Cool music…

 

There’s a battle going on between two musicians over on youtube:

• KurtHugoSchneider: "Baby" ... on RECORDER?!?!
• JakeBruene: Telephone... on GLOCKENSPIEL?!?!
• KurtHugoSchneider: Moonlight Sonata... on CROCKenspiel?!?!
• JakeBruene: Beat It... on GAMEBOY?!?!
• KurtHugoSchneider: Zelda's Lullaby... on OCARINA?!?!

IT Crowd S04E01

DVB Streaming…

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

 

$ 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.

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!

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

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

26 MHz

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

Trnava

Trnava, Slovakia, Wikipedia, Simple Wikipedia.

Old Wood

Motorola C123 Pictures (bottom)

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

Painted Wall

Best TED-Talk ever…

http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

Snow

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

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

New computer case…

Mini-ITX in wooden box.

Country Selection Fail

  Georgia, Germany, Ghana, …?

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.

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

Random stuff happening…

No Brat with crackbrained Name on Board.

(as seen on a car on the grocery’s parking lot)

Ubuntu & Gdm make me angry.

I installed the new and shiny Ubuntu Karmic on my computer today. Now there’s a speciality: I run the same installation (on a 2nd harddrive) both natively on the computer, but also in a VirtualBox VM.

That’s actually not complicated to setup, and most of the things work out fine, but there’s a remaining wart, which is the X-server needs additional and different configs for native-mode and running under the VM.

In former times, I just set the X-server being run by gdm (in /etc/gdm.conf) to /usr/local/sbin/Xserver.sh and used that shell-script to launch the correct server (with a different config, or even the same config but different “layouts”).

Now the wise men of gnome (gdm programmers) and Ubuntu decided to hardcode the paths of every component involved… And I only found out after learning…

1. that gdm no longer looks at /etc/gdm/gdm.conf, but rather is configured via the gconfd-mechanism
2. that the X-server configuration is not included in the new mechanism, but rather a compile-time default is hardcoded
3. that the X-server is not run directly, but rather via the wrapper /usr/bin/X, which is, indeed, configurable… but also lacks a configuration directive to choose which server to run.

So, again, in the sake of… “simplification”, or should I say dumbing-down, of their core programs, they made deviating from their “single user on a dedicated machine with internet dial-up” standard scenario even more painful. I might just use MS Windows then, because it basically adheres to the same “do what we have forseen and don’t deviate” belief.

Immediate update: One can adjust the symlink /etc/X11/X! Which isn’t documented (as far as I see) and also not as flexible as the original gdm.conf solution, but should suffice.

Opera 10.1 Upgrade FAIL!

Opera just announced the existence of a upgrade to it. I told it to proceed, shorty after I noticed my (usually silent) PC to spin its fans vigorously…

 

This repeats whenever Opera is restarted, so I had to delete the offending file somwhere in %TEMP%. Great engineering, guys!

Broken Kepco Power-Supply

One of the reference values is much  too low, note the brown and crispy Zener.    

 

Update: Looks very shitty, but it works. I’ll replace those with real 6.2V Zeners the next time I order some electronics stuff.

LCD working

I spent a little while debugging my microcontroller code.