Link to Howto

I’ve used this successfully and can attest to how handy it is. Kudos to Iceni for putting that Howto together.

BT dongles are getting cheap enough today that this is very doable. Most phones have BT already, so why not try it out?

Linksys also makes a USB Bluetooth adapter with a movable antenna. I’ve not heard anything about that particular adapter, but I would wager that its range is greater than that of normal Bluetooth dongles.

That’s it for today!

-LightningCrash

You gotta love Fair Use.

I really like the affordability of Amazon’s S3 service. I don’t need to back up a lot of data, but I do need it available anywhere I have an internet connection. I also need it to be automated. S3 lets me have those features.

I back up my personal e-mail server, my home desktop, and my MythTV box to Amazon’s S3 service. I run weekly full backups of select directories on my desktop, and then incrementals throughout the week. My MythTV box backs up its database on its own, so I just tarball the output and dump it to a folder on my desktop machine, which gets put on S3 when the backup job runs. My mail server runs full backups of select directories every night.

I used some bits and pieces from Paul Stamatiou’s article on S3 backups. You can read that article here.

I added in some bits and pieces for using an include/exclude file, and modified it to run incrementals on my desktop. I also got to use mktemp to do some of my bidding, which was very handy.

All told, my Amazon S3 bill for last month was $1.48 for ~8GB of transfer in, and ~3.7 storage GB/mo. I pair down my stored files weekly to meet some retention guidelines, so that contributed some to my low bill.

But all in all, I’m VERY impressed with S3. I definitely got my $1.48 worth!

I’ve been a bit busy and all with certifications training, so I haven’t had time to publish much.

However, I did find a nicely written article a few days ago that I wanted to share. Without further ado, go read “BSD For Linux Users.”

I’m working on some rather large articles for your perusal, so it won’t be long before there is some activity here.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

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.

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

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

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.)