whizfoo

I was given a DVD collection containing the early films by Alfred Hitchcock for Christmas this year. The box set cover art included a very good two colour profile of the master of suspense, in other words, perfect for scanning, tracing and converting to SVG!

I made a nice desktop background, and also a bonus variant with only the rough outline and signature.

Alfred Hitchcock in profile

Alfred Hitchcock outline and signature

I have recently taken up soldering as a hobby. Most (if not all) of the software I use is free, and possible for me to modifiy if I so desire. Hardware, not so much. Well, I at least wanted a chance to try and modify and build stuff, so off I went and bought a shiny new soldering station and a few kits to practice with.

In other words, I am now the proud owner of a Velleman MK109 Electronic Dice. At a simple press of a button, the seven (for aesthetic reasons) LEDs will start flashing, and a moment later the result will make it self visible. No longer is there a need to actually roll a die much like a brutish cave dwelling pre-historic beast might do.

Behold its near infinite glory

I shall be very cross indeed if this apparatus does not enrich, nay, revolutionise my life, making me the envy of my fellow man-beings.

As frightfully interesting as these kits are, I soon hope to graduate to more fruitful projects. My immidiate plans include hooking up the two unused internal USB ports on my Eee 701, eliminating the need for external Bluetooth and UMTS adapters. It’s a relativitly risk free procedure, but I’m still worried to brick the poor thing.

Another interesting project is to build the Uzebox. A homebrew 8-bit game console. It comes complete with schematics and free software licensed under the GPL.

I recently upgraded my router from the standard firmware to FreeWRT, a GNU/Linux distribution for embedded systems. FreeWRT comes with a large selection of packages but is however a bit lacking in it’s selection of editors.

Prefering Emacs, I immediately set out to package GNU Zile (zile is lossy emacs).  Fortunately it’s really easy to package software in FreeWRT, and the ADK comes with a complete environment, including a cross-compiler.

So here’s GNU Zile on FreeWRT,
http://www.whiz.se/temp/zile/

The binary is built for my Asus WL500g premium with  squashfs-overlay filesystem using FreeWRT 1.0.3.

I might suggest it for upstream inclusion, but at the moment the latest release of Zile refuses to build.

When the packaging has obvious mistakes, like spelling “Serial ATA” as “Sevial ATA” and even managing the blunder of making “Made in China” into “Made in Chian“, this really shouldn’t come as surprise:

Sevial ATA adapter

Thankfully I managed to unplug it before any other damage was done to the system. Burning electronics always smells like failure.

Listening to the soundtrack from Waking Life late at night.

I have yet to set up OpenVPN and making it work with NetworkManager (this is planned some time after I install FreeWRT on the router) so I have naturally been a bit hesitant to connect to unsecured wireless networks. It turns out there is an easy way to secure your connection with tools already installed, SSH:

Then I found that ssh has a really nifty -D option to implement a SOCKS5 proxy. Therefore all I needed to do was ssh -D localhost:8080 remote.box and then setup Firefox to use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy server.

Thank you Ian Wienand for sharing this useful tip!

Just for the record. The cheap Bluetooth USB dongles being sold on Tradera (and I’m sure other places) seems to work perfectly with Linux 2.6.25 and BlueZ 3.30.

lsusb identifies it as “Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle”.