mattw.fn_blog()

One of the things that I always fail to do before going to a conference and finding myself without Internet access is setting up a tether to my phone. Google is hosting djangocon, so lack of tubes hasn’t been a problem, but last night I remembered to go dig for a way to get Xandros eeepc talking to my T-Mobile blackberry curve over USB. It seems there are a few options out there for bluetooth, but I don’t have bluetooth built in, and when I’m mobile, I’d rather not use my battery even faster.

Strangely enough, for such a popular phone and computer pair, the options are pretty slim for USB tethering on linux. There is nothing out there that is pre-packaged, but if you don’t mind compiling a little code, you have 2 options. The first, who’s instructions I found on eeeuser forums actually required installing OpenMotif, which just seemed like a horrible idea to me, so I kept digging. After a bit more digging around, I stumbled upon Barry Backup, a tool that provides syncing, charging (you can’t charge off of USB without telling your ports it’s OK to push more power) and tethering / ppp for *most* blackberries.

To get it running on Xandros, you will need to have build tools installed, you can install quite a few of the dependencies with packages from the etch repos, but you’ll need to compile Barry itself. It is probably also worth noting that I couldn’t get the tarball to compile. Grab the Barry source, and you should be good to go.

Crash noticed the eye-fi site started getting some content tonight and quickly ordered a card from dotPhoto. About 30-40 minutes later, the cards started popping up on Amazon. News is trickling into Google, including an article in the MIT Technology Review. I predict they’re going to sell a zillion of these. Seriously, a zillion.

We (Ken and I) will be holding a wireless workshop at Toorcon 9. Wireless 101 with a takeaway Soekris box. We did it last year and it was good times had by all. This year the class is on Thursday, so attendees will have all weekend to play with their toys in a conference environment. My guess is it will be much more interesting.

Metrix moved into a new office this Summer, It’s right above the new Stumptown on Pine st. If you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to drop by and we’ll get some coffee or something. I’m sure I don’t drink enough coffee. *jitter*

I’ve been making more and more pictures lately, and NAS (Nikon Aquisition Syndrome) has fully kicked in. I’m rolling with a D200 now, and have a full strobist setup complete with PocketWizards. If you want a stylish portrait for your blog or social networking yadayada, let me know and we’ll see if we can work in some time.

Jeff let me know the feedburner/flickr feed was irritating his aggregator, so I’ve cut it back to only feed out the pictures marked with the ’seattlewireless’ tag. This should cut down on the amount of RSS spam from me since I always forget to tag things.

Vivace’s David Schomer is featured in Business Week. Good article on a great coffee shop.

This Windows based installer is very cool. Still some bugs, but it definitely works. Dual boot with no commitments. Make sure c:\boot.ini is read/write first.

I’ve been running ubuntu on our TV. It’s a Powerbook G4 (867) booting off of the firewire drive hooked up to an Olevia 30 inch LCD. If you have the same setup (it’s possible!?) xorg.conf | yaboot.conf

Edgy in a VMWare appliance. Boot a LiveCD in the VMWare player. Good for the Pyramid PXE ISO.
Anyone have Beryl working with an ati x1400 mobility?

Midnight Research Labs noticed some more wireless vulnerabilities have been released as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs (MoKB). The broadcom exploit has been brought to you by Johnny Cache (as pictured above).

Last night I checked out 3ricJ’s public nerd space.  Very cool setup.   I burned out my green laser, we wrecked some aluminum, and I was told that the Chumby was not allowed in the building.

Oh, and there was fire.

Toorcon was a blast. I got to talk to some old friends, meet some new ones, find out the skinny on some fat (or should that be phat) happenings, and eat Brazilian Barbecue. Our workshop went well, and through no fault of my own, I am now the proud owner of a chumby. I’ll have to go into more detail on what exactly it’s all about later, but thanks go out to grey for the gifting and bunnie for explaining exactly what the alarm-clock looking muppet does.

As usual, I was running around with my camera. Highlights are here, but there’s some more under the toorcon tag. Matt Peterson also has some good ones here.

Well, they’re not for sale yet, but Here are some zipit add-on boards by TomW that have rs232, SD, and EL backlight drivers.

It still requires a bit of solder and a steady hand, but having all the parts on a pre populated board should make the hacking go a whole lot easier.