Another Word for Nerd

Coming Soon…

Ginger ale, spicy ginger beer, regular beers, and eventually mead….

Willa (my current ladyfriend) has been using an old decrepit laptop with a bad keyboard hooked up to her TV at home to watch NetFlix instant-streaming movies. I took pity on her as the “geeky boyfriend” and bought her a Roku HD Player (e.g., “NetFlix Box”) a few days ago.

We just finished doing the initial setup and account connections via my TV and Internet connections here, and she’ll take it home with her to try out tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I built an XBMC-based media player to use with the 32″ TV in the living room:

I decided to make another system using an original XBox for the bedroom, since I don’t need to play HD content on the 19″ TV in there. I bought a refurbished XBox from Gamestop for $54 shipped, and picked up the rest of the pieces I needed (XBox-to-USB cables, an 8M memory card) off eBay and from a local shop. I used a 10″ LCD TV while setting it up, so I didn’t have to run back and forth to the bedroom.

Here’s the XBox after doing a “softmod” to install Linux and the UnleashX dashboard:

Here it is with XBMC installed, running the default “PM3″ theme:

And here’s the final setup. Hooked up to the 19″ TV, running the same Confluence theme as the system in the living room, with the XBox DVD Playback kit plugged in so I can use a remote instead of a wired controller.

Am really happy with both systems; the living room unit cost me around $200 total while the bedroom XBox setup cost me $90.

I finally had a Google Wave invitation come through this morning, so if you’re on it and bored, “wave” at mrbill@googlewave.com.

I don’t yet have any invites to send out, sorry.

I’ve got a big box containing at least 350-400 slides from Gray Lodge #329 that I need to scan.

One problem – my scanner (an old HP Scanjet 6200C) does not have a transparency adapter.

One trip to Ace Hardware later, things are working fine.

Six paint stirrer sticks (free), cut to appropriate lengths, taped to the scanner body over the glass with blue painter’s tape. These serve as guides to keep the slides straight; I can only put three slides on the glass at once.

One 18″ long, 15-watt flourescent light fixture with bulb. Once the slides are on the scanner glass, I position the light shining down through them down into the body of the scanner.

VueScan scanner software, running on my MacBook Core Duo (recently reinstalled with OSX 10.6.1 “Snow Leopard”). This supports the HP (and damn near every other scanner on the planet), and lets me put it into “transparency mode” where the built-in light on the scanner head is turned off. I’ve been using VueScan since 2001 and have never found anything better.

The scans are only ending up being around 800×600 since the maximum resolution of my scanner is 600dpi. However, this is fine for now; I’ll eventually buy a new scanner (whenever I’m able to sell some of Amy’s purse collection) and redo the scans at 1200dpi.

Update: A dedicated $40 slide scanner works great, although I still need to clean up the output a bit.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Neuros OSD media player off eBay. The auction showed a “Developer Beta” unit. It showed up about a week ago, but I didn’t have time to play with it till tonight.

After much pulling out of hair, I finally realized that what I had been sent was a “Developer Sample” OSD unit; it has a green printed circuit board versus the tan PCB for the Beta units (that was shown in the pictures accompanying the auction).

The end result is that I have a unit that cannot be upgraded past the original 3.00 firmware, and for my purposes is basically an expensive doorstop. This is highly annoying, as I sold my AppleTV in order to buy this piece of hardware.

Neuros Technology had a trade-in program in 2006, where owners of “Dev Sample” OSDs could swap them out for “Beta” units at no cost, but I highly doubt they’ll still do that. I’ve emailed support but I don’t have my hopes up.

Update: The nice folks at Neuros Technology are going to send me a coupon code that lets me buy the current model with a good discount. That is, if they ever get around to it.

If not, I’m going to just buy an eGreat M34A “Networked Media Tank”.

If anyone else is looking for an AKAI PDP4206EM Service Manual, here you go.

I’m still looking for a PDF of the user manual.

I recently replaced my Linksys WRT54GL routers (running DD-WRT of course) with an ALIX 2c3 running pfSense. Not only is it faster, better-built, and has more features, it looks cool. Unfortunately, the cost for a refurbished 2c3, enclosure, and power supply was around $150.

For those of you wanting to build your own tiny pfSense system, I’ve found an alternative. It’s not as small, or as completely quiet, but can provide just about equivalent functionality.

First, buy a used MaxTerm MaxSpeed 8300 thin client off ebay. That seller has them for $45 shipped, buy-it-now. These were sold as XP Embedded thin clients, but are actually complete PC systems with 512M memory, a VIA C3 “Ezra” 800Mhz CPU, and a 512M Compact Flash card and reader standing in for the main hard drive.

Take off the stand and top cover, and they look like this:

In these pictures, I’ve already installed an Intel Pro/100 Server-S PCI 10/100 network card in the PCI slot. The CompactFlash card reader is below the PCI slot; you’ll have to remove the small cover concealing it.

As received, these systems (I bought two) have Windows XP Embedded installed on them.

You’ll want to take the 512M CF card installed in the system, and use your USB card reader and another system (you DO have another system and a CF card reader, right?) to write the pfSense image to the card.

If you boot the system without a CF card installed, the screen will look similar to this:

Once the pfSense install image is written to the card, put it back in the system and boot.

At this point all console I/O switches to the serial port. You’ll need to connect another system (or a dumb terminal, etc) to the serial port on the back of the system and continue initial configuration there. The cable should be a null modem, the speed 9600 N81.

Once initial configuration (network port and IP assignments) is done via the serial port, you can continue final configuration and setup via the web interface, and do all further management through SSH or the web.

I’ve been running a pfSense box for about two weeks now, and am really happy with it. With these thin clients, I can now build a firewall for a friend, and have a spare in case of problems with my ALIX board.

Thanks to a kind soul, I’ve been fiddling around with this since earlier this week:

A Dell Mini 9, refurb from the Dell Outlet. 1024×600 screen, 16G solid-state disk, and an Atom N270 CPU. I’ve upgraded it to 2G of RAM, and just today installed the “US-International” keyboard to have a more “standard” layout.

I used this method to install Mac OS X on the system. It runs great – for the sort of things that I use it for, the performance is just as good (not as fast, but “just as good”) as my circa-2006 Core Duo 13″ MacBook.

Apple does not condone “hackintoshing”, but I would buy an Apple portable in this form factor if they would release one. I’ve owned thirteen different Apple systems in the past ten years.

The Mini 9 was discontinued a few weeks ago, but Dell replaced it with the Mini 10v. Three guys from my Masonic lodge have now ordered Mini 10v systems after seeing my Mini 9 earlier this week.

Mark Williams Coherent 4.1
running on QEMU 0.10.0 w/KQEMU 1.4
running on Ubuntu 9.04
running on VMWare Fusion
running on OSX 10.5.7

I think I need professional help.