whiskey7.net

Airport Express Turned Up

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:58:15 -0500

I got a great deal on a MacMall sale for an Airport Express. Today, I lit it up to stream my MBP iTunes to the Yamaha receiver in my media center. I set it up as a wireless client to my head end WRT54GL/X-Wrt router. Very nice and have been groovin' in Hi-Fi since.

Network/Wireless Printing Turned Up

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:32:00 -0500

I've been happily using an Unslung (to disk) NSLU2 for almost a year now. The NAS has a 120GB plugged into the Disk2 port. Having fully integrated my new MacBook Pro into my life, I wanted to leverage portability w/ wireless printing. Plugging my hp970Cse into Disk1 port and installing the cups ipkg worked perfectly, with only minimal pain. First I determined that there was no need to upgrade my Unslung from 6.8 so, I was looking for a joy ride. Almost: the daemon started up out of the box but was not not reachable by my MBP. Setting "Listen" to my Unslug address wound up breaking everything with an error report of something like, 'no local access port'. This was fixed by explicitly specifying (in cupsd.conf): Listen 127.0.0.1:631 Listen <Unslug.wired.LAN.addr>:631 (removed other Listen and Port parameters) I was then able to POST a print request from my MBP but it failed. Turning up the logging level showed that No Authentication was supplied. Looking further down cupsd.conf, I spotted the problem: Changing "Order" from Deny/Allow to Allow/Deny and making sure that the Allow addresses of the <Location /> and <Location /printers> tag payloads were: Allow 127.0.0.1 Allow <my.wired.LAN.base>/24 Bingo! In my installation, cups web admin is not available cuz it also fails on auth but not a big deal. I just setup my printer in a vi session of the file /opt/etc/cups/printers.conf via ssh. My head end router is a WRT54GL running OpenWrt White Russian - With X-Wrt Extensions 0.9. Enjoy!

Fixed Broken Link on Old W7NET Site

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0500

I noticed that the content frame on the page linked from the Old W7NET Site, (linked by thumbnail at top of right hand column on home page), was lame. Fixed now so, maybe you won't be run off by the 404 error. :)

Move to New Hosting Provider Completed

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:07:00 -0500

I've completed moving whiskey7.net from anHosting to Hostgater today. Dealing w/ anHosting availability issues finally wore me down to the point of leaving.

Biped Robot Walks

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:58:00 -0600

For years I have been procrastinating about building a robot toy and have finally put something together.

Yesterday, it took it's first walk:

This little biped stands at 16 inches high and has 4 degrees of motion to animate itself. There are some really neat features in the bot including:

Onboard controller is a PIC18F2520 running FlashForthV3.1 .
Bluetooth link to command/development system computer.
State Machine driven walk engine.

This project is going to provide plenty of winter challenges for me. Some of my priorities for implementation are:

Design an on-board "buck" switcher to regulate down to 6v from LiPO cells that can be seen on feet.
Incorporate exponential acceleration deceleration routines for servo slewing.
Incorporate IR receiver routines I've written for the 18Fnnnn to home on a charging station.

Developing.........

New Mac Book Pro

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:24:00 -0600

I just took delivery on my new 15in. Mac Book Pro, WOW! It came w/ Tiger installed and am about ready to install Lepoard that came in the package. One of my first impressions is that this Safari really renders fast! This is really a neat box. I'm looking forward to learning how to take advantage of it... Developing.....

WRT54GL

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:54:00 -0500

Over the past few months, I been toying with a WRT54GL. Even with it's vanilla firmware, I preferred it's interface and functionality over my Netgear WGT624. Then I tried: dd-WRT, Coova, Tomato and finally OpenWRT/X-Wrt. OpenWRT/X-Wrt is where it is at as far as I'm concerned. Even though I'm running only Whiterussian-0.9, (Kamikazie/X-Wrt does not seem to be fully cooked yet), having virtually everything in the router available via a clean browser interface is great on top of rock solid performance.

BiQuad Success

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 06:27:00 -0500

I decided it was time to revisit my BiQuad WIFI antenna project so that I would have a way to test my hotspot. I went back to the online articles I had bookmarked and was embarrassed to find that I had the feed hooked up wrong to the BiQuad driven element. I won't go into the gory details but, suffice it to say that, it would never have worked the way I had it hooked up, gleep!

At any rate, I made the connection changes and pointed the antenna at my neighbor Art's house about 300yds. down river, just out of line of site, shaded by the edge of a plateau on the hillside between here and there. Then I paid a visit to Art with a laptop and gee-wizzed him with high speed INTERNET service. Art normally gets only 21.6kbps via the local rural ISP and seems about to take up stamp collecting instead of his internet activities.

I want to build another one if these BiQuads and hook them up pointing up and down river (that's at about 120 degrees as I am on a bend of the river), and turn on some more neighbors. But first, I need to find a recipe for a 2.4gHz power divider. No test equipment available here for building and testing one from scratch.

Serrano Hotspot

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:28:00 -0500

A month of 3 digit afternoon temperatures had me hiding out in my air conditioned lab where among other things, I used the opportunity to turn up instances of chillispot 1.0.2, apache+mod_ssl-1.3.37+2.8.28, freeradius-1.1.7 and mysql-5.0.45 on some old (PII) server hardware (running FreeBSD-6.2) I had laying around. I used venture37's FreeBSD chillispot port for a quick start. I made a few changes to pf.conf accommodating my LAN topology and now have a bare bones hotspot to share some of my bandwidth w/ a few neighbors up and down the river. Nice piece of work venture37, thank you! Before I hook up the external antenna and raise the power above 1mw :^) I need to build a welcome page that is a little more friendly than the minimal hotspotlogin.cgi dialog provided in the port. Whether I actually 'fluff' up the user interface or not, i am pleased with the outcome of the project and would recommend venture37's port to any wanting to build a hotspot.

BACK

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:03:00 -0500

I've been stopping by here for 6 months and kicking myself for not taking time to keep this up to date. I couldn't have imagined that being retired would be so time consuming but, now that I have infrastructure projects down to a short list, I'll be spending more time here. This years garden is in full production and we have just about finished processing a run of home grown Cornish Cross fryers. A good year so far. During my blog hiatus, I did rekindle my flying interests and have two new RC planes in the air. I'll be posting some Flight (Topic) blurbs shortly.