Recently I’ve have been playing the great game League of Legends but my friends list has not been working. After dealing with the problem for several weeks, I’ve finally found the issue. I use Smoothwall for my router, and as Smoothwall users may know, it has a niffty IM proxy feature. Well, after playing with… Continue reading League of Legends Friends List and Smoothwall
XFCE Autologin and Autostart
With my media computer coming together nicely, I wanted to remove all user intervention such that the computer will boot directly to XBMC. The two primary obstacles to this are automatically logging in the user and automatically starting a program once in XFCE. I decided to use SLiM as my log-in manager since it is… Continue reading XFCE Autologin and Autostart
Intel D945GCLF2 and Surround Sound on Gentoo
I while back I purchased an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard to play with. This board features the dual core Atom 330 processor in a nice mini-ITX form factor. I’ve recently set this up as a media center PC, running Gentoo and XBMC. I’ve been quite happy with its performance in this role, but there was one… Continue reading Intel D945GCLF2 and Surround Sound on Gentoo
Network Bonding in Gentoo
I’ve been trying to find a good use for the second network adapter in my fileserver, and what better than to increase the throughput to the network. Using something called bonding, its possible to combine two physical network adapters into one logical bonded adapter. Using a bonded adapter provides several advantages such as fallover should… Continue reading Network Bonding in Gentoo
Samsung u550 Hidden Menus and Lock Codes
In playing with my Samsung u550 phone, I found some postings about various “hidden” menus. On my old Motorola V265, these hidden menus allowed you to change such things as the HTTP proxy that the phone would use for web browsing. By using your own proxy rather than the default Verizon proxy, you could avoid… Continue reading Samsung u550 Hidden Menus and Lock Codes
Gentoo as VirtualBox Guest
For a while, I kept an old 733MHz computer in my rack to use as a test box, where I could play with various software without needing to worry that what I was doing could cause problems for my desktop. I have not used it in a while, but I decided that having a physical… Continue reading Gentoo as VirtualBox Guest
Microchip ICD 2 and Windows Vista x64
While on Christmas break, I purchased a few things to get started on the stock clock project. First was the Explorer 16 development board, which is the same one that I used while an a co-op (internship). I bought this particular one since I was already familiar with its features and the processors that came… Continue reading Microchip ICD 2 and Windows Vista x64
Deny Hosts and SSH Login Attempt Behavior
A few weeks ago I installed DenyHosts, a small deamon (can also be run as a cron job) that runs on my server to block IP’s that make brute force SSH login attempts. The script has worked great, blocking over 500 hosts on the first day I used it (including myself a few times…). One… Continue reading Deny Hosts and SSH Login Attempt Behavior
Internet Enabled Wireless Stock Clock
A project that a friend of mine wants to complete is to build a small clock type device that can connect to the internet and show something like +/- 10% for the stock market (or a specific stock). The preliminary concept involves 2 physical devices and a program on the computer. The program on the… Continue reading Internet Enabled Wireless Stock Clock
Infrared Robot Detection with Obstacle Avoidance
As part of a Robotics class I took as a professional elective, I designed and built two robots with the intent of having them interact with each other. My original idea was to have them play a hide and seek type game, where one robot would chase the other, while both of them would avoid… Continue reading Infrared Robot Detection with Obstacle Avoidance