July 2008 Entries
Earlier this year I installed Linux on my $40 Motorola router. Since then, I've discovered various ways in which this can be beneficial and turn my $40 router into something closer to a $400 Cisco router.
On the performance side, I overclocked the CPU from the stock 200MHz to 216MHz, which gave me a noticeable increase in routing bandwidth: almost 6Mbps, for a total of 18Mbps. If I install a suitable heatsink, I can take the BCM4712 CPU all the way up to 300MHz. Using DNSMasq for DNS forwarding eliminated many of the problems that stemmed from Motorola's firmware, and with...
I certainly have been posting more than usual, haven't I?
Sometime last year, my school ditched their old circa-1978 Tandberg Educational Language Lab and replaced it with a newer Sanako lab. The new lab uses PCs instead of cassette tapes and, perhaps most important to this post, new headsets. While they were in the process of getting rid of the old lab, a couple of people and I asked if we could take some of the old headsets. Unfortunately, these old headsets used a 6P6C connector instead of 3.5" stereo connectors, so we couldn't just plug them into a computer and...
Podcast 13 has been recorded, marking the one-year milestone for the podcast. We're releasing it on the 23rd for consistency along with something extra, details of which I can't elaborate about.
A year's worth of podcasts has grown to nearly 300MB. Today I began re-encoding our 64kbps MP3s to 20kbps WMA9 Voice files to save some space, as I'd mentioned earlier this year. If you absolutely want the MP3-based archives, download them now, because they'll be gone by the 23rd at the latest. Bandwidth savings are pretty good: our 67-minute episodes compress to under 10MB with roughly the same vocal quality....
A trip to the Boston RMV left me with some rather disheartening insight as to the way the office works. Here are a few things I noticed while I was there.
After an hour of waiting, my number was called, and I proceeded to one of the service desks. As soon as I get there, the computer blue-screens and reboots. From the boot messages I realize the machines running the RMV are running Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4, and have most likely missed whatever security fixes were included with SP5, SP6, SP6a, and the Post-SP6a Security Rollup.
The representative at the...
I figure I can live with my hard drive as it is now. I haven't yet been encountering massive problems related to corruption, so I suppose that frees up my hard drive funding for other purposes. That said, I'm considering new batteries for my laptop, since the one in here now is anything but useful.
The two batteries I'm looking at are a 6-cell and a 12-cell, so that should I buy both, they could be used in conjunction with each other. The first is an independent-brand PB994A-ER, 10.8v at 4.8Ah, which I can get about 3.5 hours off for $79....
I've noticed that a number of bands' websites are massively Flash-enabled, to the point where the entire site consists of an HTML wrapper with a large-scale, dynamically-loading Flash application. While the argument of whether or not this is an acceptable way to code a website is arguable, I'll save that argument for some other time. Something's made me wonder about such sites for quite awhile: almost all of these band sites allow a user to listen to a full-length track at no charge, using an MP3 player coded in Flash.
That's great and all, but obviously I don't want to have...