forgotten just how excructiating commercial interruptions are. I don’t really watch TV anymore, just Tivo.
Tonight I found another reason to love Tivo. Last Thursday night, I found that a show I scheduled to record (Coupling… ok, but not near as good as the BBC original - and with the same script no less) wasn’t there… it said it was, but what I got when I viewed it was another show all together (Whoopi. Rememer when she was funny?). That rarely every happens, so it surprised me.
So tonight, when I fired up the Tivo, I was greeted by a message from Tivo. Paraphrasing, it explained that last Wed and Thursday, CBS & NBC shifted scheduling due to Baseball playoffs, leading to some shows being recorded incorrectly. It went on to explain the while the missed episodes would be broadcast in the coming week or so, the descriptions would be the same as before. Because Tivo normally doesn’t record the same program (based on description) within 30 days, the correct airing might be missed by Tivo. And then it went on to explain how to fix it.
Didn’t I tell you Tivo loves me?