See, there are a hell of a lot of Lance Corporals in the Marines. You go in a private (you’re a private when you’re a recruit, they just don’t call you that), and you get PFC (I think it’s) 6 months after the day you went into boot, then Lance Corporal another 6 or 9 months, I forget which. After that, you have to start earning it. So, like I said, there are a hell of a lot of Lance Corporals in the Marine Corps.
Since we’re all nonrates (e.g., not NCOs), we can all pretty much talk to each other like human beings, and since none of us ever know what the hell’s going on at the upper levels, the one guy who happened to be taking out the trash at the moment the First Sergeant said “we’re getting out early on Friday” feels compelled to tell everyone.
We call it “the Lance Corporal Underground”. And it’s usually wildly inaccurate. We might as well be asking Miss Cleo what’s on the agenda for the unit next week.
Someone took this a step further and took it online.
I thought it was hilarious.
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Yes, I finally broke down and bought a new laptop, with my <in-joke>fat Marine Corps paycheck</in-joke>.
It’s running Ubuntu Edgy, after a seemingly endless series of forced dist-upgrades from Feisty. I’ll be posting my experiences with it in a seperate section, since I seem to be the first Linux user to have bought the damned thing.
So far: ethernet works out of the box. The wireless card, a Realtek 8187B, needs a quick hack to the driver source, which I’ve detailed here. Sound and the modem are big question marks. I get 1280×800 with Xorg and the fglrx module. Synaptics touchpad works as expected.
More to come.
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I got the drivers for the RTL8187B straight from Realtek, who was nice enough to respond to my email. However, when I compiled it and insmodded it under the Ubuntu live CD, it barfed out with an “Unknown RF chip” error.
After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to get it to work: my card’s USB product ID is 0×8197, and it’s functionally identical to product ID 0×8189. All you have to do is go into rtl8187/r8187_core.c, and around line 2837, change
case 0x8189:
to
case 0x8197:
case 0×8189:
Works like a champ.
That said, why, WHY would you make the onboard NIC in a laptop a USB device? Why?
[EDIT] Drivers are at http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/. Please read the README there, since I’ve made further changes since writing this post.
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I got a new laptop. It runs Vista, for the moment, until I find drivers for the RTL8187B card.
Hmm.
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Remember me saying how M&M suddenly started spamming me? Yeah, the unsubscribe thing didn’t work. I’m still getting spam from them.
Shitlisted.
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So, we have a Wii.
This is pretty much what I went through:
- Ooooh, shiny.
- Two days of Splinter Cell: Double Agent
- Where’s the web browser?
- What the fuck do you mean, I have to pay to download a god damned web browser?!
- The remote works with Linux now.
- Drunken Wii sports with the girlfriend.
Eventually, I’m sure I’ll get around to doing craziness with it, just like everyone else.
[UPDATE] Hey, cool, I can stream radio stations to it.
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The way my home network is set up, all I really have to do to get a new machine on the network is plop the MAC address in a host declaration and forget about it, since I’ve got dynamic DNS updating working. However, the new Wii doesn’t send a hostname all the time: it asks for “Wii” when it’s downloading the weather and all that jazz, but nothing when you launch the web browser — sorry, “internet channel”.
A quick Google, and I found this little gem. (Scroll down to the comments.)
Long story short:
ddns-hostname = host-decl-name;
and now I can continue plopping things in dhcpd.conf, and DNS takes care of itself. I just add a host declaration with the MAC address:
host foo { hardware ethernet ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff; }
and a new host magically appears as foo.WIRELESS.LAN.
(I don’t know why I caps it like that.)
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I got a mysterious post at one of my blog entries. I googled Anandi Hristina, the poster’s name, and found some other random site that promises to solve the mystery of who the hell this person is, and what the hell they want.
The post came from 208.184.65.85, an AboveNet IP registered to “APS Communication” in San Jose, CA, under “Pablo Espana” at phone number 888-210-6539. It was spoofing (?) an MSN spider user-agent.
Is it a spambot checking for open posts on blogs? But, why bother? If it posts, just post it, and if it doesn’t, move on. Why verify?
A new worm, maybe, seeding its ground zero for an attack on Wordpress installations?
Or maybe just a spammer who got caught and didn’t update their spambot.
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From: M&M'S Brand
Reply-To: M&M'S Brand
To: cuervo.mm@zerokarma.homeunix.org
Subject: Join the M&M'S© Brand in Supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure!
You know those commercials where people turn into M&M’s candy to the tune of some irritatingly catchy music? It was something about finding your inner M&M, or some stupid shit like that, with a link to a site that lets you create an M&M that looks like you. I went and created my little guy, forgot about it, and now I get stupid emails from a candy bar company. I went through the routine to remove myself from the list (hey, it’s a big company, it might work), but we’ll see.
Popularity: 2% [?]
