06.25.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:42 am by hank
Seems painfully obvious now, but I just shouldn’t maintain a personal blog. Why? … Well, could be because I don’t maintain it!
Thank goodness Wordpress doesn’t have a lot of security problems/holes. I’ll have to figure out what to do here eventually, as I started to use this as my personal tech support log …. stuff I’d figured out that I couldn’t find on google, and that probably still has value, but I don’t know the method to actually keep me interested in maintaining it!
Anyway, reset the ‘update’ clock to zero … I’ll try and keep it under 15 months this time.
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03.12.06
Posted in Fishing at 11:10 am by hank
Got out to Braidwood yesterday and caught the first few fishies of the year, started out a little cool and ended really windy, but a few fish were caught. Fished the southwest corner with chicken liver and shrimp; nothing doing on the liver, I caught a few 1-1.5 lb’ers with the shrimp.
Did see one group leaving with a stringer of 10lb’ers though … they were using cut Bluegill.
Anyway, twas a beautiful day to be out!!
Pix below:
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03.10.06
Posted in Techie Stuff at 9:37 pm by hank
I had a pleasent suprise last evening. I was building a new machine for my kids and do to game consumption, they live in the land of Windows … so I figured I’d try transfering my unused XP partition to them, reclaim the space on my disk and everyone would be happy. That is if it worked.
I tried this once with Windows 98 and it was a disaster, the image transfered OK, but the resulting boot on different hardware was abysmal … busted drivers galore, never could get it to work right. So the suprise was that this just worked … booted the windows partition and sure, it chugged away for a while redoing the drivers and it made me re-register with Micorsoft, but it worked! Anyway below are the mechanics if you’re interested.
Starting point:
My machine dual boots, Linux and Win XP, target machine was bare metal … no OS
I booted Knoppix to terminal mode on the new machine (boot opt: knoppix 2)
Started ssh on the new box (/etc/init.d/ssh start)
Fired up fdisk and created a partition on the new machine’s drive a bit bigger than the existing one — this was my only false start here and I had to do it 3 times. The disk geometries were different such that to transfer my 20G partition, the new machine needed a 21.5G partition because of sector size issues I’d guess.
I changed/set the root password on the new machine (passwd command)
From my workstation I used dd and ssh to do the transfer:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh root@newhostIPAddress “dd of=/dev/hda1″
That assumes that /dev/hda is your hard disk on both machines and 1 is the partition number. Took a little under an hour to transfer over my 100Mbs network.
After this I did a debian install to another partition on the new machine and let grub handle the boot loading — this automagically found the XP install and life was good.
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03.09.06
Posted in Web Stuff, Flotsom and Jetsom at 4:11 pm by hank
So I upgraded wordpress to 2.0.1 … easy enough. But as always I go polking around after the upgrade and ended up looking at the themes as the default one that’s been here is pretty boring. So it’s now set to ocadia, which in the long run seems too feminine to me, but is better than the default and while I like the green one, it doesn’t include the admin links and it’s css screws up my pictures …
So If this changes again soon, well it’s just the way it is …
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03.06.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:20 am by hank
I unsubscribed from all my email lists this weekend. Why? … I don’t need them anymore. When I setup my email server back in 1999, Google was a baby and information was hard to come by on certain topics. So like everyone else in the same boat, I subscribed to all the mailing lists for my personal and professional interests … so I have 6 years of debian-devel, debian-user, freebsd-stable, mysql, php, and myriad other lists … but my usage has changed.
When I now have a problem/question, I fire up the all knowing oracle … Google. So I’ve been storing gigs, yes *Gigs* of mail every month that I’ll never use.
Anyway, it all started by my reconfiguring hardware and looking to upgrade or decommission the existing mail server … that lead to thinking about migrating my data and that got me to looking at the mail I was getting. It’s all gone now and I don’t know the difference. My migration (likely to postfix from my current exim) should be relatively smooth and painless as a result.
So now I get maybe 100 messages a day, instead of 3,000 … and it feels good.
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02.05.06
Posted in Techie Stuff at 8:18 am by hank
I got my E815 because it was hackable for a Verizon phone. One thing that eluded me though was using my PDA thourgh it using bluetooth. This wasn’t fault with the phone, but more of there not being an ‘official’ E815 driver from palm because this isn’t an officially supported thing to do by Verizon … the only US carrier using the E815.
Endless cycles of “Invalid PIN” ensued when trying to get the two to pair properly. Finally I just tried all the Moto drivers and hit paydirt on the V500 driver, the two paired successfully! The odd note is that from searching on the topic, other folks have had success with different drivers, so it seems like you have to go through all of them for each E2/Phone pair.
Once the two were paired, here’s how I got on …
I created a connection in Prefs~~> Connections and used the following settings:
Connect to: Phone
Via: Bluetooth
Device: (I chose the e815 that I had just created)
Model: Univ. Phone driver
I then went created a network under Prefs~~> Network and used the following settings:
Service: I created a new name here, used “Verizon 3G”
User Name: xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com (where the x’s are your 10-digit verizon phone number)
Password: vzw
Connection: I used the connection I had just created in the last step
Phone: #777
Then click Done.
Now go back into Prefs~~> Network and click the “Connect” button. (First, of course, make sure that bluetooth is enabled on both phone and E2) If you’re lucky like I was you will hear the e815 make a short high pitch beep, then see “signing on” and “connection established”. You will then see “Packet Data” under the date on the e815’s main LCD. Viola! You’re on the 3G network.
I’m not sure exactly what service you need to do this, I have the $5 web package on my plan, no VCast plan … I’m sure you have to have *some* kind of data plan though. Yet to be seen is what this looks like (if anything) on my bill, though I will say that I’m not a heavy user so I should fly under the radar.
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01.04.06
Posted in Techie Stuff at 8:40 pm by hank
I’d wondered how to do this for a while. I have a bunch of concert DVDs that I wanted to listen to while traveling or in the car, but how get the audio wasn’t self evident. I finally got around to spending some quality time with google to find the answer, so I document it here both for my own future recollection and in case the google gods send you to this page first 
In essence you create a fifo pipe and then use mplayer to send the sound in raw pcm to the pipe while using a null video codec … that looks like this:
mkfifo soundpipe
lame -b 128 soundpipe your_new.mp3 &
mplayer -quiet -ao pcm -aofile soundpipe -vo null -vc dummy -aid 128 dvd://2
First command makes the pipe, second starts the lame encoder and the third starts playback. Works great! Only small hiccup I had was that newer versions of mplayer wanted the options in the form of -ao pcm:file=soundpipe depracating the -aofile.
I found this basic technique in 2 places:
That’s it!
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11.28.05
Posted in Flotsom and Jetsom at 11:45 am by hank
Just never seem to get around to writing here any more (like I ever got rolling 
)
Of course things have happened over time, but I guess I’m just not a diary kind of guy. Anyway, I’m still plugging along on the weight loss … sitting around 205lbs … that’s a historic sticking point, but one I’m determined to get through.
Also there will be a bunch of tech stuff coming; I’m to the point of rectifying the “Shoekeeper’s Children” syndrome that has plagued my own network for some time … server upgrades, retasking, data safety strategies, it’s all coming soon … I’ll probably write a little more fulsomely on it when the time comes.
I’ve also started dabbling with “Ruby on Rails” … it’s a pretty exciting framework, particularly the AJAX integration it has … now I just need a project to play with!!
All for now, more to come ….
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09.13.05
Posted in Flotsom and Jetsom at 3:11 pm by hank
Yes another month has come and gone without much going on here. Fall is near and I’ll get back to fishing and more meaningful geocaching. On the geocaching front, the annual local picnic is this weekend and should be fun Details here … I should be around for a good part of it.
On the fitness front, things are plugging along, hit 229.5 on Monday, so the trend is definitely in the right direction. Perhaps one day I’ll be more motivated to write something .
All for now.
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08.03.05
Posted in Uncategorized, Flotsom and Jetsom at 10:44 am by hank
Wow, where does time go? Been almost a month since I posted anything and it’s not because nothing’s going on, just don’t have the inclination to do any one topic justice in a whole write up. I’ve read 3 or 4 books and picked up a couple techy texts; all of which I could review and probably will at some point, just not today
I got back on the diet/exercise horse too … topped out at 254.5lbs; yikes … already down to the low 240s but I guess the difference this time is I have a goal; 9% body fat … no matter how you slice it, that will take a while and be a lot of work. But the goal is there and the program is started … I’ll probably write more at some point, maybe even make a new section for it. There are a couple resources that I’ve found helpful:
I’ve also picked up a new cell phone. The Motorola E815 — really a nice step up from my old Audiovox 8900 … and the best thing is that while not condoned or enabled by Verizon, OBEX and DUN are enableable for the bluetooth stuff … more on this too, once I get to playing with it.
So stuff is going on, just not in the mood to write in any meaningful way.
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