Check out this unbelievably cool motion simulator rig for racing sims:
No price listed, and I’m sure it’s out of my range, but damn isn’t that cool? Now to convince Susan it’s an acceptable alternative to buying a sportscar for my pending mid-life crisis…
Tomato is one of a number of replacement firmwares for routers. Last week I switched over to it from the stock firmware on my Linksys WRTG54. So far I love it, despite it being responsible for knocking my network offline and forcing me to re-configure everything from scratch. Truth be told at this point I’m pretty sure the network being offline was my fault (me? Read the docs? never!), and the process of rewriting every device’s config from scratch was a good exercise for me since I have a ton of devices and the configs were an accumulation of mistakes small and large.
The whole move to Tomato was caused by Thanksgiving, when one too many devices ended up on my network. This caused a cascade effect of ip addresses being bumped and multiple devices with one IP assigned to them. This knocked my consoles offline and caused my streaming music to stop working, pushing me to replace the firmware, but I had been planning to do it anyway for a couple of reasons. First, Comcast now has a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap and I want to track how much we’ve used of it at any point in time, and second because there are bugs in the factory firmware on my router which cause UPnP not to work for my gaming consoles.
The install process couldn’t have been simpler – just point the default firmware’s update function at the firmware from the site, do a nvram reset, and configure. It was even smart enough to pick up my old firmware’s configuration with its dozens of MAC addresses in the wireless access list, and though in the end I think that’s what caused the problems I initially had, I was still impressed that it worked.
UPnP now works on my consoles, the interface on Tomato is much nicer than the default Linksys one, there are a ton more features including ssh access, dynds/domain mapping, full routing functions, various logging/traffic reporting features, and more, and all for free – it’s a fantastic option if you have one of the supported routers. Definitely worth checking out.
For kicks, to give you a sense of scale, here’s a mostly complete list of networked objects in my house, each of which I had to poke yesterday as I resurrected everything:
Hardware:
Software:
I have a thing for Roman History, mostly because of a couple of great courses I had back in college, and I adore I, Claudius, both as a novel and the BBC dramatic series. Google recently announced the availability of a virtual tour of ancient Rome (circa 320ad) for their Google Earth tool, and it’s fantastic. Google Earth is free, as is the tour. You can get the details and download it here where they announcement is. There’s also a short movie demonstrating how it all works and what it looks like. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in Roman history.
Image via Wikipedia
We use Drupal at work and are pretty happy with it. I’m happy for the folks behind it because for the second year in a row they’ve won open source CMS product of the year from the folks over at Packt publishing. It’s also pretty cool that Earl Miles, who contributes extensively to the Drupal project and who is the principle author of Views/Views2, a central component of most Drupal sites, was recognized as an MVP this year. Kudos all around, both the award and the recognition are well deserved.
I agree with the sentiments over on osnews.com, where there’s a brief discussion of Apple‘s refusal to allow Opera to appear in the Apple Apps store because it ‘competes’ with one of their products. This is hardly the first example of Apple doing this and using this justification. This is counter to Apple’s interests in my opinion, and seems to demonstrate a refusal to learn the lessons of the past. One of the absolutely fantastic things about the iphone/ipod touch is the breadth of application availability – finally, cell phones are starting to feel like the little handheld computers they are. Don’t presume to decide for me what software I want to run on it, that’s what the cell phone carriers have been doing for over a decade. If I want to run some other browser, LET ME. Compete on the basis of merits, not by exercising your monopoly power on the platform. Google‘s Android platform is out, the source is open, and hopefully they’ll force Apple’s hand on this issue. If not, maybe my next phone will be an Android phone, not an Apple one…or maybe I’ll jailbreak an iphone.
[update] Turns out this story has been widely misreported – note this piece over on daringfireball.net revealing that Apple has not in fact denied Opera. I believe the gist of my post above remains true though – Apple is denying software access to their platform and doing so is not in their interests.
If you have an Intel Mac or are running Linux on Intel hardware, Codeweaver is giving away their Crossover Pro product, which includes both Crossover Pro and Crossover Games. This lets you run many Windows apps and games on a Mac or Linux box without running Windows. You can score a copy over here: http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ Getting hold of it is kind of difficult because their website is getting hammered, but it’s worth struggling through the slow access.
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Check out this little 4.3″ USB powered monitor, selling now in asia for ~$200. It’s too spendy for the uses I’d put it to, but when I saw it I imagined one or two velcroed to the side of my machine running my IM client and Mediamonkey MP3 software. If these drop down into the ~$100 range I’d be tempted.
I have two MP3 players, a 1st generation Ipod Nano and a Creative Sansa 250. I have issues with the software on both of them, and last week I installed Rockbox on the Sansa to experiment. It’s going on the Ipod this weekend, because Rockbox completely rocks. I could go on and on about how much better it is in terms of features, but it really came down to several key things: 1) Bookmarks. The thing automatically creates bookmarks for whatever you were doing when you turn the power off, and it keeps a library of them for you. You’ll never lose your place in an audiobook again. Apple’s had like what, 5 years to figure this out and still has a crummy, botched bookmark implementation? 2) File formats. Rockbox plays all the formats you’d expect, instead of being stuck with only a handful that Apple and Creative choose to support. Lossless audio for the win folks. 3) You can configure it to speak the user interface. No need to look at it, just scroll around as you drive and it will tell you where you just clicked/navigated etc.
The rest of the cool stuff – editable playlists, skins, games, utilities, a true browsable file system – they’re all just gravy. Rockbox is free, has a great little installer, a huge support community, and tons of mods. If you have a player which Rockbox supports, it’s definitely worth considering. One downside to be clear on – if you install this on an Ipod, you can’t use Itunes to manage the device anymore, it becomes a mountable volume on your computer and you copy files over. There are other media library software that will do this for you (things like Mediamonkey for example) but it also means losing access to the music store integration and so on. Not that you should have been buying music with DRM baked into it to begin with… but that’s a post for another day.
Another ‘back where we started’ kind of issue to mention today. Over the years I’ve mentioned a number of web shared drive tools that came out during the first dot.com boom. Most of them went bust or got acquired by some bigger company, and none of them ended up lasting in terms of their usefulness to me. Today I got an account over on getdropbox.com and so far it looks pretty promising. 2 gigs of free storage, 10GB/month bandwidth, a mount on the OS of your local computers, and a web interface to manage the thing along with tools local to the host OS’s you get it running on, plus the ability to create private shares with your friends. So far it seems pretty great. I’m addicted to grabbing live music off of archive.org (this is free, legal music), and instead of dumping things onto a thumb drive to get it home, I’m just synching it to my dropbox and grabbing it when I’m home. Definitely worth checking out if you need a way to move files from place to place. I’ve got some invites if anyone is interested, though I think they’re now in public beta and anyone can get an account. I’m using my daveman1967 yahoo email account if anyone wants to share with me. Now I’m off to hassle my camping buddies to get accounts so I don’t have to pay $10 per CD to get the photos they take of our camping trips.
Sorry folks. I’ll wait for the iphone to get an updated browser with better javascript support. All these other templates I’ve been playing with had one or more problems that were worse than not being able to fully use the site on the iphone, so back we are to this template.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 