Thursday, December 23, 2010

Blubb

IMG_0513blubb2

This thing *really* needs some more colourful illumination… Smile

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Summer in Austria

This photo has been taken in August!
From chris' blog
From chris' blog

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Update update update update…

Update to enable future updates… You just can’t make that up.

update-update-update

Sunday, June 13, 2010

DVB Streaming…

dvblast is kind of neat… :-) Streaming 4 programmes (one DVB-T transponder/frequency) to a windows machine running 4 vlc decoders.

quad-net-stream

 

$ dvblast –c dvblast_746000000.conf –f 746000000 –b 8

$ cat dvblast_746000000.conf

# arte
arte:239.0.0.1:4008  1       2
# Phoenix
239.0.0.1:4009  1       3
# EinsPlus
239.0.0.1:4010  1       6
# Das_Erste
239.0.0.1:4011  1       32

The corresponding “channel.conf” can be found on the VDR Wiki.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Damn it, it’s 2010!

  I was looking for the cause of a erratic jumping mouse cursor (about once every minute moving, clicking, …) when I suddenly realized that I had a GPS receiver still connected to a USB/serial adapter on the Windows machine. Cut that shit off, Microsoft! It’s 2010, no one is using serial mice anymore. And anyone who still does can sure be bothered to install the f*cking driver themselves!

serial-mouse

Update: It’s a feature of the FTDIchip USB-to-serial driver and documented in the manual for the advanced driver options:

serial-enumerator

To disable auto detect, go to the device properties, advanced, and uncheck the “serial enumerator” feature.

serial-properties

Sunday, May 09, 2010

26 MHz

Motorola C155, Rita XOUT between C132 and C210, 26 MHz nominal

IMG_1522 IMG_1523 IMG_1524 IMG_1525 IMG_1526_w_label

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Motorola C123 Pictures (bottom)

My new not-so-smart-phone: Motorola C123.

c123_battery c123_battery_compartment c123_battery_terminals

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Snow

There’s currently a lot of very pretty snow around here. 

IMG_1318 IMG_1320IMG_1319

I especially like the funny shapes the wind has created at one corner of the house.

IMG_1316IMG_1317

Sunday, January 24, 2010

New computer case…

IMG_1315 Mini-ITX in wooden box.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Country Selection Fail

country_selection_fail  Georgia, Germany, Ghana, …?

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

VLANs on a cheap switch

Today I read on tmbinc’s blog about how he modified a cheap Ethernet-switch to be VLAN capable.

With VLANs you can fan out the single built-in Ethernet-interface of your computer to several isolated networks. These cheap switches (you can get them with 8 ports for about 10€) have this functionality because they use the same chips as common plastic routers that separate their three different types of network ports with the same technique and usually connect with a ninth MII-port that’s not being used in a common desktop-switch.

I had tried to do the same in the past, but initially failed as I blew the serial i2c-eeprom during my attempts of programming it, but today I didn’t make any mistakes that destroyed the little thing. As my configuration is different from tmbinc’s, I’ll make it also available in the archive linked to below.

The Process to make your switch (that has to use a RTL8309SB IC) VLAN capable.

  1. Get a switch that preferably already has a I2C eeprom to store it’s configuration. Mine had, because it advertised QOS (quality of service) functionality that requires the IC it to be configured by some external memory. I used a Longshine LCS-FS6108, but it’s already 4 years old, so most likely they’ve switched to a different IC already? One never knows.
  2. Remove the I2C eeprom. On that particular switch the ground planes are very thick so I wasn’t able to desolder it properly. I just cut off the pins and…
  3. Put it on top of a IC socket providing replacements for the severed limbs.
  4. Change the contents of the eeprom using your favorite programmer, the text files in the archive linked to below contain some explanations (see details.txt)
  5. Put chip back into switch.

IMG_1269 IMG_1271 IMG_1277 IMG_1274

The configuration in the .zip-file provides you with 6 untagged ports and 2 tagged ports according to the table below:

Label on Switch RTL8309SB
Port Number
VLANs
8,7 0,1 1, untagged
6,5 2,3 2, untagged
4,3 4,5 3, untagged
2,1 6,7 1…9, tagged
- MII Unused

Download Configuration:

20100106_switch_eeprom_vlan.zip (798k)

  • switch_eeprom_vlan.dat : VLAN Configuration of Switch, copy contents to eeprom
  • switch_eeprom_orig.dat : Original configuration of Switch, Backup
  • switch_eeprom_detail.txt : VLAN Configuration with comments
  • switch_eeprom_detail.pdf : VLAN Configuration with comments, as pdf

I tested the switch with a Linux machine that has a NVIDIA nForce Gigabit Controller and my OpenSolaris NAS that uses a RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller.

Update 2011-02-18: zip-file available again on new server

Friday, January 01, 2010