If someone handed you $100 right now, could you spend it? How long would it take you to decide what to buy?

Not long at all, right?

Well, I seriously fail at retail therapy. I was given a $100 Visa gift card as a Giftmas 2008 present, and I can’t think of a single thing I want to buy with it. Is that pathetic, or what?

I thought about picking up a video game or two, but I really don’t have the time nor motivation to play them. Modern video games totally lack the necessary charm and appeal of older games. They use advanced graphics and cinematic sequences to “wow” people, but the gameplay is empty. You can’t compensate for a boring game with eye candy alone, at least for me.

I thought about movies or music, but there hasn’t been music released in the last 5 years that I thought was good enough to own except for a few songs which I picked up on iTunes or through Amazon MP3. Same goes for movies — the ones I care to watch, I’ve already seen and I haven’t seen a movie in years that was good enough to be worth watching twice.

Ah, what about books? Goodness, there’s that free time issue again! I still have books sitting on my shelf that I want to read that I haven’t read yet. Buying more just seems wasteful, at this point.

Surprisingly, as a technology geek, I’m not a big gadget junkie. I went through the phase of collecting shiny doo-dads and frankly, I got tired of throwing them out when they lost their shine. Is there really such a thing as a must-have item? I haven’t found one, yet.

About the only thing that I still really like is food. I love to eat! I guess the best way to spend this money is to take the family out and enjoy a nice meal. Oh, but then the dilemma of deciding where to go sets in …

I guess there are worse problems to have than not knowing how to spend $100, but it really bothers me that I don’t have a go-to list of reasonably inexpensive things that I’d want to buy. This is why I’m such a hard person to buy gifts for: I truly don’t want anything. I don’t mean this in the polite “oh, it’s okay, don’t worry” sort of way, but in the “oh, please, not another thing that I have to find a place for and hold onto until I get tired of it and throw it out” kind of way.

Maybe I’m truly able to find happiness with what I already have. But, a part of me — probably conditioned and programmed through advertising as I was growing up — feels like I’m “incomplete” without more material possessions. Part of me asks “what’s wrong with me?” because I don’t already know what I’d go out and buy with this money. Do you know what I’m talking about?

What would you go and buy with $100 right now? Or, are you like me, without any clue what you’d do with it?

Tags: retail therapy

Apparently, South African Airways runs some kind of Linux for their in-flight entertainment system.

Of course, on the leg of the trip from New York to Senegal, the flight staff kept rebooting the system trying to get it to work, with very little luck. Most of the time we just stared at the Linux boot process hanging, trying to talk to the NFS server. Fortunately, they got it working for the Senegal to South Africa leg of the trip.

Tags: South African Airways, Linux, fail

I love problem solving and puzzles. My friend Christina brought me back a fun one from her trip to Mongolia. Here it is, solved:

Apparently this puzzle type is what Stewart Coffin calls “Locked Nest.”

It may not look like much, but the challenge is to assemble it from a completely disassembled state. It’s not only geometrically challenging, having to visualize the pieces in their final states, but physically challenging, having to hold the thing together as you put it together. Several times, while I was working on the puzzle, a pin would slide out or a rod would be out of alignment and the pin would miss it.

This is definitely a puzzle I’ll enjoy solving many times over. It’s quite challenging.

Tags: Mongolian, puzzle, Stewart Coffin

So, I have a TiVo Series 2 stand-alone DVR with a Product Lifetime subscription. For years, I’ve had it connected to the home network using a Linksys WUSB11 wireless network adapter, but it finally died. I went and grabbed a Linksys WUSB54G as a replacement, but found out that the TiVo doesn’t support it. No problem, I know the TiVo runs Linux and there’s plenty of documentation on how to “hack” the TiVo so I can load my own kernel modules on it, etc.

It turns out that the Linksys WUSB54G v4 uses the Ralink 2570 chipset. Fortunately, there’s been effort on native Linux drivers for the Ralink family of wireless chipsets. The hurdle, of course, is that the TiVo’s MIPS R5432 is big-endian, so it presents a bit of a challenge porting the driver to the TiVo.

Working off the latest code for the legacy rt2570 driver from CVS, I’ve gotten it to compile using TiVo’s Linux 2.4.20 kernel. Loading the module, however, results in this:

rt2570: init
usb.c: registered new driver rt2570
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: using permanent MAC addr
rt2570: Active MAC addr: 00:12:17:89:f5:02.
rt2570: driver version 1.0.0
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2b in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2d in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b3dc
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b408
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc2c
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc08
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021cd8c
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f47 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f49 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80231155 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80231157 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04

So, now I get to go fishing through /proc/ksyms and try to fix up all these unaligned access errors. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through all of this and get the driver working.

Anyone out there have experience porting Linux device drivers like this? Got any tips or techniques that might help me? I’d really love any help I can get …

Update: I’m posting my debugging progress in a rt2×00 forum thread. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, right?

Update: I’ve gotten it working! I’ve addressed the majority of the unaligned access traps and I can now use my WUSB54G as a wireless NIC on my TiVo! Here’s a patch against rt2570-cvs-2008102616 of the driver and the corresponding kernel module binary:

• rt2570-tivo-mips.patch
• rt2570.o.gz (1.42 MB)
  MD5: 64605e019929db714d583d160a6b513c

If you have a SA2 TiVo and want to use a Linksys WUSB54G as your wireless NIC, this driver is what you want. It works for me, anyway!

Tags: Linux, TiVo, open source, hacking, Linksys WUSB54G, Ralink 2570

I’m selling a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition Verizon phone on eBay for a friend. The auction will end next Friday, February 22nd. If you’re interested in it or know someone who is, please go and bid on it.