A little solace on this rainy …
August 30th, 2011A little solace on this rainy August day…. http://t.co/ShWmURR
Stuff that I like, stuff I hate and all that is in between….
@theG00NI3 I did say I havn’t …
August 30th, 2011@theG00NI3 I did say I havn’t been to one in over a year…
Big mistake not putting on a c…
August 30th, 2011Big mistake not putting on a coat this morning…
The show has finally started -…
August 30th, 2011The show has finally started – only 21mins late!
Attending the AMZN company mee…
August 30th, 2011Attending the AMZN company meeting this morning. First one in about a year…
Reason Linux still isn’t ready for the desktop….
August 29th, 2011I have three computers on my desk at work. My MBP that would be considered my main machine and the one that goes back and forth between home and work everyday. A Windows 7 laptop, which is pretty much used for single purpose now. I also have a linux dev box that is running Red Hat. (RHEL5) When our security masters decided that Bluetooth wasn’t evil earlier this year, I started using my Bluetooth headphones connected to my MBP. Normally I’d paired them with my iPhone, but now that ALL my music is in the cloud (Amazon Cloud Player Rocks!) and I’ve found several excellent internet radio stations, the MBP is a better source. Getting the headphones paired took about 5 minutes, not super easy, but doable.
The only problem is that I had to keep restarting things when I’d ‘dock’ my MBP in the morning and this annoyed me. I also sometimes watch the live stream of TWiT and it was nice to put that up on my linux desktop (which has a big screen) but I have no speakers on my linux desktop. So the first thing I tried to-do was add a Bluetooth dongle thing to the linux desktop. This is impossible, it just can’t be done without recompiling half the libraries on the box.
So enabling on the MBP took five minutes, enabling on linux desktop would never happen. What was my solution? I used the old ‘analog’ workaround. I bought a Bluetooth transmitter, which I plug into the speaker output on the linux box and pair it with my headphones. Getting the device with exactly ONE output bit (a blinky light) and minimal input (one button, which can be pushed quickly or held), it took about 10 minutes to get paired with my headphones.
So now I have my music, internet radio stations or live TWiT running all the time via the linux box.
NOTE: Some of you might be asking why I didn’t use the Windows 7 box? I really just hate touching it, except when I have to for this weekly report I have to generate. It works OK and I used it for about 9 months before going back to the Mac. But it just makes things difficult. I don’t know why, but I have to authenticate to the network every time I look at it funny. About one out of three times I try to save something to Sharepoint, it fails and has to re-try. (And re-authenticate me again) Switching between IE and Word will sometimes require it to think for a couple minutes. Ugh….
Shaving Yaks….
August 27th, 2011I came across a reference to Yak Shaving recently and it has sort of stuck with me the last couple weeks when working on this project. Before going any further, please pop over to this definition. Did you read it? Good, now you can continue.
Way back in November 2010 I won a bid on a Kenwood TKR-820 70cm repeater. I had been watching the auctions since reading about John-K7VE exploits setting up a garage D-Star repeater using non-Icom hardware. What John (and others) were doing was very interesting to me. I had never built a repeater, but here was a chance to learn about it. Plus there was the computer / networking angle, since the whole thing is really done with software running on a linux box, that really interested me.
So following the eBay auction win, I started figuring out the pieces I would need. I bought a inexpensive set of cans from this Chinese company, which many people were using in non-RF sensitive locations. I start looking for the pieces to put together another rack mount PC to run linux and placed the order for the only item which was really single sourced, the node adaptor. (Of course in the months since there has been an explosion of alternative suppliers) In the end the node adapter I originally ordered took more then seven months to arrive and required a trip to Dayton to actually get.
You see the individual I ordered the node adaptor from was having some issues producing the boards. First there was a lost PCB order and then parts weren’t available, etc. Along the way he stopped responding to e-mail from anybody who had ordered from him, but he was good to keep accepting new orders. I eventually was able to track him down at Dayton and asked him face to face where my node adaptor was. He really didn’t know, but took my card and promised to look into it when he got home. Later the next week I got an e-mail and he admitted to messing up and had ‘lost’ my order. He shipped the board the following week, right in time for me to be super busy at a new job and trying to get ready for Field Day.
So this is long way of saying that following Field Day, I was ready to start building the repeater. So in my twisted head, I decided that the first thing I should do is get the location of the repeater ready. I didn’t want to put it in the shack due to the noise of the server. I also thought it would be nice to shorten the coax run to the tower. I decided that the laundry room would be the perfect place for a number of reasons. Our laundry room is located right inside the house, at the base of the tower, the laundry room stays several degrees cooler in there since its partly below ground level and there was a large unused corner where I could put everything.
(This is where the shaving yaks analogy comes in. Noticed how I went from assembling the repeater to constructing a datacenter in my laundry room? Well we have only started going down the rabbit hole…..)
So the first thing I needed to-do to make this plan happen is run a network drop into the laundry room. Since I was going to make a new Ethernet run, I might as well run CAT6 and move the house to GigE.(I had slowly started doing this anyhow, but only in my office where the servers use to live.) So to get the house moved over to GigE, I also needed to run CAT6 to the living room (every device around the TV requires Ethernet) and I might as well put a separate run into my wife’s desk.(She has been living with a long Ethernet cable running around the wall) Are you beginning to see how this thing started spinning out of control?
In the end I pulled CAT6 to five locations, with all the wiring on the outside of the house. Everything terminates into a punch down patch panel in the laundry room, which I mounted on the wall.I terminated each run into a ‘keystone’ jack and box, which I mounted on the wall. (pic) The installations turned out pretty nice. I had never really used the punch down tool before and had a blast figuring all this stuff out. (Yes, it isn’t complicated. But I had fun!)
Since I was going to have the entire house running through this new patch panel, I decided to spend the money and get a nice GigE switch. The important thing to me is that it has a 2Gig backplane. I got it installed shortly after getting the wiring done.
While I was pulling CAT6 cable around the outside of the house, I decided I should also pull another TV cable coax drop in the laundry-datacenter. This would allow me to re-locate the cable modem into the same location as the D-Star server. Right now the cable modem is sitting under my workbench in the shack, because that is where the cable coax dropped was when we moved in. I had moved us to a commercial cable modem account when we dropped the satellite TV service. (We are now a 100% internet TV consumption house) Getting the cable modem by the D-Star box would make it easy to give it one of the static IP’s that we got with the service.
This got me thinking that since the D-Star and cable modem would be in there, I might as well re-locate the main file server into the laundry-datacenter. But this was going to require some sort of rack, since there would be at least three servers, the cable modem, monitor/keyboard, repeater, etc. So once the switch / wiring was done, I started looking for rack ideas. I had fallen deep down the rabbit hole and I was still diggging….
But that will have to wait until next time…..
Came home to find both @rosies…
August 24th, 2011Came home to find both @rosiesgrosso and @isaaczrichards asleep on the couch….
wicked cool idea! http://t.co/…
August 22nd, 2011wicked cool idea! http://t.co/4di9FGg
Has anybody else had a problem…
August 22nd, 2011Has anybody else had a problem with Lion and Chrome? Mine keeps crashing anytime I have >6 tabs and several downloads happening…