Still more wireless troubleshooting Mar 24, 2011 {% raw %} The damnedest thing happened - I went out of town.  I went out of town, and discovered that I was STILL getting dropouts every 90 seconds!  On a totally different router, on the opposite site of the planet, in a rural area with no conceivable wireless interference.  This prompted me to boot into Windows 7 (I have a Boot Camp partition) to try my ping test under a totally different software stack. ...
Heat issues on my XBMC mediacenter Jan 21, 2011 {% raw %} I run an XBMC mediacenter at home, on my old Compaq C765 laptop (the laptop I used to use as a Hackintosh, until I got a real Mac).  I say it's old, but it's perfectly well powered: 2.1ghz Intel Core 2 Duo2gb RAMIntel GMA X3100 "graphics" adapterApart from the X3100, it's a perfectly good little computer, and perfect for a media center.  XBMC is super easy to install - just install Ubuntu as you normally would, and install the XBMC package using your favorite package manager (" ...
Net Neutrality and Steve Wozniak Dec 22, 2010 {% raw %} I know no one reads this blog but me, but I may as well put this up here.  Net Neutrality: I'm for it. Steve Wozniak has an excellent Open Letter up on the Atlantic about the issue.  He takes the examples of public goods such as roadworks and compares them favorably to privately managed utilities like Cable TV and Internet. Personally, I think his letter is a much more effective critique of the FCC than it is a championing of the public works model of construction. ...
More DD-WRT / Linksys WRT54G troubleshooting Dec 22, 2010 {% raw %} After my evening spent getting my DD-WRT firmware to a stable version (as opposed to the version recommended by the DD-WRT website), I had hoped that I had seen the end of my wireless issues. No such luck. I have definitely seen an improvement - in a ping flood test, I'm only seeing 0.5% dropped packets now, which is an improvement over the 2% I was seeing before. ...
DD-WRT, versioning, and the Linksys WRT54G wireless router Dec 20, 2010 {% raw %} I have had all sorts of trouble with the wireless situation in my apartment.  The layout of the place is such that the kitchen sits in between the two major rooms (living room and bedroom), and I swear those kitchen walls must be made of lead.  No wireless signal seems to get through.  I have phone jacks for ADSL in the living room and bedroom, nothing in between. ...
How to jailbreak and unlock iPhone 3GS IOS 4.2.1, old baseband Dec 20, 2010 {% raw %} After wasting my evening working out a jailbreak/unlock for an old version of IOS, I discovered a side note in a devteam blog update that gave me clues on how to jailbreak and unlock my phones for the latest version of IOS.  So I spent another evening working on that. I haven't seen complete instructions anywhere yet, so here they are.  How to update your iPhone 3GS to 4. ...
I baked a computer (and it worked!) Dec 20, 2010 {% raw %} This weekend a friend asked me to have a look at his HP DV9500 laptop.  It was having trouble - when you turned it on, the screen showed nothing but a solid grey with a few thin black bars.  The grey increased in intensity as the system ran, until it ran off the colors that the display knew how to show. Clearly, there was a problem with the video card. ...
Unlocking and jailbreaking my iPhone 3gs on 4.1.2 - a little late Dec 18, 2010 {% raw %} While I was away over the weekend, I borked my iphone.  I was running IOS 4.0, and I was having trouble with network connections. The statusbar wouldn't reflect my actual connection status.  WiFi connections would rarely show up in the statusbar, though I knew I was surfing wirelessly (my router at 10.10.10.1 was accessible to the phone, for starters...)WiFi would periodically crash.  In the middle of a good network connection, it would just. ...