Month: August 2007

dammit

If you get call from me that sounds like I’m underwater, my phone is at the bottom of Lake Washington.

Not a good day, all told. Took the young’uns out kayaking, it being a nice sunny day and all. $25/person is too much to pay but we were there and they were into it, so I coughed it up and we set out. Strong wind from the south so we headed into it, figuring when we got tired we could take it easy coming back.

It clouded over as soon as we got out on the water. Feh. I put on sunscreen for this?

As for taking it easy on the way back, hah! A squall-ish rain burst came in from the north once we had turned around and beat us up pretty well. We never got any rain but the wind was something else. We made it back to the boat ramp only to learn that my phone (think a Lake Washington salmon will appreciate a RAZR V3c?) had slid out of my pocket and over the side.

Lessons learned:

  • Seattle raft and kayak doesn’t really cater to people who just want a paddle on the lake: the $25/person is for a full day or whatever part of it you use.
  • Sit-on-top kayaks are awful if you have any wind to deal with. I was a sail, for all intents and purposes, and that worked against us both ways.

And now I have to deal with Verizon to get a new phone and their online account system is all kindsa messed up. We have had the same numbers since they were AirTouch in 2000 and they still don’t know that we have two numbers on the same account?

the nanny state

I kid.

I think Seattle is doing a good thing making life jackets and bike helmets available at a low cost to area residents. I got my first ever life jacket today. The next one will equal the number of boats I have owned.

There are good reasons to get one here that would not have applied in Florida where I did my youthful sailing and boating. One, the water is much colder here, so hypothermia is a risk year-round. Two, currents and tides are more of a factor than in the places I’ve lived before. Both these factors point to being able to stay afloat longer without getting tired as a way to boost your chance of survival. A third reason is to set a good example for my young aquatic enthusiasts.

Just as I would never ride without a helmet, I won’t push off from shore without a PFD of some kind. Better to have my own than find myself needing one and not having access to one.

all browsers are equally crummy, I think

Dumped Firefox, even after the tweaks I made a few days ago. I suspect it was having trouble with the number of tabs I had open, but after a certain point (maybe 8 or so) it just bogged way down and all my limited memory (a throbbing 640 Mb) was gone. Closing FireFox would free up a couple hundred meg. With Safari 3 open, I have 90 Mb free. I suppose a couple of tabs will start to eat into that (but how much should a tab weigh, if you like?).

And yes, I could buy more memory, since others have been successful adding a 1 Gb stick in place of the 512 Mb. But I would rather buy a new MacBook. If I could justify it against any income at all, I’d get one in a heartbeat.

adding some persistence to the wrt54 router

I have been having some issues with this router not allowing clients to authenticate properly. It seems to just drop connections. I’m not sure it’s fixed now — I modified the Keychain settings to permit all applications to access the router’s login details — but in the process, I worked out how to add configuration details that the web UI doesn’t explicitly permit.

NB: I have upgraded my WRT54G with the dd-wrt firmware, v.23SP2. The secret is the ability to mount cifs/samba shares. There is an option in the UI to mount them but I have never gotten it to work consistently: I suspect the smbfs module isn’t being loaded.

So I use the commands tab in the Administration page, and simply drop in the commands I want to run.

insmod smbfs
smbmount //192.168.2.25/dd-wrt /mnt -o username=dd-wrt,password=******,debug=4
if [ -f /mnt/hosts ]; then grep 192 /mnt/hosts > /etc/hosts ; fi

Prior to all this, I had to create a dd-wrt user and add it to the smbpasswd file. Any files I want to make visible to the router are copied or linked into its home directory. You could update resolv.conf the same way.

The built-in command to mount smbshares mounts it at /tmp/smbshare, but I am just putting it on /mnt. But the built-in command seems to be broken. I think the smbfs module is missing from the boot/load sequence. If it’s loaded manually, and I run the startup commands, that directory gets mounted on /tmp/smbshare.

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 2880 2880 0 100% /
/dev/mtdblock/4 320 320 0 100% /jffs
//192.168.2.25/dd-wrt 111230976 86286336 24944640 78% /mnt

Now if I could work out a way to dump the nvram out to that directory on a regular basis, rather than have to download it over http (maybe some kind of wget instruction?), that would be handy.

Now playing: Western Promise from the album “Vienna” by Ultravox

another reason for creator/distributors to get p2p

Nifty hack..:

What a nifty hack. These hacks are injecting subversive advertisements into torrented movies.
I just saw one in Spiderman 3 – a “meat is murder” message. Struck me as seriously weird being in the middle of the film and I looked up the url displayed on the screen and found ’em.
Apparently, they’ve done it within a ton of torrented films. Talk about cyberpunk.

Quality of experience is something they should be concerned about — unless all they want is our money. If they want fans to enjoy movies, shorts, music, etc. — anything that can be shared via p2p — they should be in front of the pirates, offering a better experience.

But if all they want is our money, well, why bother?

subtle

Looking into some family getaway destinations for next week, this phrasing caught my eye: Port Angeles Bed and Breakfasts Inn – Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce:

‘The Love Nest’ is 1200 sq feet of very private, self-contained luxury only 300 feet from the beach. Snuggle by the fire, romp in the Cal-King canopied bed or hot tub outdoors in total seclusion, surrounded by old-growth cedar and lush ferns.[…] Our secluded beach offers more opportunities for romance!

Sounds like this place has aphrodisiac qualities.