An inside joke between me and my geek friends involves a conversation I began ten years ago that began “wouldn’t it be great if you could build a device to detect eye movememts that would replace your mouse?” Over the years the “device to detect” phrase became a running gag, useful for knocking the wind out of a hyper geek like myself.

Hey, you had to be there.

Anyway, someone has built a device to detect eye movements called OpenEyes. And its open source, too. So step off, you doubters!

Over my time off I’ve spent some time messing around with my Linksys WRT54G access point. It had been collecting dust in my bedroom while I focused on other ways in which to waste time. As I mentioned a few posts back, I had been looking into what it would take to create a neighborhood-wide network. The WRT54G seems ideally suited for such a task.

A while ago I installed OpenWRT on the access point as I wanted to see how Linux worked on the box. What I didn’t find out until yesterday is how truly powerful this little box is when Linux is under the hood. For instance, one thing I need to do is to have it be my home internet gateway and split the internet connection into a trusted segment (the LAN) and an untrusted segment (WiFi). When I first read that the wireless connection was bridged to the ethernet switch, I thought this wasn’t possible. I found out yesterday that – while the wireless is bridged to the switch, it is configurable with vlans! Thus, I can treat each port on the switch as if they were independent, meaning that splitting traffic can be easily done with firewall rules.

Its truly amazing to know that a $50 box can do all of this. Linux rules!

Before I boarded my plane to Amsterdam last week I picked up a pair of Koss QuietZone Pro noise-cancelling headphones. They were on sale at Rat Shack for 50 bucks. I’ve long been jealous of travelers with their high-end Bose noise-cancelling headphones but couldn’t cough up the $300 or more for a set of headphones. I didn’t have high hopes that a $50 pair would perform well.

Boy was I wrong. They’re great! When they’re actively cancelling they reduce an amazing amount of ambient noise in an airline cabin. I sat there thinking, come on, this doesn’t REALLY work, does it and I’d flick the power button on and off. Sure enough, the wind noise would vanish when it was on. I was astonished at how well it worked!

Three months ago when I made my trip to Australia I had my Sony earbuds and that was it. The plane I flew for that trip, a Boeing 777, had the traditional airplane-headphone jacks in the seat, meaning I could listen with my Sony earbuds but only in mono.

That wasn’t enough to filter the noise out, however. I spent the trip with my in-flight movie’s volume cranked to its highest level. Even then I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue. With the noise cancelling headphones, not only could I hear the dialogue but I had the volume set to the absolute lowest level! I honestly couldn’t believe what I was hearing (or more specifically, what I wasn’t hearing)!

My only quibble with the headphones is that it is quite mysterious figuring out where to install the batteries! I couldn’t use the noise cancelling on the way to Amsterdam because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to power them. Only after I’d gotten on the Internet did I realize that one of the ear pieces rotates off, revealing the battery compartment.

If you fly with any frequency and want some relief from the drone of the engines, pick up a pair of these noise-cancelling headphones. Your ears will thank you!

I saw someone’s Mapquest directions left on the company printer this morning and it inspired an evil idea.

Let’s say you’re the IT administrator. Let’s say you devise a clever hack with a transparent proxy so that all directions from a site like Mapquest have some random detour inserted into it. Or perhaps the directions always lead to a particular fast-food restaurant.

That would be cool, and totally evil. Too bad I don’t have the time on my hands to actually implement it.

I’ve been looking into interesting uses for GPS lately. A recent discussion on the Make Magazine Blog highlighted GPS loggers: devices which record location info for later download.

Today the Make blog featured another GPS logger: the Wintec WBT-200 which costs below a hundred bucks. I’ve crowed here before about a cheap USB GPS, but that still needed a PC to work. This GPS logger is self-contained: the only time a PC is needed is when the data is ready for download.

You could take this with you when you wanted to mark a trail but couldn’t take a PC with you. You could attach one to a weather balloon to track its movements. Or an elephant. Or a passing freight train. Or a business competitor. Or a spy. Or a cheating spouse. There are plenty of uses!

When cool technology drops below a certain price, it becomes available for all sorts of interesting uses. How would you use it?

The other day when Yet Another Freight Train went rumbling by the house, blaring its horn, I realized a good new use of Woody Norris‘s HyperSonic Sound invention. As you may know, the HyperSonic Sound (HSS) devices focus sound like a beam of light. You may recall that such a device was used recently to repel pirates attacking a cruise ship.

Why not make a train’s horn hypersonic? A train’s path is pretty predictable, you know, straight ahead and all that. There’s no real reason for anyone on either side of a train to know where its going. What if the sound of the horn was beamed straight down the track – where the train is going – instead of everywhere else? A focused horn would maintain or enhance rail safety and cut down on the horn noise to the point that neighboring homes and businesses would be disturbed far less often by a passing train.

Man, am I a freakin’ genius or what?

I just signed up to attend the local BarCamp held July 22nd at the offices of Red Hat. The Barcamp is an “unconference” where interested geeks get together to share information about various topics.

I think I’d like to present on a topic, but one of my standbys – VoIP – has already been claimed by Scott Morningstar. Thus I have to get creative, which is good. I’m thinking I’ll have to do something edgy or unusual. How does one out-geek a conference of top-notch geeks? Continue reading →

This past weekend I spent some time installing my mobile ham radio into my car. The radio install went well, though disconnecting the battery cables had some reprocussions. My factory-installed car stereo has a stupid security code enabled which you have to enter each time the radio loses power. Like anyone would want to steal a boxy, Honda factory stereo! I had to track down the code before I could listen to any music.

Once I finally got my stereo working again, I found it tuned to a frequency just below the FM band: 87.7MHz. That frequency is in the low-VHF TV band, so I only a little surprised to hear something on that frequency. I was thinking it was Raleigh’s WRAL-TV Channel 5, but further listening proved it to be WECT Channel 6, the NBC affiliate in Wilmington! That’s a good 127 miles, according to Google Maps!

Yesterday, I also heard a repeater in Greensboro, itself a nice hop away. There’s been some pretty impressive tropospheric ducting going on lately.

I think Google’s Google Earth is an amazing tool. I mean, being able to view any point on the globe like you’re flying over it is captivatingly cool. I’ve used it a few times to map out the route to a customer meeting ahead of time. The only problem with Google Earth is that it has no Linux client. Sure, you can run it under WINE, but its buggy: the screens make you dizzy and the menus don’t draw.

NASA has a lot of satellite imagery in its collection, so naturally they built their own mapping project called World Wind. World Wind offers access to all of NASA’s high-quality imagery, including all the data from the shuttle’s Topography Mission. The result is a rich, 3D view of the world.

Still, World Wind does not in itself offer a Linux client so an enterprising Russian hacker named Vitaliy Pronkin made his own WW2D is a free and open source, Java-based client to NASA’s World Wind data.

World Wind’s detail rivals Google Earth’s, though the WW2D client doesn’t offer 3D views (NASA’s version for Windows does). Still, its great to see that the Linux community now has a place to play with maps.

For more information:
News Forge article on World Wind
NASA World Wind
World Wind FAQ
WW2D – a Java World Wind Client