I finally got my Raspberry Pi yesterday, and wanted to ramble about it for a bit under the fold.
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We’ve been doing some parts closet cleaning along with the sysadmin types in our building on campus, and I spotted an original AT&T branded WaveLAN PCMICA card (Model 3399-K2624) in one of the bins. These are the precursor to all modern wireless networking devices – they don’t just predate the 802.11 standards, but were actually the contributed technology that eventually became the basis for the standard – I love computer history artifacts, so I had to play with it.
Sadly, the wavelan and wavelan_cs Linux drivers were demoted to staging in 2.6.33 in 2009 (commit) and removed in 2.6.35 in 2010 (commit… gods I love well documented F/OSS projects).
This is eminently reasonable, since it is non-standard in every way, and I may be handling one of the only remaining functional examples – assuming it is fully functional. I tried to verify with some LiveCDs of suitable vintage, but inserting the card either errored the module on load or crashed the machine… which is probably why it was removed from the kernel. It’s still a neat artifact and will be getting tucked away with my odd vintage machines.
While I had it out I opened it up (Imagine! Opening a consumer device without having to pry the fucker apart with spudgers while praying to whatever gods you believe in that none of the tabs break.) The picture above is the “EAM” (External Antenna Module) pulled apart. There isn’t too much to see among the RF cages, but the fact it is assembled with the wire harness apparently hand soldered into a row of machine pins is amazingly quaint, and the fulls-scale R/F parts are awesome.
I’m pretty enamored of the industrial design on this thing – it looks like an important transitional device. It is the dull gray that was common on (especially AT&T) computer equipment in the 80s, which has grown even uglier with UV yellowing, so the color, logos, and sharp edges look like it crawled out of the 70s, while the rounded accents, domed round indicator LEDs, and darker molded stress relief look surprisingly modern.
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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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:
(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:
Why can’t all the compaines I interact with be this full of win?
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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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
Some notes from the pictures:
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.
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.
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.
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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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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