Category Archives: Objects

OpenWRT

Posted on 2012-06-08 by pappp

I’ve been using various consumer routers hacked with dd-wrt both at home and on campus for years, and was shopping for a new one to use in the apartment I’ll be moving in to in a couple weeks, only to discover that the desired feature set wasn’t possible with dd-wrt. In particular, I wanted 802.11n, Gigabit Ethernet, USB printer sharing, and the ability to share an ext4-formatted USB hard disc via SMB and SSHFS. Hardware with the requisite bits isn’t too hard to come by, but no stock firmware supports the range of printer and storage features I wanted (and most of them are missing basic features and/or just plain suck). DD-WRT isn’t a solution, because it uses ancient kernels that don’t support modern file systems. I figured since OpenWRT was well spoken of and claimed to do everything I wanted when coupled with suitable hardware I would give it a try, and picked up a TP-Link WL-1043ND based on reviews and price, and followed the Wiki Instructions to flash it from the web interface.

This turns out to have been an excellent decision, because not only are the basic packages in OpenWRT a good five years newer than in in DD-WRT, it turns out to be superior in virtually every way. The OpenWRT documentation isn’t as inviting as DD’s, but the install process is no more complicated, the Web GUI is better laid out and more responsive, and features can be easily added and removed with a well-designed, well-integrated package manager (opkg). I’m aware that DD-WRT supports ipkg, but it has always felt hacked on and never worked terribly well for me, but opkg just works on OpenWRT. It even has a friendly Web interface for managing packages. Even the warning about the stock WL-1043ND image not coming with the appropriate WiFi modules is apparently out of date, because everything was already in place.
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Skateboarding Companies are the Best

Posted on 2012-04-16 by pappp

One more longboarding post before I return to my usual content. We’re all used to being regularly mistreated by vendors, and I don’t want to sound like an SEO bot, but these guys deserve recognition for being awesome.

Free Churchill Deck
When I ordered my Jasmine from Churchill Mfg., I sent in my reddit user name for their “free skate tool with order for redditors” promotion a couple hours after I ordered. It didn’t show up in the order, and I didn’t worry about it, because worrying about free pack-ins is silly. Then I got an email from Troy Churchill apologizing for not sending me free stuff because they shipped my order before they saw I had sent in for the promotion.

I replied that it wasn’t a problem and threw in a link to my post about setting up the board. They 1. Looked at it, 2. Politely offered a slight correction and, 3. Offered me a free deck under the “give us a shout-out in a video of decorating your Churchill deck and get one free” promotion they are running, even though it wasn’t a video.
So now I have a free Marina (pintail) coming that I’m passing to a friend who rode my boards and decided she liked it, to spread the stoke.

Khiro Makes it Right
I orderd a Khiro Angle Wedge Riser Rail Kit from Daddies to play with the ride of my decks, and this happened:
Riser Problem
(There was a slight packing error among the 16 similar looking plastic bits in the set, so I had three 7° risers and only one 10°.)
I emailed a description of the problem the service contact at Daddies’, asking how they wanted to handle it… and in less than 12 hours, I was CC-ed on an email from a Daddies employee to Khiro, had an apologetic email from Khiro promising me that a replacment 10° riser was going in the mail with “some goodies,” and a voicemail from Khiro Bob apologizing for the problem. A few days later this showed up:
Riser Solved

Why can’t all the compaines I interact with be this full of win?

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Churchill Jasmine

Posted on 2012-04-14 by pappp

Complete
I’ve been fairly in to Longboarding this spring, and decided to pick up another board, set up to contrast with my current big surfy cruise/carve deck. I wanted something lower, with a bit of flex, easier to break out wheels, and a less popsicle-stick shape. The intention is for variety, for easier to pushing, and to improve my technical riding. It will also be nice to have a deck to lend out to get friends hooked.
Details of the board are attached to the images of the gallery after the fold. Fair warning: they are rather high resolution. I’m sure my advisor would complain about the superimposed images with ill-matched white balance and squirrely focus, but I’m shooting with my phone and making automated fixes only in the gimp, so they will do. The WordPress gallery software also seems to be a bit confused by the non-4:3 shapes.
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Churchill Mfg. 180mm RKP Trucks

Posted on 2012-04-14 by pappp

I’m in the process of putting together a second longboard – there will be more posts about that in the next couple days, but I wanted to put up some detailed pictures of the Churchill Mfg. 180mm 50° Reverse Kingpin trucks, since there were none to be had when I went looking. The ineterwebs are all abuzz about how inexpensive and decent they are, but I couldn’t find any side-by-side comparisons with an established brand when shopping. To that end, there are some comparison shots with classic Paris 180mm 50° Reverse Kingpin trucks in the gallery. I’ll also note that they look an awful lot like Stealth Trucks without the raised sections on the triangle portion of the hanger.

Some notes from the pictures:

  • They ship with speed rings, which is both a nice touch and possibly important because the end of the hanger at the axle isn’t faced.
  • In fact, there is no sign of any post-casting machining whatsoever. The finish is pretty good for a casting, though – they may be sandblasted or tumbled or somesuch.
  • The Churchills are about 1/8″ higher than Paris’, but that may just be a difference of bushings. They look the same height in the pictures because the Paris’ are mounted on 1/8″ shock pads. The Churchills have the stock bushings in, and the Paris’ have 81a Venom standard barrels board-side and 85a Khiro barrels street-side (which should probably be the other way around).
  • The bushings they ship with are cherry red translucent 92a double-cones of unknown origin. They kind of remind me of the ones Paris’ come with, which likely means they will be replaced soon, but I’ll give them a ride before passing judgement.
  • The bushing seats are shallower but tighter than the Paris’, I’m not sure how that will translate when riding.
  • The kingpin is an absolutely standard carriage bolt, 3/8″ – 24tpi, 1/2″ hex head, 1″ threaded length, 2.75″ total length. I suspect it could be replaced from stock at a home improvement store.

Conclusion: These trucks are $20+S&H per pair, and appear to be functionally equivalent to the classic ~$50 sets from Paris and Randall. I haven’t taken them out riding yet, but inspection says they are extremely comparable. I’ll have a more informed opinion after some riding, and only time will tell if the axle/kingpin steel is as good.
Edited to add disassembled picture and note from disassembly.

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Watch as a Phone Stand

Posted on 2012-02-26 by pappp


I do this all the time and didn’t realize it was unusual until someone pointed it out the other day. I wear a somewhat clunky metal watch (to use as a grounding strap) and it makes a pretty solid portrait orientation phone stand. Might be a useful trick for someone else.

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Google Exit Plan

Posted on 2012-02-13 by pappp

I started writing this as notes for my own use, and wasn’t really planning to post it publicly. However, I didn’t find any comprehensive google exit plans that were suitable for people in my position, and it seemed like an interesting area for discussion, so up it goes.

While making my regular Google backups (detailed below in “Backup ALL the Things”) over the weekend, I decided it was time to update my plans for bailing out of google’s services if necessary, and discovered that there may be superior alternatives to some of the services I’ve been depending on. Google’s vast infrastructure, development resources, ubiquity and integration have tended to make them better than self hosted options. The fact that they are a single party who has thus far been generally responsible with user data makes them more attractive than other hosted solutions. Both of those situations are subject to change.

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Touchpad Cyanogenmod 9

Posted on 2012-01-19 by pappp

My Touchpad (AKA “The Mobile Platform Test Device”) has had both its OSes updated in the last couple days. WebOS bumped from 3.0.4 to 3.0.5, and I updated the Android install from Cyanogenmod 7 Alpha 3.5 (Gingerbread based) to Cyanogenmod9 Alpha0 (Ice Cream Sandwich based).
tl;dr version: Cyanogenmod9 is, by virtue of speed and features, at rough pairty with WebOS, even though its interactions are uniformly worse.
Details below.
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Touchpad Dual-Boot

Posted on 2011-12-31 by pappp

I dual booted my Touchpad with CyanogenMod last week, and it has made me notice a lot of things about the Touchpad, WebOS, and Android that I hadn’t fully appreciated before. I wish I had thought to post these as snippets instead of a wall of text, but I foolishly gathered them up and am posting as a set.

Details about putting CM7 on the Toucpad are here in this RootzWiki forum thread. Yes, their page and documentation are a forum thread with 100+ pages of screeching morons obscuring the content – that’s how the Android community tends to be.
The whole CM7 install process is pretty graceful – I had a minor hiccup in that it claimed the gapps would be installed on the first ACME run if I put them in the cyanogeninstall directory, but I had to go in with ClockWork and flash them later – then it hung on the setup autorun on the next boot. Fine after that. During the initial install, I found myself using the phrase “Oh jeez, there is some Linux shit going on”  — it looks like the ACMEInstaller is just a fancy initrd image with some utilities and scripts baked in that does some FS manipulation and archive decompression.  I appreciate it when Linux is Linux. 
Onward to notes:
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Canon Cat

Posted on 2011-12-29 by pappp

Clip from Canon Cat Advertising Materials

I’m not sure why there has been a spate of tech news artcles about the Canon Cat recently, but it’s really refreshing to see. I assume it started because someone spotted this nice document dump, and the tech news world is an echo chamber.

Many of the articles note that the manuals and such come with (mostly) complete circuit designs, but they miss the other interesting bit of technical openness – Cats were running a totally introspective user accessible software stack written in a dialect of Forth. In addition to having a UI that is still a popular example for application specific computing devices, it was also user programmable/modifiable almost down to the hardware. I’m not a fan of Forth, but it demonstrates that 1. It is possible to make an embedded computer programmable without interfering with its UI model, and 2. It is possible to design introspective systems which are usable, which are right in line with what I want to be doing with myself next, and totally out of line with current trends in computing. It brings to mind Alan Kay‘s work, or a more reasonable LISP machine.
The other reason I’m fascinated by the Cat is that it manages to make a completely modeless text editing system, and its development spawned several papers (in the linked documents) on the topic. I despise implicit modality in user interfaces (this is why, despite having all kinds of wonderful features, the traditional progammer’s editors just end up making me furious), and good through theoretical and case studies supporting that stance are a beautiful thing.

That dump is slightly different collection of Canon Cat materials that I put together when I was curious after reading The Humane Interface a couple years back. I’m still integrating the collections, but there seems to be some different stuff in each – piles of arbitrary format documents are hard to diff, especially when there is no name correspondence and some are binary formats. I think there may be enough material in the various available sources that, given access to an operable CAT and a reasonable digital lab, it would only be a large 10s/small 100s of man hours of work to emulate or even hardware simulate one.
I’ve never (actually, I think I ran into one as a kid but did’t know what it was at the time) had a chance to play with a real Canon Cat, and owning one would be a mixture of all the standard problems in owning vintage computing stuff – they’re expensive and collectible, and like most computers of the era, bulky and fragile, and they require problematic media… but I would still probably get one if I had the chance for a reasonable price, because they did so many interesting things right. More and more I think CS/EE programs should include (probably just as an elective) proper History of Computing courses – if my intended life pattern continues, I may even get to teach one for a while. I think it would be a blast for all involved.

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Teaching Embedded Systems (with Arduino)

Posted on 2011-12-14 by pappp

Now that the classes are winding down, I want to write up some internet-accessible notes about the embedded systems unit I designed and taught for EGR199 this semester. The unit went well, and I can see basically the same materials being reused, so having a nice content dump for me or any other instructor to use is worth the effort. Long winded version after the fold.
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