Alston Grove

Every so often, a piece of hardware with modest popularity and unrealized potential is catapulted into infamy when it is hacked. People hack it and make it do things beyond its original design. That is definitely the case with the series of wireless routers from Linksys. I originally bought my Linksys WRT54G to free my laptop from its twisted-pair tether and to act as a firewall for my network. It quickly reached limitations, however, and I dedicated a PC to running Endian firewall (based on IPCop) instead.

Years passed, and now I am tired of listening to the whine of PC fans that saturate my living space. I have built out a home network with multiple machines as a kind of lab playground. It’s been fun and educational, but now I’d like less noise and clutter. The FitPC is an interesting little system running on AMD Geode and Linux, with a small profile and no fans. The mini-ITX systems at Mini Box are also interesting. Everyone seems to be getting in on the action, with the “mini computer” category on NewEgg.

And then a friend pointed out that I have the perfect hardware under my nose. It just needs an upgrade of its software. So I took the plunge and installed the open source DD-WRT on my old Linksys router. Setup is easy. The user interface is more sophisticated and informative. And there are enough knobs and dials to keep any hacker happy. It simply blows away the old software.

Now that I have saved a little power and made things a little quieter, I wonder what can I do about this noisy computer sitting on my desk? We’ll have to see about that.

Some of my media has worn out and some is on the verge of obsolescence. Media deteriorates from common environmental factors like heat, moisture, and light. For CD and DVD discs, oxidation is often the reason for failure. Magnetic media seems even more susceptible: small electric fields, dust, and mold can also weaken it. For tapes, simple things like using “pause” too much or leaving the tape partially wound can weaken the signal. If the media doesn’t fail, it may still become unusable as the format loses support. I have a bunch of Video 8 tapes and no way to play them. I may have to send them to a service like Home Movie Depot to get them digitized and recorded on modern media.

My plan is to go gold — to store everything on archival gold DVD and CD media. They actually use gold in the reflective layer, which is naturally inert and resistant to the environment. The dye used to write the data is also specially formulated to be very stable and accurate. Some archival media come with a scratch-resistant coating on the surface as well. Using N.I.S.T.’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) accelerated aging process to test these media, they are expected to last 100 years for DVDs and 300 years for CDs. Based on those tests, my idea is to convert movies to DVD and store photos and other files on CD. I bought a spindle of Vertbatim Ultralife Gold Archival discs and a solvent-free pen for labeling them. Now, if I can just keep the kids from treating them like frisbees, I’ll be golden.

The basement looks like a graveyard for computer hardware, all victims of the PC plague. Sinclair. Coleco. Commodore. Amiga. They all still work, but their owner, sadly, pays them little attention, except for an occasional nostalgic power up. It’s time they found better homes. But first, history must be preserved.

I bought a XE/XM-1541 adapter on E-Bay that was originally made by VintageComputerCables.com. One end plugs into a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, the other end into the PC parallel port. Using Star Commander in DOS or OpenCBM on Linux, it’s possible to transfer a disk image (a D64 file). It also works with a 1581 drive and 3.5 floppies (a D81 file). I made disk images of all my programs. Remarkably, everything was still readable. I tried to copy some old commercial games, but the copy protection on the disks prevented it. It made sense after I thought about it. Anyway, my personal stuff was more important.

They run great under VICE, which is a very complete Commodore emulator. It even emulates the slow load times, or you can turn on warp mode when you’re feeling impatient. A friend pointed me to FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator written in Flash that can already play some programs. That’s crazy.

Even after making disk images to complete my C-64 codeography, I still can’t bring myself to pitch the stacks of old floppies. I feel like one of those people on Style Network’s Clean House who live in clutter because they can’t part with anything that carries a memory. I’ll work myself up to it eventually.

It took me a little longer than I wanted, but the results are worth it. My MAME cabinet is fully operational:

I’m slowly documenting the steps and materials to build it on my MAME cabinet page. The controls are all working, although I still need a light to make the trackball glow. The coin doors light up and accept quarters for games. (Coin entry is also simulated by holding down Player-1 and tapping Button A.) It makes me feel like a kid again.

My iRiver iHP became a brick when its hard drive died. It was time for an upgrade anyway. One thing I realized after all that use was that I really didn’t need to carry 20 gigs of music around. My new player had to be small, sleek and support Rockbox, the open-source firmware for mp3 players. I chose the newly supported Sandisk Sansa e270.

The factory firmware on the Sansa is pretty and worked quite well at first, but I soon experienced problems. First of all, and strangely enough, the minimum volume was uncomfortably loud. There was actually a setting to fix this. Next, advancing to the next song required hitting the button twice, sometimes. If the LCD is on, hit the button once to advance, if the LCD screen is sleeping, hit the button once to wake it, then again to advance. How annoying! The final straw came after I added more songs to the player, but was unable to find them and play them.

Installing Rockbox was much easier than I had imagined. All I had to do was download and unzip a file onto the player, then run a small installer that writes a boot loader to the player. The original Sansa firmware is still there and can be booted. But now Rockbox boots by default.

The default Rockbox is plain-looking, but it is feature-rich. I quickly found font and theme files that can be unzipped to add Rockbox eye-candy. I can’t believe how fast it boots, and I am convinced the player actually sounds better now. How long before factory players start shipping with this on it?

As you may have read, I am always looking out for a better Slim Keyboard that has the minimalist programmer in mind. So, now I’ve gone and bought an A4Tech KL-5 Mini Keyboard.

It’s not too bad, much like a laptop keyboard, really. Things I like:

• Nice typing sound, easy tactile pressure
• Slight ridges on “home” keys for index fingers
• Normal size keys
• Has cursor keys, home, end, page up/down
• Acceptable number of annoying keys (e-mail, browser) that are small and less noticeable
• Space bar is centered
• Function keys are smaller, out of the way
• Backspace and Enter keys are acceptable sizes
• Nice form factor and attractive look

Things I don’t like:

• Control key makes my fingers play twister
• Where’s the little feet to angle it up?
• Cursor keys are in-line, which slows down finding them
• The Escape key is too small and too far away

I mapped the Caps Lock key to the Control key, and I think I’m getting used to it otherwise. The Happy Hacker keyboard was nice, but the key clacking was beginning to drive me mad.

I was at CompUSA to pick up some cables and I ended up making an impulse buy: a Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter for Vonage. I’d been researching Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, and Packet8, but my wife says I spend too much time on decisions, so I’m trying to change.

The PAP2 is very small, like two decks of cards, and it has an ethernet jack and two RJ11 phone jacks (for two separate phone numbers). I plugged it into my Linksys switch and patched the “phone 1″ into my house panel. Since I put the phone adapter behind my firewall, I had to add a few rules to let VoIP packets through, which the manual kindly provided.

I went to the Vonage website and activated my adapter. One nice thing about VoIP is you can pick the area code your phone number will orginate from. If your parents live in South Carolina, you can get a number that is local to them. I kept it simple and chose a Columbus number, but I might add another number later. Right after I activated, the phone LED lit up, and I had a dial tone. I didn’t have to take a day off from work to wait for some telco guy!

I’ve been using it for a couple days, and I must say I am impressed. My wife hasn’t complained, so I know it’s decent. The voice quality is good and the service has been flawless. It comes with standard features like caller ID, 3-way calling, call waiting, and even voice mail. You can use their website to track calls, check voice mail, add features, and configure settings. The price for all of this is pretty unbelievable. We were paying $35/month for a line, and $75/month for long distance. Now we pay $15/month. It makes me feel like the big telcos have been cheating me all along.

Vonage doesn’t require a contract, so I could eventually switch providers. CallVantage has some interesting features, like Do Not Disturb. Packet8 most interests me for their Virtual Office. Really, I need to run Asterick and connect it to my VoIP provider, and I’d have all the PBX features I could imagine.

I’ve been searching for the perfect keyboard for years. What I seek is generally known as a slim keyboard. But it is easier to express by stating what I don’t want: a wide honking keyboard with number pad, function keys, internet buttons, and wrist support.
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Several years ago, with the encouragement and help of friends, I built a PC from component parts for the first time. The fastest processor at that time was outside of my budget, so I bought the notorious Celeron 300A — loved by many for its ability to be dramatically overclocked. To make the feat even easier, I coupled it with one of the first “jumperless” motherboards. I was trying to avoid junky parts and high prices from PC manufacturers, and maybe learn something about this mysterious hardware.

Fast forward to today, where a vibrant market now caters to overclockers, modders, and LAN party gamers. In the age of the iMac, style matters as much as performance. Seeing mostly flashy, glowing, see-through cases littering online stores, I decided they were gaudy, and I set out to build a vanilla PC with conservative components. But something unintended and unexplainable happened along the way.

Keep reading for highlights, photos, and the parts list.
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I was experiencing random segmentation faults while running programs under Linux. I was encoding some OGG files and oggenc kept crashing from it. Suspicious, I tried compiling the kernel source, and sure enough, segmentation fault again.

Also known as signal 11, sigseg, or segfault, this signal from the kernel means that a program used a pointer to reference invalid memory. Usually it means a buggy program, but when it starts happening system-wide, there is more likely a hardware problem. Most programs will run without a problem, but code that uses a lot of computation and pointers (like encoders and compilers) are bound to get the signal quickly.

I immediately blamed my memory chip, a single 512M SDRAM. There are a couple of unique programs for Linux that help with bad memory. First, Memtest86 can run patterns across all memory and monitor for bad addresses. Next, the Bad RAM patch for the Linux kernel will allocate the bad memory addresses at boot time, making sure they are never used by running code.

But after running Memtest86 for hours, it didn’t find anything wrong with memory. Then I tried restricting Linux to only 64M (using the “mem=64″ kernel parameter), but I still got SIG11. I thought the odds of bad memory being in the first 64M seemed unlikely, so I started looking around for another source of the problem.

On the PC Health page in the BIOS, I noticed my processor temperature running at 105 degrees Celsius! Even an AMD Althon shouldn’t run that hot. After examining it on the motherboard, everything looked okay. But the fan seemed a little too dusty, so I cleaned it out. I pulled up the BIOS page again, and the processor had evened out at 73 C. I booted up Linux, ran some heavy processing, and SIG11 had disappeared! I’ll never underestimate the power of dust again.