This week, I’m switching over from using an Android device to using an iOS device full time. I’m going to give it a whirl and see how it goes. In the past, I had been developing for Android. Lately though, I’ve been focused on iOS and AppleTV. Figure I should be dog fooding the platform, apps, and what not full time instead of part time. I’ll likely still carry the Android phone (Samsung S10) until I find it’s no longer useful. So Thursday I had gone out to make use of my Disney discount at the Apple store and got … Continue reading Switching from Android to iOS as Primary

Going to geek out again. Skip if it’s not your jam… With a little bit of tech gear, you can capture the radio traffic aircraft send to broadcast their position (ADS-B). It allows a real-time glimpse into the air traffic around you. The data can be viewed as well as fed up to services like flightaware.com. It’s basically wardriving, but without having to drive. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, a software defined radio (USB flavored), and an antenna. Ideally, line of site is preferred. To protect the gear from the elements, I’m going to leave it inside which … Continue reading ADS-B Receiver

It has been a crazy 2 weeks.  This weekend being MUCH better than last weekend. Last weekend, between Friday night and Saturday, my main PC (the one I use for development, photo editing, game playing, etc) locked up.  I haven’t seen a computer freeze and lock up like it did for quite some time.  Reboot and no luck.  It was having problems getting past POST and if it did get past POST, it locked up on the screen where the XP logo fades in on boot up.  Lots of potty language later, I realized this was a heck of a … Continue reading It is computer chaos!

Development on axtime.com has been an all summer activity.  I'm getting close to wrapping up an update to the existing site.  Basically, it is a complete rewrite.  The things I know now compared to 5 years ago is evident when I look at my code (what a mess!).  A preview of what I'm doing can be found at http://v3.axtime.com.
Continue reading “Autocross Results”

Booting Knoppix from a USB memory stick was all fun and games, until the cheap USB stick broke.  I could get another USB stick and copy the contents over.  "Or why not dual boot?" I thought.  My notebook has a 60gb drive and after doing house cleaning, I'm only using 15gb of it.  I don't want to reformat and have to reinstall Windows.  Gparted to the rescue!  I used it to shrink down the Windows partition and add some new partitions for Linux (if people would like more details on this process, let me know, there's some tricks to do this).  Now I have space for Linux which flavor will I go with?
Continue reading “Dual Booting With XP and Ubuntu”

I’ve got a Nokia 6600 phone. Nice phone. T-Mobile has a bare-bones internet plan which gets you out and on the ‘net. Its nice, but there’s a lot of ports being blocked and any app that requires an internet connection fails. T-Mobile has an internet plan, but its Crazy Expensive™ per month. I haven’t been able to find a work around either.

Then the other day it hit me: Persuade the phone to use a dialup connection. Here’s how to do it.

1. You’ll need a phone which can do this. A Nokia 6600 works. I would think other phones can do this too, but maybe not.

2. You’ll need a dialup internet plan. There’s some pretty cheap ones out there. I get mine from the university I go to.

3. Go to Settings -> Connections -> Access Points. We want to add a new access point.

4. Give it a name and specify the data bearer as “data call.” Then enter the dialup number and user name and password. For authentication, I left it as “normal.”

5. When you use your favorite app, tell it to use your new access point you setup.

There are some drawbacks to doing this like it uses your phone connection and ties up your line. But the advantage is you have full ‘net access and all the ports are open.

By using this technique, I was able to use Putty, AgileMessenger, and several J2ME apps which hadn’t worked with the simple t-zones plan.

Continue reading “Access to the internet minus T-Mobile’s ‘net plan”

Student resells MS acedemic software and got sued by Microsoft. Impressive, he fought back and won!

I’ve picked up some Microsoft acedemic software. Its dirt cheap. But yeah, if you can’t use it or install it, its useless and very tough to get rid of.
Continue reading “KSU/UA Student takes on Microsoft!”

New phone! A nokia 6600!

Continue reading “new phone”

Wow: PNG Ad, PDF Ad. Mozilla had so many donations, they’re running a two page ad in the New York Times.

Continue reading “Firefox in NYT”

Thursday started off interesting. Pathfinder, the name of the computer
I have video monitoring the cat stand, died. Time of death appears to
have been around about 11:02pm Wednesday evening, Pathfinder time (which
had fallen behind by as much as 10-30 minutes). I discovered it powered
off on Thursday morning because the whirling of PC fans hadn’t sounded
the same that morning.

What to do? It was almost 8am on Thursday morning and I decided I was
going to replace the power supply before I head off to work. How did I
know it was the power supply? Well, 2 weeks before hand there was the
stench of burnt electronics coming from the general area where
Pathfinder sits at. I had first suspected it was Endeavour, my Pentium
100Mhz Linux box, but oddly enough it was running fine. After about 5
minutes, I rounded up a flakey (due to motherboard/cache) AMD K6-2
300Mhz machine. I pulled its power supply out and 10 minutes later had
it installed in Pathfinder. Flipped the switch and Pathfinder resumed
where it left off at.

An interesting note about Pathfinder: It is an Intel 233Mhz machine
which isn’t anything special. But its running in the same chassis as my
first computer – an AMD 386DX 40Mhz machine (back then, 486SX 25Mhz
machines were “da bomb”). And from this first chassis I had upgraded to
a 486DX 40Mhz machine and then later to the Intel 233Mhz. The 3.5″
floppy drive is the original floppy drive that came with the 386 machine
and I think it still works (haven’t really had a need to use floppies
lately). This 233Mhz machine has a video tuner card installed and makes
one of the web cams possible.

In other news, I had my last calculus 1 quiz last night. I’m pretty
sure I passed it. I would LOVE to have gotten a perfect score on it.
But I had gotten stuck on a step in one of the problems. I think I
worked around it successfully, but I’m not sure.

Continue reading “Computer Outage and Quiz”

align=”left” width=”315″ height=”237″ /> Wow! Burt Rutan and his team
at Scaled Composites complete their
2nd flight to space and win the X
Prize this morning!

They completed their first flight on Thursday, September
30th. And today they completed the required second flight within the
required two weeks.

Also note, today is the 47th anniversary of the
Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik.

align=”left” width=”240″ height=”179″ />Burt Rutan is one
of the people I consider a hero and would really like to meet. He has
designed and built some amazing aircraft. What’s really amazing is all
his aircraft have been sub-sonic. SpaceShipOne is his first creation
which goes faster than Mach 1. In fact, it reaches Mach 3+ going
straight up! SpaceShipOne also is designed as simple as possible. It’s
flight controls are not the fancy fly-by-wire but the simple cable and
pulley type. The last aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound
with a cable and pulley setup is said to be the Bell X-1 piloted by
Chuck Yeager. This, to me, means there’s some serious engineering going
on to allow SpaceShipOne to fly with this configuration. Also pretty
neat is the feather system Rutan designed into SpaceShipOne. It allows
the aircraft (or is it a space craft?) to tumble back into the
atmosphere without much stress on the airframe or pilot input (its been
said the pilot can sit back and not touch a thing and it’ll re-enter the
atmosphere on its own). To me, that’s engineering and creativity at work.

Wow!

Continue reading “SpaceShipOne completes 2nd flight”