What I did on my vacation from reality

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…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

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

Popularity: 2% [?]

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. ;-)

Popularity: 12% [?]

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. :-)

Popularity: 4% [?]

I got a wild hair up my ass to get Puppy and Ubuntu both booting off my 1G USB drive.

Oddly enough, it worked pretty well, but it took a bit of work.

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

I got my new PayPal “security key” in the mail today. It’s nifty, but so far, the only way I’ve found to use it with Linux is a commercial product called Stadrin. Even then, I’m not sure it’ll support the PayPal keyfob.

I’ve had the key for about a week now, and had no problems using it to log into PayPal thus far.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Irony is screwing with udev for a while, finding it’s too much of a pain in the ass, and writing a Perl program to interface with HAL instead.

Anyway, I wrote a program to run commands whenever anything (USB drive, SD card, joystick, whatever) is inserted or removed a while back, and I spiffed it up a bit so anyone can use it. I’m still making it pretty, but I’ll post source in a bit.

Oh, yeah. In my hacking, I noticed that ssh-agent is incapable of deleting an identity when the (public?) key file is no longer accessible — e.g., mount removable media with ssh key, load ssh key, unmount media, and you can’t delete it. Bug in ssh-agent?

[UPDATE] Source is here.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Eheheheheh.

The Software Publisher’s Association gives you permission to copy this video for the non-profit purpose of promoting the ethical and legal use of software.

And public ridicule.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 4% [?]