X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 701 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 38 of 71).

N.C. Nearspace balloon launch

N.C. Nearspace launches helium balloon

If the Stormfest 2011 event wasn’t enough fun for one day, Travis and I had another fun event. We drove across town to the state fairgrounds to watch N.C. Nearspace launch another weather balloon (the club’s sixth).

Travis and I got there just as the team was inflating the helium balloon. An impressive crowd had gathered around, making it a challenge to actually see what was happening! We soon found a spot and watched as the team did its work.

With the crowd providing a lively countdown, the team released the balloon. Cheers rose with the balloon as it glided slowly through the hot, late-spring sky. The balloon eventually landed in a horse pasture in Ayden, North Carolina, just south of Greenville. It reached just over 60,000 feet on its meandering journey.
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Cheap Thoughts: “Roaming” for cable modems

On the road this week, I was thinking it would be nice if I could temporarily bump up the speed of my home cable modem. I don’t need blazing-fast service all the time, but when I travel it’s nice to have speedy access to my home network and also to have a video chat with the family without buffering …. buffering …. buffering.

This is how I see this working. The subscriber goes to a special page on their Internet provider’s website. They fill out a form specifying a time frame during which their cable modem becomes “unlocked.” The subscriber pays a small premium (similar to a mobile phone’s roaming charges) during the time their Internet speed is boosted. At the end of the window, the speed reverts back to its original speed and the rate returns to its original. With DOCSIS 3.0 modems now in the field, I would think that this could be implemented fairly easily.

I would jump to the first provider who could offer this. If only we had real competition amongst Internet providers.

On the air with Rivendell

By LeRe Pics

My use of online music services like Pandora, Mondomix, TaintRadio.Org, and my recent voiceover dabbling has gotten me itching to start my own online radio station. Or reignite my itch, I should say: back in 1997 I became one of the first to apply to the Library of Congress for a compulsory license for Internet radio (back when the list of online radio stations would fit on just few pages). I never followed through with it because it was a leap of faith: the song royalty rates were not fixed and could have been enormous once they were.
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Emergency Management’s pCom unit


At tonight’s Rise Up Raleigh benefit concert there was a number of emergency vehicles parked out for the public to see. I spent some time talking with Raleigh Fire Department Battalion Chief Frank McLaurin about the state’s new mobile command post for disaster communications. The unit consists of a truck with desks, video, computers, and phone, towing a pCom satellite communications trailer.

Frank told me the pCom can provide 16 VoIP channels off of its self-aiming satellite dish. The trailer also provides 10kw of generator power, air-conditioned racks for networking gear and radio repeaters, and a 41 foot pneumatic tower for radio antennas, lights, or cameras. Oh, and an air compressor is included to raise the tower and also to provide compressed air for tools. It’s a pretty sweet setup!

Frank told me the state has owned it since August and has been building out the truck since then. He says the truck worked its first disaster during the April tornado, where it provided electricity and communications at the city’s Keeter fire training center in south Raleigh: one of the areas hit hard by the tornado.
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Facebook and open source

Watching the movie The Social Network gave me an appreciation for the open source mindset that guided Facebook’s creation. During the scenes where Mark Zuckerberg is creating the first application that would become Facebook, I chuckled at all the actual open source and Linux terminology that was used. It wasn’t the typical made-up Hollywood technical mumbo-jumbo the actors were spouting: it was the real stuff. The movie didn’t take shortcuts and I was impressed.

Outside the fiction of the film, Facebook truly does value open source. Their platform is built on open source tools and the company shares bugfixes and enhancements back to the projects it relies upon. I consider the Facebook platform a prime example of how open source software is up to the challenge of the most demanding websites.

Upon installing some perl modules the other day, I noticed one of the CPAN mirrors was hosted at a Facebook domain. That’s when I found Facebook’s open source portal page, detailing the open source tools they use and the public mirrors that they host.

I admire Facebook for its commitment to open source.

Javascript-based PC emulator

Fabrice Bellard, the author of the open source, VMware-like QEMU emulator I use every day, has written a virtual PC that runs entirely in Javascript called JSLinux. Geeky? Yes. Practical? No, but give the man points for being a world-class hacker!

Fabrice Bellard has written a 32 bit x86 emulator in Javascript — in plain English, he’s created a virtual PC that runs inside your browser, using Javascript. And then of course, he created a GNU/Linux variant that can run inside it — so you can run a full-featured PC inside your browser.

via Javascript-based PC emulator, running GNU/Linux – Boing Boing.

Kegbot

I was talking to another geek in the neighborhood last night who was telling me about this interesting idea that appeals to geek beer fans: the Kegbot. He had been at a friend’s party where the Kegbot was used to track who had been drinking what, with charts generated on the web for bragging rights purposes.

According to the project website:

Kegbot is a free, open-source project to turn your beer kegerator into a computerized drink tracker. With Kegbot and our Arduino firmware, you can:

* Monitor exactly how much beer is left in your kegs and track the temperature;
* Record the volume of each and every pour;
* Set up user accounts to track who is drinking, how much, and all sorts of other nutty statistics;
* Use special keys (tokens, RFID tags, barcodes) to authenticate your kegerator users;
* Control access to your taps (with special valve hardware) to prevent unauthorized pours;

Many of my computer-geek friends are also beer geeks, so this scratches two itches for them. I look forward to encountering my first Kegbot and trying this for myself!

Make your own cell phone network

I just discovered a very cool open-source project that turns an ordinary laptop into a cellular tower. It uses Asterisk to route calls.

Very, very cool. Now I have to find out how it works!

OpenBTS is an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk® software PBX to connect calls. The combination of the ubiquitous GSM air interface with VoIP backhaul could form the basis of a new type of cellular network that could be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in greenfields in the developing world.

via The OpenBTS Project.

Satellite fun, part two

Motor mount


After I had my satellite pole properly set, it was time to aim the dish. While I had little trouble finding a satellite earlier when I simply stuck the dish on the pole and fiddled a bit, I found it much more difficult to make things work when I added the mount motor. That’s because the motor adds its own angle to the mix, so you have two dials to set, not just one. When you couple that with an instruction manual often written with poor English it becomes an even greater challenge.

I mounted the motor to the pole, attached the dish to it, and began fiddling. And fiddling. And fiddling some more. I just couldn’t get the receiver to work. The motor needed to be pointed directly south and I worked a long time to get it correct. It didn’t help that I had my TV and receiver all the way inside while I worked. Though I had a “satellite beeper” device which makes a tone when it detects a satellite, I couldn’t get the receiver to do what I wanted.
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Satellite fun

Satellite dish


Longtime MT.Net readers will know that I’m a satellite geek. I bought a DVB-S card for my computer five years ago and enjoyed tuning in the few channels I could pull in on a tiny 18″ dish. That didn’t hold my interest, though, because … well, there wasn’t much to see.

For my latest birthday, I decided to get a little more serious into this hobby. I found a Craigslist ad from a local guy who was selling his satellite gear. For about $75, I bought three DVB receivers, a dish, and an LNB. I took the parts home, scratched my head, and wondered if I had the knowledge to put it all together into something that worked. It turns out I did!
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