Non-Drowsy Reactine

"Warning: may cause drowsiness".

FUCKING LIARS.

Jailbreaking to 3.0

If you're going to install a jailbroken 3.0 OS on the iPhone/iPod Touch, remember to first install the vanilla version. If you have the .ipsw for it from another one of your machines, place it in "~/Library/iTunes/iPod Software Updates/".

Once the device has been upgraded to vanilla 3.0, you can upgrade it to the jailbroken 3.0 with redsn0w.

Yay for DSLReports

To enable pinging of a ST780 from WAN:

* Telnet into the router.
> :service system ifadd name=PING_RESPONDER group=wan
> saveall
> exit

Green Screen

If your HBC backups don't load, change your cIOS38 to rev 13a (not 13b), and use a loader that can apply the 002 error fix, such as USBLoader GX.

SpeedTouch 780 - Firmware Upgrade

Ok, so Google is completely unhelpful for this. I ended up finding the German SpeedTouch forum, which has a pretty complete list of firmwares.

Lessons learned: SpeedTouch 780WL is NOT SpeedTouch 780 DXT. If you have a firmware that says 7.4.4.7 or similar, DO NOT USE IT. It will not brick your router, but you will have to use the Bootp method to downgrade the firmware to a compatible version, because otherwise it will stay stuck at the factory settings with no chance of letting you log in.

If you did make the mistake of installing the wrong firmware, don't panic! What you will need to do to fix it is the following:
* Get the firmware upgrader (you probably already have it, since you installed the wrong firmware).
* Get the correct firmware! For my router it was ST780_SIP_62T2_bant-r.zip because it has a BANT-R board.
* Unzip it, keep it at a handy location.
Shut off the power to the router. With a pen or toothpick, push down the wee little reset button on the right side of the back panel (near the VoIP ports), keep it pressed, and at the same time turn on the power again. Hold the reset button until the front LEDs change from one red to one green and a flashing orange (some models may have alternating red/green flashing LEDs. Either way, you should be able to notice when the change happend).
* Start the firmware upgrader. It will scan your network for the router. If it doesn't detect it, close the upgrader, and restart it. I had to try several times before it worked for me.
* Select the appropriate firmware. You may have to check a box acknowledging that you are downgrading the firmware before you can hit next. Do the upgrade.
* If it fails, run it again. The process seems to have a tendency to break if you as much as breathe on the router, so 2-3 tries may be necessary. Don't give up too quickly.
* Once it finished upgrading, the router will be set to factory defaults. Go to the setup page, configure everything, and off you go.

Note to self: For future upgrades, the settings are VPI 0.35, PPPoE, user@host / pass.

Merging IM accounts

I'd been toying with the idea of collecting all my IM accounts and routing them through an always-on server. Something like bitlbee, with an IM client on one end, not IRC. Jabber is *almost* what I want - I can run a server (e.g. Openfire) at home just fine, and it supports all transports. The donwside is, though, than I cannot use multiple transports of the same type on one jabber account, e.g. have two MSN or AIM accounts linked to my jabber login. It will also disconnect me when I close my client. So back to good ok' bitlbee it is, I guess.

Tomcat on OSX

Forget about using macports. It wants to get xercesj 2.9.1, but apache only serves up to 2.9.0. Instead, I followed the instructions listed here.

Jon Lajoie

I giggled.

Sunburn!

Yesterday I had a beer with N and S. It was a gorgeous day, with enough sunshine that we ended up just lounging outside and basking in the sun. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm a lobster. At least I was wearing my hat.

Homebrew on the Wii

Since I did not have Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I do not like modchips, I had never gotten around to installing homebrew on my Wii. Last month I got around to do that, however, thanks to the bannerbomb exploit. It did not go too smooth, however. The Homebrew Channel installed fine, but bootmii and DVDx did not, and I could not install any .wad files. It turned out to be due to a missing cIOS. Some sleuthing turned up a package that let me fix that. I also ended up trying a bunch of homebrew apps, and this is the setup I ended up with:

System 4.0u
HBC
Ultimate USB loader 7.1 (based on Waninkoko's 1.5 loader)
Wad manager
Homebrew browser
Mplayer
bootmii as boot2, loading HBC by default

The USB loader is a blessing. I ended up loading all my games onto a USB disk. It's nice not having to get up to swap disks, and it's great for when we're visiting the family, because we only need to pack the usb hard drive instead of 2 dozen dvd boxes.

One problem, though, is that Wiiconnect24 sometimes crashes the games, so I had to turn it off. No big problem there, huh? Well, no, except that with Wiiconnect24 off, turning off the Wii also means turning off power to the USB ports, and thus preventing the wiimotes and the balance board from recharging. Not to mention that I cannot have the usb disk plugged in and charge both peripherals at the same time, because there's only 2 ports. I wonder if a powered USB hub will let me charge the devices.

Cleanign up my Ubuntu package list

After testing it on the Ubuntu Parallels VM, I decided to remove all Gnome-related packages from old cicada. I'm using slim instead of gdm, wpasupplicant instead of network applet, and of course xmonad. The login manager still defaults to 1204x768, but I suspect that's because the laptop screen only supports up to 1280x768, but it tries to maintain the external monitor aspect ratio. In any case, I managed to get both screens to work at the same time. The trick was to toggle it before grub booted, and voilá, 2 screens. I found a new coolness about xmonad, too - the 2nd monitor will display the last workspace seen, AND xmobar will tell me which desktops each screen is displaying. I'd still like to figure out how to automatically set the resolution for both screens on bootup, but for now I'm a happy camper with xrandr. For those with a more mouse-oriented mind, there's arandr.

Oh, and did I mention that wpasupplicant is much more reliable than network applet (not to mention wifi-radar, which sucked so hard it could pull a golfball through a garden hose)?

I found out that xmonad will keep the background that slim uses. That works nicely on my VM where the screen resolution stays the same, but on poor cicada it has a tendency to maintain the image at the old resolution and tile it. Bleh. I figure though that I just need to find a nice image for tiling (which slim also supports), and Bob's your uncle.

Installing FreeBSD on Parallels: Corrections

Use pcm0 for the mouse driver

That should say use psm0.

The 5GB installation size is probably due to fragmentation on the image. Not much I can do about it - Parallels Tools offers disk compression on Windows, but not on FreeBSD. I did save some space by taking a snapshot of the powered-off machine so that Parallels does not have to store the RAM contents.

I got rid of everything Gnome, including `gdm'. I've tried `slim', a shiny and minimalistic alternative. Barfed on me, gave up and decided to stick with startx. I found out though that xorg does not like the .xsession file. Linking .xinitrc to it did the trick though.