2006-02-28 05:23:00

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2006-02-28 05:23:00
Hey, now I can listen to Derrick flying his helicopter AND know which direction he is from my position!

Not wanting to spend money on one of these I started…

The Coat Hangar Directional Antenna Project

I bought an ICOM-W32A ham radio, ‘TheAnvil’ provided some BNC connectors, and the closet had a coat hangar.

steps:

  1. bend the triangle portion of coat hangar into shape of circle
  2. use gerber to cut coat-hangar hook off leaving a pointy end
  3. stick pointy end of coat hangar into bnc connector, secure with tape
  4. plug bnc connector into radio
  5. the signal is only picked up if it can travel through the loop (in theory, it sort of works from what i can tell).

current issues: the coat hangar is way too receptive–i get 9 bars on stations that give me 3 bars with the regular antenna–so at close range it’s useless. it needs some attenuators to weaken the signal at close range

2006-02-09 17:59:00

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2006-02-09 17:59:00
Automated Smileys get the Annoyance Award

Smileys used to be cool. You could be creative. You could give them eyebrows so they would like like this:
¦:-) or this |;-)

Now, thanks to the wonderful world of automation we get uggly yellow faced critters following horizontal lines:
¦😀 |😉
This caused me to use smileys without noses so that the parser wouldn’t pick them up:

|: ( they’re sad, they don’t have noses ¦; (

Comments [13]

2006-02-06 07:31:00

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2006-02-06 07:31:00
Why use FreeBSD

FreeBSD Daemon
FreeBSD Daemon
  1. Compiling everything from source
  2. Check entire system for vulnerabilities with one command: portaudit
  3. Upgrade all ports with one command: portupgrade -a
  4. You can still get a command prompt to respond with a CPU load of 4.00
  5. it doesn’t crash.
  6. Runaway processes auto reniced
  7. Zombie processes die
  8. Routing faster than consumer hardware routers
  9. 730 day uptime means you recently rebooted
  10. Jailed servers in 2 minutes
  11. GEOM encryption
  12. …and the list goes on…

Comments [21]

2006-01-17 22:29:00

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2006-01-17 22:29:00
Counting Pennies
Here is my 2005 distribution of coins received for change (excluding a lot probably):

Quarters: 262
Dimes: 148 ***
Nickels: 92 ***
Pennies: 307 ****

And a quick trip to the local coinstar machine converted that all into Amazon cash! Hmm…not quite enough to buy a MacBook Pro…

Comments [5]

2006-01-09 07:41:00

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2006-01-09 07:41:00
Photon Communication Howto
This post dedicated to Meyrahn, Spencer, and Yesensky.

Faster than the speed of light….
How to Communicate Across light-years instantly.

Photon Communications

This exploits a phenomenon in physics. When a single photon is sent through a 50% reflector the photon (which can not be split since it is a single photon) will be reflected, AND it will also pass through the reflector. It is not a clone, it is still a single photon. But it exists in two places at the same time.

The single photon reflector setup must be placed directly between the two points of communication. Precise positioning is important. A constant stream of photons must be sent through the reflector. When point A (earth) wants to talk to point B (spaceship) it merely has to put a stop to block the photon stream before it reaches A. This action will immediately be known to point B because the photon stream to B will stop coming (remember, the photons are single photons that exist in two locations, so once they are stopped at point A they also are stopped at point B before reaching the detector). An operator at point A can move the block in and out of position to send binary or Morse code. The photons stopped at A will also be stopped at point B instantly (since it is the same photon) allowing for instant communication across space-time.


Comments [16]

2005-11-27 01:01:00

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2005-11-27 01:01:00
From the Jack Brown Labs…
Slaving away for CS572…
01:01am, Sunday morning. We have put in over 75 hours already this week. A second all-nighter for us.

We have been loading data into the database for the last 3 hours. I’m staring to work on some of our query statements. We’re hoping to be done in time to make it to church in the morning…

2005-10-12 06:21:00

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2005-10-12 06:21:00
PC-BSD

Being a strong advocate of FreeBSD and hearing some good about PC-BSD I decided to give it a shot since I needed to install FreeBSD on my notebook anyway.

The install process is GUI! I don’t like GUI installs designed for right-handed mice.

…anyway, it never asked for my drive geometry which FreeBSD always does (and I always have to fix it). PC-BSD booted fine, usb-mouse and scrolling were setup for me. I had to manually edit the XF86Config file to use my ATI card and had to set the resolution to 1280×800. Hardware acceleration did not work (as usual for ATI’s in BSD). Not as good as Ubuntu as far as setup but better than a lot of other Linux distros.

To my dismay when I tried booting into Windows something choked the bootloader. I tried rebooting and now all it said was bad boot sector. I tried to reinstall Grub, and use fixmbr but both failed to write. A quick fdisk seems to show the problem:

Partitions Goofed

I wanted to reinstall anyway. Next come licensing issues. Here I accidently used the wrong XP CD (what’s the difference between Corp and Pro anyway) so I had to start all over:
XP bad key

…and iTunes apparantly will only let me do this 3 more times. iTunes auth

…and the ACER-branded XP CD decided that I wanted one large partition …parted fixed that easy enough.

Partitioning
All in all, the reinstall wasn’t too bad. But I would hold off on trying PC-BSD again until the next release. It does look like it has some potential.

2005-10-05 05:44:00

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2005-10-05 05:44:00

“Password may contain only letters (a-z) and numbers (0-9).”

…is what appeared on the website of a well known company rejecting my account creation because my password contained special characters. Needless to say I decided not to trust them with my credit card number and bought the merchandise elsewhere. Come on?! A ‘little’ security?