I’ve added gphoto2 to my Linksys NSLU2 (a.k.a. “the Slug”) running Openslug. I’ve also used gphoto2 to control my Nikon D50 camera. Thus, I have a networked digital camera which I can manipulate from anywhere on the network. The one thing I can’t do is adjust the zoom on my D50 (or pan or tilt for that matter), but nearly everything else can be controlled remotely.

So . . . my idea of building a Linux-powered balloon is one step closer to reality. I’m not about to hang my $600 camera off a balloon that hasn’t been thoroughly tested, of course, but I now have a few key pieces with which I can take aerial photos.

I also added a USB 2.0 hub to the mix, allowing for other periphials to be tacked on. This is where I’ll add my USB GPS for location and altitude info. I am also considering a USB barometer which will provide even more accurate altitude information. I also need something to transmit telemetry: perhaps a packet-radio link hooked to a small amateur-radio HT. I could add a self-contained APRS unit to the payload but I’d really like to have the Slug be able to feed the telemetry.

Eventually I’d like to explore means of making the balloon neutrally-buoyant. That way I could hold an altitude and have more control. That would be good for photographing the landscape or cities.

Perhaps I’ll start a wiki on this and let others contribute. Anyone interested?

Thought I’d give y’all an update on my switch to Net10 for cellphone service. I’ve literally spent over 4 painful hours on their tech support line but everything is now settled and working.

Why did it take 4 hours? An MVNO like Net10 uses a hosting cellphone company’s network and voicemail (in Net10’s case, Cingular). The MVNO provides all the customer handholding itself. To minimize costs, Net10 of course oursources its front-line support to Belize. To gain even greater savings, Net10 uses VoIP links to Belize. Thus, when one calls their support, you have network latency issues, dropped packets, AND a cultural barrier in addition to the language barrier.

The folks on the other end are polite and are as professional as they could be. Gosh darn it, they really do seem to want to help. Unfortunately, the bad connections and cultural divide are hurdles just too high to overcome. When you provide information to them, they repeat it back to you digit by unending digit. Providing them a twenty-digit IMEI number (in other words, the phone’s serial number) is an exercise in insanity.

I also hear them say “I’m waiting for my system” quite a lot. At first I played along and assumed their call center had sucky Internet connectivity. After my last call, though, I realized the agent is simply plugging my complaint into an internal search engine and the wait is for the result. I’ll tell you more about that call in a moment.

I ordered a refurbished Motorola V171 from their website for $50. It’s a great deal: phone plus 300 minutes for 50 bucks. My only beef was the phone didn’t seem loud enough for driving around in my noisy Honda CR-V. I called them back and got an RMA for the phone. They quickly had a postage-paid box shipped to my house and a new phone in my hands, only it wasn’t the phone I asked for. It was another V171 when I asked to try a Nokia phone. The rep had noted my call as “phone defective,” rather than actually listening to what I was asking. The mighty search-engine strikes again! Fortunately, I found that I’d only thought I’d turned the phone’s volume all the way up but it still had a few notches to go. When I upped the volume everything was golden.

For a while I had two cellphones. To avoid paying outrageous forwarding fees to $print, I put an “extended absence” message on that phone’s voicemail, directing callers to my Net10 phone. I then went about the issue of porting my old number to my new phone.

Here’s where the fun really began. On November 30th I spent another one of my hours talking to the Net10 rep to get this porting done. They put in the paperwork and told me I’d be getting a new SIM card for the port (which also entails reprogramming all your phone book entries, by the way). The only problem is, Sprint ported the number and Net10 never sent me my SIM card. Callers to my old number were sent to hyperspace while I wondered when my “any day now” SIM card would arrive.

Time marched on. Lives were born and lost. Planet Earth sailed farther around the sun. I got sick of waiting and burned another hour on the phone. “It has already been mailed,” yada yada yada. Give them a few more days.

Kelly goes through the porting routine herself. When her card doesn’t arrive as promised, she lets the rep have a piece of her mind. Somehow she gets a native English speaker on the line. The next day, her new SIM card is in her hands. While she’s on the line with the clueful rep, she helpfully has them ship a new card out to me, too. Saturday before Christmas was the promised arrival day.

Of course that didn’t happen. The day after Christmas the card finally arrived. Finally I had all the parts to do the port. Another frustrating telephonic visit to Belize and I had my familiar cellphone number on my new phone. All seemed good, right?

Wrong. The new SIM card had no voicemail number programmed into it so I didn’t know how to retrieve my messages.

Friday was my last communication with my friends in Belize. After reading and rereading the zillion-digit IMEI number and explaining at least four times that I simply needed to know which number to dial to retrieve voice mail, I heard the clueless rep begin reading the script for resetting the voicemail password. WTF?!?

“I’m sorry,” I said politely but curtly. “I don’t think you’ll be able to help me. Goodbye.” I hung up the phone before strongly considering hurling it across the room.

Here’s when I finally got wise. Net10 is owned by TracFone, a Miami-based company. Their letterhead has their corporate number on it, which can also be used for support. I called it and got a cheerful American voice on the first ring. In another moment, I was speaking with an American tech who not only corrected all the problems introduced by her Belize counterparts, she waited on the line while she hustled the Cingular rep through the process of setting up my voicemail. Only when she had verified the voicemail was working did she let me go, and by this time it was closing on 6 PM on a Friday. In other words, their internal support did an outstanding job, in contrast to their well-meaning but hopeless outsourced call center.

So where does that leave me? It was a lot of pain to get here, but I’m now satisfied with my service. I love not paying for my phone when I’m not using it, I can carry minutes over for a whole year, and if something fancier catches my eye I have no draconian contracts locking me in. I can think of little reason to call Net10’s support department again now that things are set up, so the earlier bumps don’t really concern me. Especially now that I know which number to call.

This MVNO stuff is frontier-type stuff. It can be frustrating and bewildering. If you know what you’re doing, though, you can get the same service coverage and features that you’re using now for a fraction of the cost. To me that’s worth a little bit of trouble.

I spent one day out of the recent holidays taking measurements of our electric power usage at near-hourly intervals. This involved going outside and walking around to the meter to read whatever number was flashing at the time. While I got good data, obviously it isn’t convenient to step outside all the time. (And before you say it, yes I’m a hopeless geek. Deal with it!)

I know the meter can be queried via from the street, so I did some research on how this works. Apparently the meter (an Itron Centron) transmits as a Part 15 (i.e., unlicensed) device on the 900MHz band. It uses spread-spectrum frequency hopping over 50 channels, a fact that makes it somewhat difficult (but not impossible) to zero in on the data stream. However, the channels are published and span 909.6 Mhz through 921.8 MHz, well within the range of my scanner.

Thus, my idea of Do It Yourself Meter Reading (also described here)may be possible, after all. I haven’t found any description of the data stream, nor if its encrypted, so I do not know what information is available nor how to decode it. One step at a time, though.

Interestingly enough, the frequencies the electric meters use are right in the middle of the amateur radio 33cm band. Being licensed operators, hams thus have priority on these frequencies. I wonder how long it will be before reports surface about interference on this band?

Warning: multiple buzzwords ahead! I don’t call this category X-Geek for nothing! 🙂

I finally got my NSLU2 running CUPS with Openslug!

I had to install the CUPS packages from the Unslung distribution. Then the battle was the SSL-fu needed to generate a certificate, since CUPS likes to use HTTPS connections for doing admin stuff.

The final hurdle, which just was overcome this morning, was adding a USB printer kernel module. I downloaded the Openslug sources last night and compiled the kernel module. Adding it this morning to my NSLU2 was all CUPS needed to see the printer.

The very, very last hurdle (actually) was adding the printer’s PPD file, so CUPS knew how to print to it. I dug that out of the printer’s install CD and installed it with little effort.

I’ve now turned my $80 Linksys NSLU2 network-attached-storage (NAS) device into not just an NAS but also a USB print server. Plus I learned a little about embedded Linux in the process, which is the best part of all. I’ve discovered you really can have a full-featured Linux server for less than 100 bucks.

Now to decide how else I can add to its usefullness. I’ve heard of an iTunes-compatible server running on the NSLU2, so maybe I need to explore that next.

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Let’s make those days a little longer for a change, shall we?

Space shuttle Discovery is scheduled for launch tonight at 9:35 PM EST. If you’ve got a view of the southeast sky at 10 degrees above horizon, you may see the launch as the shuttle progresses through the sky.

I remember seeing a eerily beautiful glowing cloud in the sky as I was driving home from work a few years back. If I recall correctly, it was exhaust from a rocket launched from California: the sun shining through it long after its rays had moved west across Earth. I’m hoping tonight’s launch is just as eerily beautiful.

In related news, I was happy to hear NASA is planning at least one more service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, in my opinion one of the greatest scientific devices ever constructed.

By way of the Interesting People list, here are some interesting links about law enforcement using cell phones as remotely-operated listening devices or tracking devices:

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect and brother

I’ve wondered before if this could be done. Looks like it can.

Since I’m on the topic of telecommunications, I think we’re going to see some interesting moves in the telecommunications industry now that the Copyright Office has ruled that as of December 1st unlocking your cellphone is legal. Read this PC Magazine article explaining what the law says is legal.

Perhaps some competition will bloom now that phone service doesn’t have to be tied to the phone.

I’ve written before about MVNOs, the cell phone providers who lease airtime from Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint. I decided that my Sprint PCS Vision plan was way too expensive. I don’t use the Internet option much at all now that I’ve got a Boingo account and the 2,000 minutes per month is far more than I ever come close to using. Thus it was time to do some shopping.

After visiting some online forums, I discovered Net10 (and have written about it before), an MVNO which has one of the most affordable plans around. The cost for calls is 10 cents per minute, period. No contracts, monthly fees or daily minimums, just a dime a minute. As opposed to other services, Net10’s minutes can be bought in quantites which last all year. I can buy a card from them providing 1500 minutes and keep them fora whole year. Thus, my monthly cellphone bill can be as low as $12.50 if that’s all the minutes I need a year. Instead, my usage is about 300 minutes per month, which equals (duh) $30 per month. That’s less than half of what I’m currently paying for Sprint!

The phones aren’t flashy, which to me is a good thing since I don’t care to have to lug around a PDA/camera phone/rocket launcher when I need to talk. The battery life should be pretty lengthy without those add-ons, too. The underlying cell phone service is provided by Cingular and T-Mobile, so the coverage is good.

I bought a reconditioned Motorola V171 from Net10 to try them out. Cost was $40. This flip phone has a color screen and is fairly easy to use. The remaining minutes are displayed on the screen so I know what I have as well as when they expire. It has support for polyphonic ringtones, in case I ever go insane and want them for some reason.

My biggest beef with the phone is that the volume on calls is a bit weak. I had trouble hearing Kelly when I took a call from her while I was driving. I thought this was a fatal flaw so I called their support number to return the phone. A nice woman in Belize answered the call and took down all my information. Even though I told her I wanted to switch to a Nokia phone, Net10 sent me an identical V171 in return! I was going to send both of them back when I decided to give the new phone a spin. It turns out the volume wasn’t turned up to the highest level, which makes a difference. Also, I reasoned, if I’m talking while driving I should be using a headset, anyway. I bought a headset and now everything seems fine.

My other beef with the V171 is that the phone just doesn’t seem to fit my ear. Motorola designed the earpiece to be totally flat, which doesn’t match any human ear I’ve ever seen. Thus you can press it against your ear and never get a good seal around it, nor feel comfortable talking on it. Once again, the headset saves the day.

To summarize, I’m happy so far with the Net10 service. I’m marginally happy with the phone. Given what I’ve spent on the phone so far, I don’t have much room to complain. Oh, by the way, the phones come with free airtime, so my $40 bought not only a phone but 300 free minutes, too.

I’m porting my Sprint number to my new Net10 service now. I won’t miss Sprint’s fat phone bill nor its now-redundant Vision internet service. Net10 may be as close to a perfect cell phone service as I’ve seen yet.