Another Word for Nerd

When Apple’s 802.11n-capable Airport Extreme router came out early last year, I picked one up in anticipation of eventually replacing all my wireless networking gear with 11n-capable stuff. At the time I was running Linksys WRT54GL routers running DD-WRT firmware, and doing WDS in order to bridge networks in two rooms together without running Cat5 down the hallway.

I bought the new Airport Extreme router, and one of the 802.11g Airport Express units, and set up WDS between them. Throughput was just a bit slower than it had been with my highly-tweaked WRT54GLs, but I could live with that because “eventually Apple will come out with 11n Express hardware”.

Back in March, Apple finally came out with the 11n Airport Express units. I rushed out and bought one, only to get it home and discover that Apple does not support using WDS in 802.11n mode; it has to be run in “G-compatible” mode. In other words, having 802.11n hardware on both sides of the connection makes NO difference at all in throughput, and gives no advantage over having 802.11g hardware.

I just finished ripping out all of the Apple wireless gear, and replacing it with three brand new WRT54GLs running DD-WRT v24. I reasoned that if I’m going to be limited to 802.11g speeds between rooms, I might as well have it on the best, most-tweakable hardware available - stuff that I have complete control over via SSH and a web interface, instead of being forced to use a proprietary management GUI.

I sold one 802.11n Airport Extreme (non-GigE version) and two 802.11n Airport Express units to a friend for $175, which was just enough to pay for the WRT54GLs from NewEgg with free shipping.

The Open Genera LISP development environment by Symbolics. It’s Brad Parker’s x86-64 port, running in a 64-bit Ubuntu 7.10 VM under VMWare Fusion on my Mac Mini.

For instructions on how to get it running, see here, here, or here.

I still pine after a real Symbolics Lisp Machine. Unfortunately, I can’t justify $1500 for a MacIvory board, an old 68K Mac to run it in, and the Symbolics keyboard with ADB adapter.

I recently got my $40 digital TV transition coupons, and found that the local H.E.B. grocery chain was selling a digital-to-analog TV “converter” (it’s a tuner with RF and AV output) for $40 + tax.

A few days later, I came home with a pair of the converters for a grand total of $6.60. On my way home, I stopped by Electronic Parts Outlet and picked up a couple pairs of “rabbit ears” antennas and a matching adapter (spade lugs to F-Male).

Tonight I unpacked it all to try things out. I’d first thought about running the AV output into a box I have that takes composite video and gives VGA out, but that would leave me with no audio.

Digging through my junk box, I found a little 3.5″ LCD display that takes AV in and has a speaker. Bingo!

I present the Ten Dollar Digital TV:

Philco TB100HH9 Converter Box: $3.30
Antenna and adapter: $6.70
Junky LCD Display: Free

I ended up just breaking down and doing it myself.

Here’s the 8926A (Omega-style bezel) with the new green bezel insert:

I’ll probably swap out the black bezel insert on the 8926C with a better black one this weekend.

I have the manuals and serial cable pinouts for nSTOR CR8e RAID arrays up for download:

http://www.mrbill.net/nstor

I managed to get these out of nSTOR (or whoever owned them at the time) four years ago when I was trying to reconfigure a unit but did not have the manual or console cable.

Someone emailed me to say that they’d found them useful, but only found them because I had mentioned the URL in a mailing list post from 2006. This should help anyone trying to keep their arrays running.

I finally got most of my knife collection together for a picture.

I still want a Gerber Mark II, but they’re too expensive now since they’re no longer made.

Update: My ebay purchase of a Commander I Mark I variant finally arrived, and it’s in perfect mint condition - original box, and it still “smells new”, like leather and ozone.

Now I just need to find a Mark II or a Command II (single-edged version of the Mark II, made for cities or states where double-edged blades are illegal).

I recently bought a Via PC2500E motherboard in order to build a low-power replacement for my current backup / rsnapshot system, a 2.5-year-old Dell SC420.

Got all the parts in, assembled the system tonight, and went to boot Solaris Express Community Edition; the latest release being Nevada B83a. I got the ISO image downloaded, burned a DVD, and booted the system.

For some reason, it boots straight into a grub prompt, and not into the installer or even a boot menu.

Oh well; now I have to spend another three hours downloading the latest Solaris Express Developer Edition, which is Nevada B79b. Hopefully it will work properly on the Via board.

I really don’t want to have to run FreeBSD 7; it’s ZFS support is still a little unreliable.

I now have a matched pair of 500G Hitachi SATA disks (in stripped Sun Unipack enclosures) as my external disk and Time Machine backup disk, to avoid a repeat of a couple weeks ago.

As for radio stuff, a week after I bought the FRG-100 from a friend, another friend said “Hey, I have a Kenwood TS-430S here that you can have for cost of shipping.” DOH! Anyway, $80 in shipping fees later, I now have this setup for when I pass my General upgrade exam:

Left to right: AT-250 automatic antenna tuner, TS-430S transceiver, PS-430 power supply.

I’ll eventually have to send it off for minor repair of a known problem and a tuneup, but that will only cost me $200. For a grand total of around $300, this is a VERY NICE rig that still runs around $600 with the extra components on eBay.

Now I have to figure out how I’m going to get a decent antenna up in the limited space I have available.

Got out of bed this morning (I’ve been sick for the past three days), walked into the office, and my external 250G hard drive (a Western Digital combo USB2/Firewire unit) is making “CLACK. CLACK. CLACK” noises. It’s dead.

I lost a bit of stuff obtained via BitTorrent, along with lots of PDF archive documents, some work I’d done scanning a 300-page book to release as a PDF (with the author’s permission), and worst of all, the 40G of scanned comic books I’d collected over the past three years. I have nobody to blame but myself - I had another external 250G disk here that I’d been intending to hang off the Airport Extreme and use for backup for months now, but I never got off my ass and set it up.

After I finished being angry about the dead drive (which was TWO MONTHS out of its one-year warranty), I hooked up the other disk and set up Time Machine to do backups of my internal drive for now.

Thanks to a consulting client of mine, I’ve got two 500G Hitachi SATA disks on the way that should be here early next week. I’ll be putting each of them in a gutted Sun 411 disk enclosure, replacing the internal SCSI bits with a Sabrent USB2 to SATA adapter.

Once those disks are ready, I’ll be dedicating one of them as a Time Machine backup disk, with the other in two partitions; one for “critical” data (will be backed up) and the other for non-critical data (not backed up). The single 500G external for Time Machine should be plenty to keep a “rescue” copy of all the data on my internal (250G) drive and the 250G “critical” external.

This will leave my current USB2-based external 250G disk that I’m using for Time Machine until the 500Gs get here; I’ll either keep it detatched and hook it up once a month for “last ditch” backups, or hang it off the old Dell SC420 in the other room that does nothing but rsnapshot backups of my colocated server in Austin.

I recently came across a 4-volume set of the Popular Mechanics Illustrated Home Handyman Encyclopedia & Guide (from 1961) in the bargain bin at a local used book store. Of course, I grabbed them - for less than $5 total!

The ~4000 pages of projects are amazing - it’s basically your grandparents’ equivalent of today’s MAKE Magazine; with a lot of projects that wouldn’t be printed today due to liability concerns.

They’ve got everything from planning/building/remodeling a house, woodworking, metalworking, making your own boat/go-cart/children’s playground equipment, indoor shooting ranges, to radio repair, electronics, photography, gardening, farming, and equipment to make handling your farm animals easier.

Over the past four days I’ve taken pictures of the title pages and illustrations for the most interesting articles, and put them up on Flickr. I’ve also contacted Popular Mechanics to see about getting permission to break out the scanner and make proper PDFs of the best stuff.

The Flickr collections page, with one set for each volume, is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/collections/72157603639900790/

JANUARY 14th UPDATE: I’ve received permission from Popular Mechanics to make PDFs of the articles and put them online! That’s coming soon.