If you haven’t heard of it, you can watch Star Wars in ASCII by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I wish someone would write a program to pipe the output of that to Xscreensaver. Now that would be awesome.

So I haven’t heard back from atiware, the SF maintainers of MBEQWA. I guess it’s time to do my own thing. I’ll post with more updates later. I’ll have to create a SF page and etc. I probably won’t use any of their source at all, but try to keep the usability features that I like from MBEQWA present in a similar fashion.

Netstat is a staple, but ever wish you could get more information about sockets in use?

ss to the rescue!

Open up your terminal and execute:
ss -pantus

Now sit back and enjoy the information you have been presented with. I much prefer the output of ss to lsof, and it’s quicker than grepping for IPv4 from lsof’s output.

There’s really not much else to say about ss, either you’re going to go “Oh wow!” or not care.

Edit: I should add that this might not be in your path. If it’s not, you should be able to discern its location from the iproute package. On Ubuntu it should be /sbin/ss, on FC7 it might be /usr/sbin/ss

To find it on Ubuntu/Debian: dpkg -L iproute |grep ss

To find it on RH/Fedora: rpm -ql iproute | grep ss

Until next time!
-LightningCrash

I frequent the forums of a local LAN party called the OKGG. Recently, some have taken issue to the avatar of a certain forum admin. So I wrote a GM script to replace everyone’s avatar with the offending image.

Without further ado, here is the OKGG Poopifier.

OKGG Poopifier

You’ll need to save it as nimda.user.js , then drag it into your FireFox window to install it. My upload script butchered the extra period in the filename.

Enjoy the poop!

-LightningCrash

I was interested in reading an article on Slashdot about the world’s biggest SANs. That is, until I got to the site it was hosted on. Holy crap, guys, what the hell is that? I hate it when sites interrupt their contiguous textspace with crap like ads and related material. Stash that stuff outside of the text body, guys. Just look at it, in all its ugly glory:

I’m not saying I’m a design guru (you can tell that just by looking around here), but I won’t read articles on crappy layouts like this. Most of the width of the page is taken up by garbage.

Guess I won’t be reading their poop!

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

Call me blasphemous, but I still would rather have a Nokia N800 than an iPod Touch or an iPhone.

This article on TabletBlog puts the N800 and the iPod Touch head to head, and is extremely thorough, covering many different aspects of usage, performance, and capabilities. He even benchmarks throughput on the WiFi browser.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to annoy my coworkers now.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

It looks like you will soon be able to acquire a 25-watt AMD Athlon64 3100+ in the AM2 package, per this article on Linuxdevices.com. This is great news for embedded applications, as the Geode was a poor performer even by old standards.

I think these CPUs will find huge value in custom DVR boxes. Sure, MPEG-4 acceleration is fine when you just want to record or watch TV, but what if you want to compress those recordings? A custom DVR with a 3100+ could run compression jobs when the tuner’s not active, giving you even more space on your DVR’s drive. Assuming a performance profile on par with the Athlon 64 3000+, it should be more than enough for XviD encoding. You won’t get any stellar x264 encode performance, but such is life for anyone who doesn’t have an overclocked 4-way box as their media center.

Now we just need a mini-ITX AM2 board that supports 4GB of RAM and firewire, and we’ll be set!

The Linksys WRT54G….is there anything it can’t do?

I already think it’s possible to control a CNC mill with a WRT54G, but apparently someone has used one to pilot a robot, and that is fantastic.

You can already build a temperature sensor into the WRT54G (or any 1-wire device, for that matter), as somebody else has demonstrated. I wish I was more EE inclined, I’d be all over tinkering with this.

I wonder what other crazy stuff you can do with a WRT54G….hmmm…..

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

Today when checking the page, I noticed that a few of my Digg buttons pointed not to Digg links for my site, but for bizlead or some nonsense. It seems to be pretty common, as a number of commenters on the story echoed the same story.

Is this some sort of XSS bug that’s being exploited? I don’t know. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, though. Maybe there are some DB problems on the Digg end.

Either way, I’ve deactivated the Digg button on my posts until further notice. This isn’t a big deal, as the wonderful SU users make up about 90% of my traffic anyway. Digg, not so much.

I’ll post more about this later when I figure out what’s going on.

Edit: looks like the offending Digg submission is gone. I’ll consider turning the digg button back on later.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

Make sure you have ‘beep’ installed. Try it out by executing beep at the command prompt. If you don’t have it, just ’sudo apt-get install beep’ and you’ll be on your way.

Now, open up a terminal, and paste this in:
while true; do sleep $(($RANDOM/1000)) && beep -f 2000 -l $(($RANDOM/100)) ; done

Lock your terminal and go to lunch. When you get back from lunch, just CTRL+C to stop the annoyance.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

(No I’m not a BOFH….most of the time.)