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loose ends
Jan. 30th, 2006 12:20 am- I ended up nuking all the comments on the post that referred to gentoo, since there's apparently no way of saying, "ok, no more comments here" - you can freeze an individual subthread, but not the main thread. And when I said, "I don't want a distro war on my livejournal", it was apparently read as "let me tell you why I use My Favourite Distro". Thanks, yo. Read the goddamn instructions before posting.
- More like/dislike for the Motophone: iTap text input is like T9, only much, much better. On the other hand, the phone's clock is in the Dumbest. Place. Evar: when you've the keypad locked, pressing a button to light up the display so you can check the time causes a "helpful" How To Unlock This Phone window to pop up. On top of the clock.
well, that's annoying.
Jan. 27th, 2006 09:31 pmWhen I "upgraded" the flash rom in my router, the upgrade cautioned that I'd need to do a factory reset (thus losing all my configuration), but it seemed to be working okay without one. I should've payed more attention, since this is what nmap currently says about my server:
Of course, enabling the firewall seems to cause problems too (details obscured):
PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 25/tcp open smtp 53/tcp open domain 80/tcp open http 110/tcp open pop3 111/tcp open rpcbind 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 143/tcp open imap 199/tcp open smux 443/tcp open https 445/tcp open microsoft-ds 783/tcp open spamassassin 993/tcp open imaps 995/tcp open pop3s 2401/tcp open cvspserver 3128/tcp open squid-http 3306/tcp open mysql 8080/tcp open http-proxyApparently when it says, "SPI Firewall Not Enabled!" it means, "dude, your ass is showing". Thankfully, I'm sufficiently paranoid about this sort of thing that I was running tcp_wrappers on the box, and most services are configured to refuse to have anything to do with traffic originating outside my network. I'm still annoyed, though.
Of course, enabling the firewall seems to cause problems too (details obscured):
Looking up www.example.com.. --- Connecting to example.com (127.0.0.1) port 6670.. --- Connection failed. Error: (336130315) error:1408F10B:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:wrong version number Are you sure this is a SSL capable server and port?That's supposed to be an IRC connection. GAH.
new phone, one week on
Jan. 25th, 2006 09:40 pmI got a Motorola E770v last week as a cheapy upgrade from my Sagem MyV55. Both phones are Vodafone-specific variants of mainstream phones, of which more below. My main requirements for the upgrade included bluetooth, better than GSM connectivity (i.e. 2.5 or 3G), and no Nokias unless absolutely necessary. Here's what I like about the Motorola:
- not just a digital camera, not just a video camera, but a camera with two lenses - one facing the phone user and one facing in the opposite direction. You can't use both to get picture-in-picture, mind.
- Java engine has full access to phone's features - this is something my old phone lacked, and it SUCKS.
- The power/data connector is a standard miniUSB. Plug it into a laptop and it starts charging. It's got a software switch to swap between CDC ACM modem and a USB drive.
- Music player which plays MP3 files and can be loaded via the aforementioned USB drive
- Curiously useful multitasking: you can use the 3G connection at the same time as you're on a voice call.
- The USB connection is flaky. Sometimes it doesn't work, and the only way to make it work is to power-cycle the phone.
- There's no automatic keypad lock. There's an automatic phone lock but it requires you to enter a passcode to unlock.
- The music player can't be backgrounded in any way, to the extent that you can't lock the keypad while the music player is running.
- It's a custom build for Vodafone, like the MyV55, meaning that I'm pretty much guaranteed unable to get any firmware upgrades for it, like, ever.
It appears that while the Sony NW-S23 is "splash-resistant" or thereabouts, it's not exactly impervious to a pint of tea in its general vicinity (this would be last weekend's spillage). I'm sure I got it out of the way in time, but apparently not. I've popped it open but there's no visible damage, and it still works as a USB key, but it ain't playing music and the LCD display is in christmas-tree mode. The worst of it is that this isn't even a year old and it's a present from my eldest brother. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
waidesworld, not a word! I'm torn between buying a replacement and using the same cash to buy something better like a Nano or a Muvo or what not.
waidesworld, not a word! I'm torn between buying a replacement and using the same cash to buy something better like a Nano or a Muvo or what not.
hdb: DMA timeout retry
hdb: timeout waiting for DMA
hdb: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdb: drive not ready for command
hdb: ATAPI reset completeAnd thus, a coaster is born.
still somehow not getting the point
Sep. 18th, 2005 08:18 pmI'm obviously not stating this point clearly enough for interested parties to understand:
That is all.
The Sony Network Walkman devices that I have reverse-engineered file formats for support MP3 files natively. If you use the cunningly named MP3FileManager application, which is small enough to keep on the device, you get native MP3 support. It obfuscates the files somewhat, but it does not transcode or otherwise modify the actual audio data.Every time Engadget or Gizmodo or whoever mentions a Sony player, this stupid point comes up again and again and again from people who wouldn't know an MP3 file if it bit them in the ass, and I'm tired of reading it. Especially when I try to gently correct the mistaken impressions through helpfully pointing out that I can read the damned files and convert them right back into the MP3s they came from with nothing more than a file pointer and a XOR operator. I think Sony are idiots for not making it more native, i.e. a mountable device with actual MP3 data stored "raw", but I think people should actually know what they're talking about when they bitch about this sort of thing.
That is all.
further Finnisation
Aug. 17th, 2005 03:41 pmI spent some time today looking for Sellotape and finding only motherboards. I even made a video clip of me searching my desk, mainly to annoy wisn who had just turned up a rant on podcasting (it's not as good as Maciej Ceglowski's which it cites, but it covers the important points).
wisn who had just turned up a rant on podcasting (it's not as good as Maciej Ceglowski's which it cites, but it covers the important points).I am become Finn, collector of cruft...
Aug. 16th, 2005 11:21 pmI used love the idea, when I first read Neuromancer, of standard tech taken off the shelves and jacked up to do things it wasn't intended to do; Cowboy hackers who surfed the net using hardware assembled from whatever they could find and all that sort of thing. ( Of course, I never quite imagined I'd be getting up to that sort of thing myself. )
While Global Frequency on VCD makes for some fine watching, it's not a particularly good boot disk.
approximately back in action
Aug. 16th, 2005 02:47 pmLooks like the drive is totalled around about /usr; I recovered my home directory with no apparent damage, which is good. New hard drive ordered, which means the Lesser Laptop jumps from 20GB to 80GB. It started life with 6GB, as it happens.
more on the sony code
Aug. 7th, 2005 01:35 amI still haven't heard back from my tester, but if any of y'all own or have access to Sony Network Walkman devices and a Linux box, I'd appreciate if you could grab the MPLE code from my website and give it a gepoken. Especially if you have (access to) anything other than a NW-S23.
further adventures in reverse-engineering
Aug. 6th, 2005 05:44 pmI got some help from the owner of a device that differs from mine, and for which Sony provides a slightly different version of the MP3FileManager drag-and-drop toy, and between us it appears we've figured out how to get my MPLE code to work with his NW-E55. There are still some rough edges on the code and I'm waiting for confirmation from him that it actually works, but hurrah, and down with the Man, and all that crap. Actually from poking at Sony's downloads page, it would appear that supporting the E55 buys me support for another half-dozen devices for free.
people who need web designers
Jul. 25th, 2005 06:05 pmDue to the failure (mentioned elsewhere) of one of my laptop LCDs, I have been googling about to see if I can find an alternative to paying ChomPaq €400 for a replacement. This brought to my attention a site that purports to repair all manner of laptop ailments, including component-level system board repair. It's part of a network of sites with similar names - presumably for the googlejuice - but all of them have this odd not-quite-au-fait-with-communicating feel; there are sentence fragments and what look like notes the web site creator made to themselves; there are poorly written lists of things like repairs done, parts available, and so on; the whole thing has a 1995 look-ma-it's-animated feel to it. I am not quite sufficiently enamoured with these folks to trust any cash to them, particularly since the nearest outlet is across the water in the UK, but I have in the meantime found an Irish company who appear to provide a similar - and slightly better worded - service. Meantime, I'm just clicking around the loop of websites here reading and giggling.
ghetto GPS tracker
Jul. 11th, 2005 04:47 pmThis is a pretty ghetto GPS tracker I threw together yesterday, having come up with the idea while I was out on my morning run. It requires: Firefox, set to open URLs from remote applications in the current window/tab, Perl, and a means of piping NMEA data from your GPS to the script’s standard input. The sleep commands are a blunt way of allowing the remote-control calls to take effect and may need to be tuned for your system/bandwidth.
( shielding you from the gory details )
( shielding you from the gory details )
more tube in(s)anity
Jul. 2nd, 2005 09:31 amInstead of simulating tube overdrive with a rare unavailable snob-value antique transistor, we simulate it WITH TUBES. (link)NSFW. This is, after all, from the people who brought you The Agonizer, although the copy for that was better. Actually, they've got new ad copy for it now. "It's now fully OPTIMIZED for bad tone and crappy sound. "
