Don_HH2K's Blog

PS/2 signal converter

Don_HH2K — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:02:30 GMT

Having uncomfortably finished three term papers earlier this month, I decided to buy a PS/2 to USB signal converter so that I could use my IBM Model M keyboard with my notebook.

(Yes, I colored in my Model M's cable such that it's PC97-compliant. =D)

This turned out to be somewhat difficult, for two reasons. First, the Model M is based around en entire Motorola 6805 CPU rather than the standard-issue Intel 8048 microcontroller. Rumor has it that the keyboard was designed as such to facilitate a hardware terminal emulator, though I've never been able to confirm this. As a result, the Model M draws significantly more power than a regular keyboard, and thus I found various reports of the keyboard not being able to power up using some cheaper cables. Second, I wanted the signal converter implemented in hardware, rather than in software, so that I could use it as if it were a plain old PS/2 keyboard in any OS.

Wi-Fi antenna

Don_HH2K — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:22:11 GMT

Earlier today, Antony informed me that I hadn't yet shown the world my cheapskate version of a high-gain 2.4GHz antenna for 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth. So here's the antenna in all its duct taped, rabbit ear pole glory:

So it may not be the most attractive antenna up there, but I can get roughly +5dBi off this when it's fully extended and properly positioned (it's directional, unfortunately). I pulled one of the poles off an unused pair of television rabbit ears, lashed it up to the side of my monitor with duct tape, and then connected it to the antenna pad on the bottom using coax. The concept is pretty simple - 2.4GHz has a wavelength of roughly 12.5cm. This particular sort of antenna picks up wavelengths λ/4 and 3λ/4, in this case 3.125cm + (6.25cm*n). The antenna is 64cm long, so I usually have to shorten the length a bit after extending it full way to achieve maximum gain.

It's also brought me some sort of strange cult following, especially among the ranks of the science department, and to a lesser and stranger extent, the history department.

In other news, I'm getting rid of some of my useless stuff on Craigslist. If you want an analog phone that's still good as an address book and day planner, a digital wristwatch sans band, 1GB of DDR2, a Casio fx-115MS scientific calculator, or an HP ze4xxx/Compaq 21xx port replicator, let me know.

Digital TV

Don_HH2K — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:58:31 GMT

I suppose it's rare to find me discussing television in a positive manner, so savor the moment. In preparation for next year's analog TV switchoff, I purchased an Insignia NS-DXA1 digital tuner at Best Buy today (with some financial aid from W, of course).

I get the idea that I don't give digital technologies as much credit as they deserve. Yes, sometimes they fall awry of their intended purpose and almost always are used to satisfy some purely monopolistic restriction. This year, though, I've transitioned to digital sources twice. The first occurred earlier this year when I switched from the AMPS cellular network to GSM, and some five months later I can say that I've been quite pleased with the change. Call clarity has been improved greatly, signal strength is amazing, improved modulation results in better battery life, and for the paranoia in all of us, calls are encrypted.

It comes as no surprise that digital TV shares a number of digital cellular service's improvements. Obviously, the most noticeable is the clear picture, which rivals that of Comcast's digital cable. Not too surprising, until you take into consideration that this is a wirelessly-distributed system, which is quite impressive. Antenna positioning is key: in analog you'll get snow, which can be acceptable, while in digital you get this. Ah, MPEG-2.

Anyway, I wrote a quick article reviewing the Insignia NS-DXA1 box over here, which details the installation process and some other things that can be expected of the switch.

There's something I hate about dual-core CPUs.

Don_HH2K — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:11:57 GMT

It's that I need to add a /usepmtimer switch to new Windows installs, otherwise recorded audio comes out like this due to the CPUs desynchronizing:

So now Episode Twelve gets re-recorded... I suppose this is a blessing in disguise, since last week's Ep12 was nearly eighty minutes long!

Episode Twelve has been recorded

Don_HH2K — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:22:43 GMT

Due to circumstances mostly beyond my control, Mark and I recorded what should have been last month's podcast just a few hours ago. I haven't cut it together yet, but should have it edited and uploaded by the end of the week. We had a lot to say, so this one's a particularly long 80 minutes unedited. By comparison, our unprocessed episodes usually come out to around 67 minutes and edit down to about an hour.

In other news, I've developed a cheap system in which I can archive original and finished podcast tracks losslessly. Having lost eight episodes to a failed hard drive and two more to a lost CD, I've decided to use a linear and slightly more fault-tolerant medium: I can buy a ten-pack of Sony Hi-Fi 90-minute cassette tapes at Target for about $5. There's a problem where each tape can only record 45 minutes per side, though our episodes frequently run much longer. A quick solution I've discovered is to split our mono tracks in half, then record them as a half-length stereo mix with the left channel consisting of the first half and the right channel consisting of the second half. Assuming minimal channel bleed, this should prove rather effective as long as we never record an episode longer than 120 minutes, at which point I'd have a hard time finding tapes. In the long run, it should also transfer to tape at twice the speed, since the actual length of the audio is cut in half, and analog tape systems generally create a 1:1 time reproduction. I haven't implemented this in hardware yet, though the software end can easily be accomplished with a simple split and track addition in Audacity.

I've missed yet another week.

Don_HH2K — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:53:27 GMT

It seems that I've become a bit lax with the blog. Plenty's happened over the past week and a half, though I honestly haven't had the motivation to write any entries lately.

I finished Halo 2 a bit over a week ago. Obviously, Halo 2 is a sequel - and that dismayed me somewhat at first. There have been many attempted game series that couldn't survive a sequel, let alone two or three, notable exceptions including the classics (Mario, Zelda, StarFox, and so forth). Halo 2, impressively, managed to get things right in this regard.

One of the first things you'll notice has been changed in Halo 2 is the environment: the setting, the way objects are interacted with, and so forth. While Halo 1 was fought exclusively on Halo itself, Halo 2's settings range from Earth to Halo to Covenant capital ships and High Charity, something I'll get to in a minute. Bungie brought back the Covenant speeder/gunner, which was present in early Halo alphas for the Mac but disappeared upon the port to the Xbox. A number of new weapons have been introduced: on the human side, the Battle Rifle (a cross between the original Assault Rifle and the pistol) and SMG; on the Covenant side, the Carbine, Beam Rifle (a laser-driven sniper rifle), and Brute Shot (a grenade launcher). Certain weapons can be dual-wielded, that is, one in each hand, at the expense of being able to throw grenades and melee enemies. Vehicle performance has been improved: it's now possible to pilot a Wraith, while the Ghost and Banshee have been given afterburners.

The social aspects of the game have been dramatically overhauled. In Halo 1, the only real social implication was that between the Chief and Cortana. In Halo 2, the Covenant has annexed a number of new races, and an entire half of the game is based on the unrest between the tenured Elites and novice yet mighty Brutes within the Covenant. We learn that the Covenant are an entire theocracy led by a group of prophets, rather than the militarily-organized interspecies union that it seemed in Halo 1. Character dialog has been extended from time-scripted utterances to full-on reactions: if you stare at a friendly target, for example, he may say something along the lines of, "Yeah. It's me. Here. Alive. Okay?" Covenant phrases have now been translated from Halo 1's gibberish (explained as "better translation software"), in favor of slightly more humorous versions from Grunts: "Oh shit, he's gonna kill us all! Run!" I especially enjoyed how well Bungie pulled off the concept of brotherhood among the Elites.

Architecture hasn't changed much from Halo 1, which is something that I'm thankful for - Halo 1's style was amazing even back when I first watched the QuickTime trailer under Windows 3.1 in all its choppy Cinepak-compressed glory (go figure, it was 2000). Halo 2's graphics are fairly high-end for a console like the Xbox, which admittedly exhibits a deal of rendering difficulty with the game. Physics additions are quite welcome as well - things actually fly properly now when exploding. Overall, a pretty darned good improvement over Halo 1. Unfortunately, as of yet I haven't had a chance to test out the multiplayer functionality, and most likely won't at any point between now and June, when I have to return the Xbox. Oh well.

In other news, my Motorola router now runs DD-WRT, a cool Linux distro that runs on Broadcom-based routers. Its interface is vastly improved when compared with Motorola's firmware, which provided little organized control over the features of the box. It introduces something that I miss from the good old days of my Lucent RG-1000: full readouts of wireless performance, including signal strength, noise indexes, and SNR. There are options to overclock the CPU (though I can't see what good this would do on a router) and boost the output power of the internal transmitter to the full 250mW allowed under the 802.11 standard (for reference, it runs at 28mW under the factory settings). It's also possible to run Samba Server on DD-WRT, which I may try a bit later. Among the strange things I've configured the router to do, it Wake-on-LANs my desktop shortly before I start using it every day.

I finally got around to installing FreeNAS on one of my P3s. It provides everything from disk encryption to Samba services to Web-based management and live performance-tracking graphs in SVG. To simplify things a bit, I installed another copy of FreeBSD alongside FreeNAS for workstation use, on which I proceeded to install X11, XFCE, and the like, which seems to have been arguably easier than dual-booting BSD and Linux. Both are now in good working condition. I'm still looking for something to do with my third, diskless P3, which at this point seems impossible.

The Xbox

Don_HH2K — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:04:08 GMT

So, for the next two months I have an Xbox on loan from a friend. Provided I don't damage it, I can keep it free of charge until June, otherwise I owe him $50.

I seriously can't believe I'm saying this, but Sony actually has a better design than their competitors for once. The Xbox takes up more floor space than a laptop and stands as high as a Gamecube in the process. The PS2, meanwhile, packs even more components (or in this case, space for components, as the PS2 doesn't ship with a hard drive but includes an internal drive bay for one) into a thin, sleek-looking package - and I'm even talking about the early PS2s, not the newer slimline models.

Perhaps you're wondering why I'm ranting right now instead of playing Halo 2. I'm missing half the controller. Seriously: Xbox controllers have detach points on the cable, which supposedly prevents the console from dragging if you pull the controller too far, and I managed to lose the connector that actually interfaces the controller to the Xbox. Of course, I doubt this thing's going to be dragging by a controller - it's almost as heavy as a desktop PC. In any case, I can't yet give any comprehensive review of the unit above its physical features and its ridiculous bootup sequence, which is reminiscent from a scene from The Blob.

Add the Xbox to one of many Microsoft products that has made me ask, "What the hell were they thinking?" I suppose everything needs a rough draft - the Xbox 360 sports a vastly improved design that addresses a number of these flaws.