First, the good news.
I’ve been told by a few people that the stock 2.6.2527 kernel will support the RTL8187B natively. (Much more likely than not, this has nothing at all to do with my temporary patch.) I haven’t tried it out yet, especially since the fan on my Satellite failed miserably and the damned thing overheats every 10 minutes (those little laptop fan-pads really do work wonders, btw, I’ll have to pick another one up), but I’m crossing my fingers.
The good news is that the further bad news doesn’t really have anything to do with anything any of you need to worry about. :-) It has mostly to do with my spare time, or lack thereof.
In any case, here’s what’s going on in my drafts: Linux on the Wii, how to disassemble my particular model of Toshiba Satellite and unfuck its cooling system once the fan burns out (once I disassemble my particular model of Toshiba Satellite and unfuck its cooling system), a bit of Marine stuff, and some more miscellaneous Perl.
[EDIT: Updated the FAQ.]
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I finally broke down and bought something off Thinkgeek: the Wi-Fi Detecting Watch.
[EDIT] Wait, I lied, I also have a “got root?” sweatshirt.
(more…)
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So, being in the military, I get one of these nifty little dealies. I never bothered to look into them, but I saw a USB reader for $25 when they shipped us out for training, so I figured, what the hell.
I haven’t bothered to get really into smartcard hacking (yet?), but I have got it locking and unlocking my screen (and other assorted fun things when my friends plug their cards in).
Source - requires Chipcard::PCSC
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I got Ubuntu upgraded to 8.04. It took me a while to figure out that esound makes things very unhappy. If your Gnome desktop is hanging or otherwise misbehaving, try “sudo killall esd”, and “apt-get remove esound”.
Also, the rtl8187b driver does, indeed, dislike the 2.6.24 kernel (mine is 2.6.24-16-generic, and no, I don’t know why I’m not using the 64-bit version). I applied Hin-Tak Leung’s patch (here), and all is well — or, at least, as functional as it was with the 2.6.20 and 2.6.22 kernels.
I also got Cc’d in a couple emails to Andrea Merello, who basically said …well, to be honest, I have no idea what the hell it boils down to. I guess there’s still someone at the helm of the RTL8180 driver, and the rtl-wifi project isn’t as dead as it looks.
Also, thanks to the people who donated a couple bucks! You made me lose a bet with datamorph, damn it. :-)
Sorry again for the lag, I’m working on improving.
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Okay, I finally found a decent picture of me in that parade. Yay.
(That’s me in the back.)
Twitter’s fucking down again, which is too bad, because I just wrote a mail handler to tell me who’s following me. Woot, looks like it just came back up.
And, finally, I need reports on the new version of the RTL8187B driver that Mister Adams sent me, please. Does it compile? Does it work? Does it turn your computer into Oprah?
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I’ve put up the contributed version of the RTL8187B driver I received from a Mister Adams that supposedly works with the 2.6.24 kernel. Note I haven’t tried it yet (I’m not in a hurry to upgrade from 2.6.22, even with that local exploit going around), and the only other person I sent it to reported a kernel panic. Use at your own risk.
Also, I was lucky enough to get called up to be in the Holiday Bowl Parade in San Diego in 2007. This was pretty much the only picture I could find (that’s me in the back):
If anyone else happened to be there and snap a couple, think you could send ‘em my way?
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I installed a new tagboard. Since I didn’t feel like doing the work myself all over again, it’s from here, and it works pretty well so far. I figured it’d help you guys who’re paying more attention to the laptop page out a bit more, if nothing else. We’ll see how it goes.
Speaking of which, yes, I know I’m still lagging on things. I got an email from a gentleman who said he patched the RTL8187B driver for the 2.6.24 kernel, so I sent it to another gent who tried it out, and got back a report of a kernel panic. D’oh! (The next post will have a link to the source.) The best way to reach me right now is probably one of the contact links in the sidebar.
I really am trying to get the ball rolling again, and I know that page is getting pretty cluttered. I was honestly just throwing some source and docs out there, I didn’t intend to become the maintainer of anything besides the Linux-Laptops site, but since I’m headed towards the top of Google for the RTL8187B, I might as well do what I can. :-)
I’ll keep you posted.
PS - Would the sir who sent me his 2.6.24 patch please email me again? I still have the patch, but lost your email, and you forgot to add your changes and contact info in credits. ;-)
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So, I accidentally blew away my entire Javascript directory on the webserver, and the server the backups were on …well, that’s the router that “crashed”.
Fuck. Me. Sideways.
I managed to save some of it, but the parameter parsing source went bye-bye — at least the one that did it properly. Grr. I’ve kludged around that for the moment by just uncollapsing all the sidebar menus on the right. I was thinking about changing themes, anyway. Oh, well.
Also, is the fact that mutt can’t do header matching in the index fucking irritating to anyone else?
Computers are pissing me off. Merry Christmas.
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[UPDATE] I cleaned up the source a bit, so it’s suitable for human consumption.
I was adding more bells and whistles to my mail system — this time, a command-line program to parse through SpamAssassin’s configs and tell you about rules, and one to add headers as such — when I realized that all that data I was basing the pointless little graphs in my earlier post on was a little rough, and SpamAssassin already has the data on what I consider ham and spam. D’oh!
So, here’s another one, based on sa-learn --dump magic. (Here’s source.)
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I was tweaking my email system when I started wondering: what are the most popular hits against SpamAssassin?
So, I wrote a program to find out. :-)
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