On Sunday we went on a nice bicycle tour. A bit over 80 kilometers. I brought the wardriving box along and logged the networks found and the gps track. But now I can do something really cool: I can plot the track on a map and put the results on-line thanks to OpenStreetMap. No hassle with 'illegal' map material. This makes this a great moment in open license map data for me. Steps to use an OSM export map in gpsmap (part of kismet). I added the line about the license for the openstreetmap data myself but I can imagine importing data from openstreetmap and correctly naming the source turning into a standard option in gpsmap.
2008-02-29 (#)
Funny new music doing the rounds: SoKO with the weird song I'll kill her.
2008-01-14 (#)
I always thought the "Braille edition of Playboy" was just a joke in the movie Sneakers. But! It is no joke: the braille edition of the playboy, available from The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. ObJoke: you will really read this for the articles.
2008-01-08 (#)
I just read an article about the Neuros OSD: a digital video recorder which is different: the OSD stands for 'Open Source Device', it runs Linux and you are free to modify it in any way you wish. The Neuros OSD site shows a device with a lot of potential. Something I'll keep an eye on.
2008-01-07 (#)
Yesterday I found some time to install the new 1-wire sensors in a place where I am interested in the temperatures: the attic where the home server gosper lives and started fetching data into rrdtool databases. The assorted sensors at home page now shows some of the available temperatures. Sensor 2 lies in the open area right below the top of the roof.
2008-01-03 (#)
athcool is .. cool! The new server mainboard was consuming some more power and was at a higher temperature. I looked for ways to reduce this a bit. Setting power throttling mode to T1 did not help for power use or temperature (but the system reacted slowish), but athcool made the readouts from lm_sensors change from CPU Temp: +42.8 C to CPU Temp: +21.5 C which looks a lot better. And, more important: the UPS reports a drop in power-use, which is good for the electricity bill. Follow the graphs at my assorted sensors at home.
2008-01-02 (#)
The 1-wire sensors and adaptor I ordered arrived today and I started playing with DigiTemp. After running into a faq item (make sure you don't have crossed phone cable) it started working like a charm. The DS18S20 sensors work really easy and they are quite precise and fast to react to temperature changes such as touching fingers. Two sensors in the home office: on a switched-on PC speaker Sensor 1 C: 19.38, on another speaker switched-off Sensor 0 C: 18.81.
2007-08-28 (#)
After hearing the very catchy Country Boy (City Boy Remix) on the Alaska Podshow 163 and on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code 631 I had to find that mix. Party Ben has this and other funny mixes available on the Party Ben - Stuff to have page.
2007-08-20 (#)
Ik verzamel locatiegegevens van zoveel mogelijk draadloze netwerken, anderen verzamelen locatiegegevens en foto's van zoveel mogelijk ADSL centrales in Nederland. Erg leuke site.
2007-06-29 (#)
Following Wimbledon on the BBC I noticed the signs with www.wimbledon.org on the courts. Some neat work on live scores on that website: wimbledon live scores in flash 9 and wimbledon live scores for other browsers. Mighty impressive work there by IBM: the page is up-to-the-second with the current scores, and a few thousand hits per second more or less isn't going to be a problem. And with other browsers they mean all other browsers: it even gives a good view in lynx.
2007-06-28 (#)
Niels woont tegenwoordig in mijn geboortestad Dordrecht en gaat met een team meedoen aan de Abenteuer Rallye Dresden - Breslau 2007. Via de website van 4x4 Team Drechtsteden is hun voortgang te volgen. Ik ben benieuwd.
2007-04-18 (#)
I did something really scary: I tried a graphic mailclient, Thunderbird. Yes, I am a big fan of mutt but I kept having attacheritis (promising someone an attachment in an e-mail and forgetting it) and I lost the overview of my imap folders which I think should happen less with a client like Thunderbird. I wanted pgp-signed mail to work correctly so I set up the enigmail pgp plugin to sign and crypt e-mail. Mutt still rocks because it is so configurable and powerful. Cleaning out an mbox from a mailinglist with one 'D~r >3w' command (delete all mail received more than 3 weeks ago) is still faster than clicking around. The good thing about using imaps everywhere is that accessing the same mailbox with multiple clients is no problem at all. I had to set up an imaps server at home but that wasn't very difficult either.
2007-03-07 (#)
Sometimes you run into a very oooh, shiny! subject when looking for something else. I visited David Taylor's pages looking for his writeup of FreeBSD NTP server with an external GPS mainly to 'compare notes' with my own FreeBSD ntpd PPS setup (PPS slave) writeup. No surprises there, but one click led to the other, when I found out that David Taylor is also interested in receiving weather information and dove into that. He has a nice overview of his experiments in weather satellite receiving and decoding and I found out about EUMETCast data where you can receive weather satellite images via a satellite dish. Which uses a 'data' PID on a transponder, which is implemented as multicast data streams. Several personal interests for me and work-related stuff comes together in this. It's good to know this exists, but I won't be running out to buy a satellite weather map receiver now.
2007-02-28 (#)
Lore Sjöberg wrote a nice bit for Wired online: How to Heat Up Geek Reality TV where he describes tv show concepts that would actually appeal to the techies and trekkies/trekkers in the audience. Funny stuff!
2007-02-23 (#)
Coolness: Graffiti Research Lab: L.A.S.E.R. Tag where G.R.L. projected graffiti on a big building in Rotterdam.
2007-01-09 (#)
The series The Secret Life of Machines has been posted to google video: The Secret Life of Machines. Fun to watch, really british.
2006-12-31 (#)
"Paid" wardriving does exist, when you gather data that has value to for example cell phone companies: NYC Taxicabs to Test Cell Signal Strength an AP news item about Ericsson installing small receivers in taxicabs in New York to do measurements of cell phone signal strength. I have been thinking about this, if you gather enough data about radio signals and other location-dependent measurements in one go maybe it could be commercially viable to just drive (or let a unit be driven) around the country. I can imagine radio and television reception data (especially with the change to digital services) is also interesting.
2006-12-12 (#)
Ik volg de laatste dagen het nieuws over de omschakeling van analoge tv zenders in Nederland naar digitale (DVB-T). Veel informatie hierover op Radio en TV Zenders in Nederland. Het aparte aan de overschakeling was dat de frequenties voor het standaard DVB-T pakket (publieke omroepen) pas beschikbaar kwamen toen de analoge zenders uitgeschakeld waren. Er zijn (buiten de Randstad) geen extra frequenties beschikbaar omdat alles aan buurlanden grenst. Ik had eigenlijk na de omschakeling nog wat berichtgeving verwacht over problemen met de beschikbaarheid maar tot nog toe geen woord in de media.
2006-11-17 (#)
I found a webcomic due to a link in alt.sysadmin.recovery and after reading the linked comic I started at number 1 and read the entire archive.. so it's now added to the list of comics to follow. Questionable Content is not so questionable but a nice comic to follow.
2006-08-25 (#)
I played with Google Earth and it's fun and has lots of options. And lots of stuff you can play with, so after some websearches and looking at some samples I added google-earth links in Camp Wireless so you can lookup a campsite in Google Earth when it has a waypoint.
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