Category: Jake

Need Good Wireless Access Point For Hot Spot

I’m working on building a public hot spot for an area out here in Sunriver, and need some advice and see if anybody has recommendations. I need a good access point with the following:

  • Functionality that will allow us to set a starter page a “Sponsored By” page that will say who’s providing the access and general rules and policies on it.
  • I need to be able to limit bandwidth usage so that people aren’t able to saturate the providing pipe.
  • If it can survive outdoors, that’d be ideal, but regardless, it needs to be able to have an external antenna hooked up to it as I can run the antenna outside.
  • Ideally, I’d like to be able to have filtering that will filter folks based on time online, so they can’t be online for the entire day.
  • 802.11b coverage is all I’m really concerned width — I don’t really want folks to have 802.11a/g.
  • It needs to provide IP addresses and do DHCP, as I’m going to be hooking this thing directly into a pipe that’s not going to be doing any of that.
  • Content filtering would be nice, but not required. Some sort of local cache would be nice (obviously we’re talking about hooking the thing up to a cache at this point, and that might be total overkill), but not required.

If anybody has input on parts they’ve used, that would be wonderful. Or if anybody knows of an alternative firmware for the Linksys WRT54G/L router that will do this, that will certainly save me some money.

Comment here or e-mail me if you have any ideas.

May 2, 2006

A Much Needed Feature For BendBlogs.com

This is one of those things that I’ve been trying to get around to doing for quite a while, but there is now a site submit form and an about us/FAQ page. The content of each of those pages is subject to change but it’s at least much better than it was before.

So if anybody has any submissions for blogs that need to be added to BendBlogs, use those forms on that page so I can keep better track of them. As it stands right now, we have 169 blogs getting indexed, with a few more added today.

Also of note, if any of you folks reading this are using a Blogger.com (aka an *.blogspot.com blog) or a LiveJournal blog, and want a different FavIcon, if you can find a place to host it, I can manually tweak my settings in BendBlogs to show that icon. Just use the submit form to submit your new FavIcon URL.

April 30, 2006

So Maybe MySpace isn’t a Total Waste

As many of you know, my attitude towards MySpace has been pretty apathetic — I just didn’t get a rip about it. I setup a profile on there a while back, had a few friends add me, found a couple people I knew who had profiles, and that was really about it.

Then today I get an “add as friend” notification that somebody who I hadn’t talked to basically since my early college years, but was a great friend of mine growing up. I didn’t even know if the dude was still alive (long story, but I just pictured him getting killed at an early age by doing something stupid), so I sent him a note and hope to hear back from him.

So while I’ll still generally avoid MySpace (unless I’m searching for local blogs), I guess it does some good.

April 30, 2006

Completely Removing BoxTrapper In cPanel

This is one of those things I just didn’t want to lose in case I need it again, but basically, if you have a cPanel server and you’re not using BoxTrapper (which you really shouldn’t, as it can cause your server to get blacklisted unnecessarily), follow these directions to get rid of it:

The first step is to modify /etc/exim.conf to remove the boxtrapper sections (there’s around 4 or 5 IIRC), and then run:

rm -rf /var/cpanel/version/boxtrapper

/scripts/eximup –force

/scripts/mailscannerupdate

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/*/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/*/*/boxtrapp*

Also of note, I didn’t delete the boxtrapper sections out of exim.conf. Commenting them out seems to do the trick.

I was having trouble with some e-mail getting sent via my SMTP server, so I’m hoping that fixes the issue (it didn’t get bounced this time at least).

April 25, 2006

A Few Minor Updates

Just some updates to some previous posts as well as some new news:

  • The marble finally came out this morning without incident. No more poop patrol for me.
  • Actually, something was taken from my car the other night. This morning was the first time I’d actually driven anywhere in my car since Thursday, and noticed my sunglasses were gone — my $7, Bi-Mart special sunglasses. No huge loss there. But still will at least install some motion sensor lights for the driveway.
  • This is what I woke up to this morning:
     

    Yes, that is about seven inches of snow in my backyard and burying my cars, and yes, it is April 17. What’s funny is my office in Sunriver, which is at a higher elevation and usually gets beaten with snow, only had about an inch on the ground. Mt. Bachelor ended up with about 14 inches in the last 24 hours, and they still have a mid-mountain base of 192 inches.

    Is anybody else ready for spring yet? Because, despite what Simone says, it ain’t here yet.

More posts later when I get myself organized, I just know a bunch of people were asking about those items.

April 17, 2006

Need Recommendations On Home Brew Surveillance System

Why would I ask for such a thing? Because somebody got into my car last night. I honestly can’t remember if all my doors were locked (a couple of my doors are those kind where you have to hold the lever open while you shut it for it to stay locked — a stupid design in my opinion). But my car was certainly opened, and everything inside the main part of the car was moved around. Thankfully, nothing was taken. Other than my drumsticks and my music in there that belonged to COCC, there was nothing of significant value in the car. But whoever did this rummaged through my glove box, tore out the few things that were under my seat (mostly radiator fluid and a windshield screen), opened my drum stick bag (which I never leave in my car, but was just tired after band rehearsal last night), took my few cruddy CDs out of a little storage cubby, and even threw my ice scraper across the seat.

So basically from what I could tell, they were trying to find some quick cash or quick something they could pawn off for a few bucks (my stereo isn’t worth removing — it’s a piece of crap). They didn’t find anything, and they moved on (they popped my gas cap, for some reason).

What’s weirder is that they didn’t touch my wife’s car, which is a far nicer car — they decided to pick my crappy little car to rummage through.

But the reason this has me spooked is that back in 1999 when I was in college and living in Eugene, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop under my seat in my car (it was a long night of studying that I had gotten back home at 1:00am). My car was locked, but I woke up to a broken window, and my laptop, my bag, and my laptop was gone (you can read all about it in a ranting pissy online column I wrote which I’ve mirrored here as the original link isn’t rendering things properly).

I don’t want that to happen again where a momentary lapse in my judgement screws me over good or does something to me or my family. It’s one thing to screw me, but when there’s a chance that something might happen to my family, then I get a little angry.

So I’m looking to fight it and catch bastards like this in the act — I’m looking to setup a home-brew surveillance system. I know good little Web cams are getting fairly inexpensive now and I might have enough spare parts that I could build a computer to tether them to for archiving of images.

Has anybody done anything like this or have any suggestions? Linux-based systems are totally fine (and will probably be cheaper), and support for at least three cameras that I can access via the Web is a requirement (as I can route a URL to my house, if need be). Built-in motion sensing (it doesn’t need to record all the time) is basically a must. And if anybody has any spare parts that they’d like to contribute to the project, I’d be immensely grateful. I’m open to any thoughts and/or suggestions for anybody who has done this type of thing before.

Needless to say, I have filed a police report, and my cars are locked up.

April 14, 2006

Adventures in Parenting

I don’t usually post about my family or my daughters much, but I had to share this.

Remember hearing stories about all weird things you and your friends did when they were little? Or hearing stories from parents about the weird things their kids did? Today was a story I’ll be telling for a while.

My two year old (nearly three) swallowed a marble. Now she never puts stuff in her mouth like that, so we’ve never worried about her doing that kind of thing. But today, she was playing quietly with her six-year-old sister. Then out of nowhere, she runs screaming out of the bedroom, screaming “It’s all gone, it’s all gone!!!” She wouldn’t let anybody near her, so we asked our oldest daughter what happened, and she said she thought that she had swallowed a small little marble.

So the poor thing was scared to death — she was running around frantic. I don’t know if she was scared about doing something really wrong, or scared about what was happening with the marble inside her. My wife tried to comfort her, and every time she got near her (especially near her belly) she screamed. It wasn’t a painful scream, it was obviously a scared to death scream (the same kind of scream she exhibits when she hears a loud noise like the vacuum or something equally as loud and obnoxious (when the neighbors were shredding tree branches, that really freaked her out). Finally, with the help of the big sis (who little sis adores more than anybody), we finally got her calmed down and laughing and happy again.

That was, until somebody mentioned the marble, and then we were back to square one again.

Luckily we finally got her calmed down — again. We made it clear between the three of us to not speak of the marble again.

But you know what I’ll have to be digging for in her diapers over the next couple days. Because when something gets lost like this, they always turn up in the end and this too shall pass.

April 11, 2006

My First Experimentation With WordPress

I’ve been a loyal MovableType user for many years both on this site, and I use it at Cascade Winds as well. It’s a very nice, powerful system. But, just for kicks and giggles, I decided to try something else for a new site.

(more…)

April 11, 2006

Why You Shouldn’t Trust The Sales Droids At Best Buy

I was in our local Best Buy the other night. I can’t remember why, but I was in the hard drive aisle, just glancing at prices. An older woman came in, said she wanted to return her hard drive, as it’s given her nothing but trouble and her geek friend said that it was an incompatibility with her hard drive and her motherboard. The Best Buy “Geek Squad” sales droid said that “these are all standards parts and should work fine together.”

For the most part he’s right, until the lady mentioned she was trying to return a Maxtor hard drive. At this point, if the geek knew what he was doing, he would asked what processor she was running — AMD or Intel. Why is this important? Because it’s a very well known and very well documented problem with Maxtor hard drives and the nForce4 chipset that powers many newer AMD motherboards. But the “geek” had no idea about this, despite the fact that this problem has been out there for many many months and only recently has some fixes (many of which still don’t quite work, according to some forum threads).

But since the “geek” didn’t ask this question, the lady started walking out of the store feeling dejected. I walked and caught up to her, explained that the guy was full of crap, and brought her back into the store. I walked back into the store and I found a guy behind the counter that I went to high school with back in the day and who knew I was a die-hard geek. He was one of the “geek” managers. I explained to him the situation, the stories behind the data corruption, and while it was news to him too, he took care of the refund, probably because he was an old friend of mine.

So what’s the easiest way to solve Maxtor hard drive problems? Pick other companies for your hard drives. I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital hard drives, and I know Simone’s liking her system I built for her that has three of them. Just avoid Maxtor like the plague.

That, and don’t trust anybody at Best Buy.

April 3, 2006

Any PHP/MySQL Geeks Want To Make Some Money?

I’m accepting bids on either eLance or Script Lance on a project that I need a programmer for. You’re either welcome to bid on it over at either of those sites, or you can contact me directly at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com if you want to do this privately or if you have any questions.

April 3, 2006