eric’s extremeboredom

The goal of the SeattleWireless project is to create a community owned and maintained wireless network around the city. The network is being built using standard protocols and open-source mesh routing software, making it easy for anybody to participate using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. SeattleWireless is completely free to use, and does not rely on the [...]

Most people don’t think OSX comes with a program to interact with serial devices, but they’re wrong! Someone showed me this brilliant tip a few days ago: screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600 It’s useful on Linux too, since minicom can be quite a pain to set up. And by the way, this cheap AirLink101 AC-USBS Serial Adapter [...]

Today was the first annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby. If you weren’t there, you should have been. More photos on flickr.

The latest war to plague the planet appears to be between Israel and Lebanon. The BBC has coverage on their website, including a useful page about who the hezbollah are, but I always try to get more than just the media’s view of what’s going on. There’s also the wikipedia page, but someone has already [...]

I’m slowing getting all of my stuff moved over to my shiny new server (SuperServer 5015M-MT, 3ghz Pentium D, 2GB RAM). I’ve taken this as an opportunity to finally upgrade to WordPress 2.x and clear out the 2,931 bogus comments that I had sitting in the moderation queue (I had to temporarily increase php’s memory [...]

From http://freedomhec.pbwiki.com/: Coming to Seattle in May for that other hardware conference? On your way out, stay for the hardware unconference where you’ll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more. [...]

Since the weather has been so nice, we met at a park for HackNight. From the park matt blogged all of the details and some photos using free WiFi from a nearby café: Tonight we met on Teletubby Hill at Cal Anderson Park, enjoying the sunshine and ripping through some Axis Digital Media Managers that [...]

Rode the Pogo Linux bus up to Linuxfest Northwest today. It’s nice to see that there are in fact a lot of linux/open-source fans in the area, even though we’re so close to them. I attended the following talks: Linux And Virtualization – Ilya Baimetov Incoming! What’s on the EFF’s radar – Danny O’Brien The [...]

Yesterday I watched a very good presentation about multicast dns service discovery (aka bonjour aka rendezvous aka zeroconf) given by Stuart Cheshire who happens to be the person at apple that created it. One of the things mentioned that I had not previously heard of was the fact that bonjour supports unicast dns service discovery [...]

Yesterday I updated my computer to Dapper Drake (which is what will become the next version of ubuntu) so I could try out Xgl. It is honestly the coolest thing I have ever seen linux do, and will only continue to get better. If you’re brave enough to use an unstable operating system, I highly [...]