Wi-Fizzle.com - Putting the fizzle in Wi-Fi since 2005 .. (yes, this was a poor choice for a domain name)

May 21, 2009 - June 14, 2009

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Posted by dandriff on Sunday June 14, 2009@09:37PM
Posted by dandriff on Saturday June 06, 2009@07:31PM

Let's just pretend the following were true:

 So, I am running OpenWRT Kamikaze on my WRT54GS and
 am using Comcast as my ISP, with 8 Mb. down / 2 Mb.
 up service.  It's great!  Except for the random
 dropouts.  I am using a wired network client when
 I notice the dropouts occur sometimes for 20 seconds
 every minute, for a minute or two here and there.  Blimey!!!

So I read on the internet that dslreports.com will do some free line-quality testing for you. Neat! The only catch is that your IP address must respond to pings!

So off I went to google..to find out how to open OpenWRT Kamikaze for WAN ping requests.

After a little more work than I had been anticipating, I found something even better than what I had been looking for!:

 iptables -A input_rule -i $WAN -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type  echo-request -m limit --limit 10/s -m length --length 1:150 -j ACCEPT

Explanation of the iptables rule

The rule above will allow ping requests -- so your network node may be troubleshooted! .. however, it limits the number of ping requests per second to 10, and enforces a maximum ping request packet size of 150 bytes. This will make it a little bit harder for someone to DoS or DDoS you, so at least some very unskilled script kidd13s might be thwarted, should they try ;) Really, I just think it's cool to tune things so tightly.

Note: For the $WAN variable in the iptables rule, for my hardware setup I used the value "eth0.1".


Posted by dandriff on Friday June 05, 2009@05:12PM

Ah, VirtuaWin looks cool (feature clone app..), but what I was really trying to find was Synergy, the application that lets you use 1 keyboard/mouse pair to control two or many more desktops seamlessly! So nice..especially for controlling the home theater pc out in the living room from my laptop.


Posted by dandriff on Friday June 05, 2009@05:10PM

Make your Windows Desktop behave a little bit more like Gnome with VirtuaWin (it is open-source).


Posted by dandriff on Wednesday June 03, 2009@06:45PM

Uniextract is by far the nicest universal extraction tool that I have come across yet- and it is free.


Posted by dandriff on Sunday May 31, 2009@01:59PM

I randomly searched for "Lobster pain". Partly it was not a randomly selected subject to query for, because I had just been discussing the health of the Lobster and Crab meat varieties with a colleague of mine (They are actually fairly or even quite healthy - Lobster has no fat..and good a good amount of protein <em>[as long as you don't soak it in butter]</em>, and Crab wasn't tooooo horrible..). Anyways, we were talking about that, and then my colleage said to me
<p>"I don't know if I could throw a lobster on the grill while it's alive though. That just seems so cruel."</p>
To which I replied:
<p>"I don't think they throw them on the grill alive!"</p>
Which then got me thinking about boiling lobsters...and hence the search, and basically the realization that their nervous systems are so simple that they don't experience pain! Wow!

Laters.


Posted by dandriff on Friday May 29, 2009@12:11AM

Bug.gd looks like an interesting idea. I dunno, ..like searching Google already usually works pretty good for me when I come across errors (e.g. code compilation errors). Additionally, I don't know how I feel about the sites dubious marketing tactic of making a search plugin for the ever popular, trendy, [but mostly] just plain slow Mozilla Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6138).

G'day.

Update

On second thought, I think I much prefer http://stackoverflow.com/'s approach.


Posted by dandriff on Thursday May 28, 2009@10:31PM

Late at night, my 24" LCD monitor is way too bright! So I have found a piece software which can dim it. It is nice because it is a super-lightweight application with a low footprint/overhead, and also has the options which allow for the assignment of a hotkey to activate a specific profile.


Posted by dandriff on Monday May 25, 2009@02:03PM

In the second video, the we see the classic burning alcohol trick in the shortest form I've seen. The commentary is by a third party (mother?) who is wondering why there's a little tin cup with an open flame sitting on the motherboard of the laptop computer. BGA solder failure was a known manufacturing defect on some runs of Apple iBooks and IBM T series laptops, and probably others besides. People worked out that the video processor BGA contacts were the problem by physically pressing on the chip and seeing their video work. The first attempt at repair is usually jurt jamming something non-conductive between the chip and the case to keep the contacts pressed together, but that fix usually stops working after a while, so reflowing the solder becomes the only solution.

-- http://www.ifitjams.com/2008/08/reflowing-solder-under-bga-processors.html


Posted by dandriff on Sunday May 24, 2009@05:15PM

CDBurnerXP seems like a nice (and free as in beer i think..) windows cd-burning and iso-image extraction utility.


Posted by dandriff on Friday May 22, 2009@08:09PM

I wanted to rename a bunch of Firefox session files, because they have been tugged along from Windows install to install, and the naming had gotten crazy and inconsistent. So I whipped this up:

Administrator@hammertime:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Application Da
a/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ev0zie8w.default/sessions$ export IFS="
"; for f in `ls -1 zPortofire--* | grep '^.*\([0-9-]\+\).*$'`; do mv "$f" "`echo
f | sed -e 's/^\(.*\)\(200[0-9-]\+\)\(.*\)$/\2 \1\3/g' | sed -e 's/zPortofire--/Portofire /g' | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | sed -e 's/ \+/ /g' | sed -e 's/--/-/g' | sed -e
s/[ -]\./\./g' | sed -e 's/Portofire - /Portofire /g'`"; done

I'm not saying that it is complicated once you break it down...but I don't know many other people IRL who can create these useful little command line scripts.

hmm.


Posted by dandriff on Thursday May 21, 2009@02:57PM

I have noticed a strange behavior in the way that Mozilla Firefox handles the TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys. Use your imagination (or do a mental simulation with the following scenario:

You are sitting in front of your computer. You click and subsequently run the trendy and well-liked (and Open Source Software (OSS) nonetheless!) Firefox Web Browser program (for some reason I feel the need to state the following: once Google implements plug-ins for the Chrome web browser, I think it will probably pick up a huge chunk of the browser market software quality things may well chagne -- and let's face it, FF's model is S-L-O-W in many instances when compared to the more advanced and well-suited multi-threading system used by Chrome. At any rate..I think that was just way too much information on a side topic..).

<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:0.5em;margin:0.5em;text-align:center;"> <a href="/images/ff_0_freshly_started_up.png"><img src="/images/ff_0_freshly_started_up-th.png" alt="Firefox has finished starting up and is displaying a blank white page" title="Firefox has finished starting up and is displaying a blank white page" style="border-width:1px;width:390px;height:149px;" border="1" width="390" height="149" /></a> <br /> The result above was obtained by: Firefox has finished starting up and is displaying a blank white page (My homepage is blank).</div>

<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:0.5em;margin:0.5em;text-align:center;"> <a href="/images/ff_1_left-clicked_url_bar.png"><img src="/images/ff_1_left-clicked_url_bar-th.png" alt="You have clicked in the URL bar region" title="You have clicked in the URL bar region" style="border-width:1px;width:390px;height:149px;" border="1" width="390" height="149" /></a> <br /> The result above was obtained by: The mouse has been clicked in the URL bar region.</div>

<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:0.5em;margin:0.5em;text-align:center;"> <a href="/images/ff_2_pressed_shift-tab.png"><img src="/images/ff_2_pressed_shift-tab-th.png" alt="Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination once" title="Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination once" style="border-width:1px;width:390px;height:149px;" border="1" width="390" height="149" /></a> <br /> The result above was obtained by: Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination (or TAB-SHIFT, if you prefer) <u>one time</u>. Nothing much happened</div>

<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:0.5em;margin:0.5em;text-align:center;"> <a href="/images/ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again.png"><img src="/images/ff_3_pressed_shift-tab_again-th.png" alt="Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination one more time (so two times total)" title="Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination one more time (so two times total)" style="border-width:1px;width:390px;height:149px;" border="1" width="390" height="149" /></a> <br /> The result above was obtained by: Pressed the SHIFT-TAB key combination once more. It has now been pressed twice -- two (2) times total. Notice how the cursor is now up on the Google Search Toolbar widget.. after 2 presses..</div>

<div style="border:1px solid black;padding:0.5em;margin:0.5em;text-align:center;"> <a href="/images/ff_4_pressed_tab.png"><img src="/images/ff_4_pressed_tab.png" alt="" style="border-width:1px;width:390px;height:149px;" border="1" width="390" height="149" /></a> <br /> The result above was obtained by: Pressing tab just one time.</div>

So ultimately, my question is simply, why does it take two reverse tab key presses to get to the search toolbar from the url bar, but only one to go from the search toolbar to the url bar?


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