Dossy's Blog » Product placement

Sex toy or video game controller?

Dossy Shiobara — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:19:51 +0000

Sony, in the tradition of missing the boat, again, after the success of Nintendo’s Wii and its Wiimote, is still trying to catch up after four long years. Sony has finally unveiled … the PlayStation Move!

Waaaaaaaait a second. That looks awfully familiar … oh, that’s not the Move, that’s the Hitachi Magic Wand! Here’s the PlayStation Move:

I’m sure you can see where the confusion came from. Oops!

Nice job, Sony. If you’re still in the game console business in four more years, maybe you’ll actually build something interesting other than a Blu-Ray player with a sleek looking vibrator.

Using a Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N on MacOS X 10.6

Dossy Shiobara — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:12:00 +0000

After getting totally fed up with the poor Wi-Fi range on my MacBook Pro, I picked up an external Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N. Of course, Linksys doesn’t provide Mac drivers for this product, but it’s a Ralink 2870 and Ralink provides drivers for MacOS X in their support section. I downloaded the RTUSB D2870-2.0.0.0 UI-2.0.0.0_2009_10_02.dmg driver (5.2 MB).

There is a driver inside USBWireless-10.6 for Snow Leopard, and it will complain during installation that the RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext failed to install. This is expected, just ignore it, the installation will complete successfully.

At the time of this writing, the WUSB600N v2 isn’t included in the Info.plist for the kext, so I had to edit /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist in a text editor and add the appropriate bits. Search for “Linksys – RT2870 – 2″ and duplicate the and elements, renaming the key to “Linksys – RT2870 – 3″ and the idProduct integer from “113″ to “121″. Here’s what it should look like after the changes:

        Linksys - RT2870 - 3
        
            CFBundleIdentifier
            com.Ralink.driver.RT2870USBWirelessDriver
            IOClass
            RT2870USBWirelessDriver
            IOProviderClass
            IOUSBDevice
            idProduct
            121
            idVendor
            5943

After making this change, unload/reload the kext or reboot your machine, and then plug in your WUSB600N and you should get a window popping up telling you that a new network device has been detected.

I hope this helps someone, as I was totally disappointed when I learned that Linksys wasn’t supporting this device on Mac “out of the box.”

Optimum WiFi at ETD in Kinnelon NJ

Dossy Shiobara — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:57:48 +0000

As I try to get some work done waiting for car repairs, I discovered that the ETD on Route 23 in Kinnelon, NJ, has Optimum WiFi within range. Being a Optimum Online customer, I get free access to it.

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

Tags: Optimum WiFi, Kinnelon, NJ

Tie-dye glasses, I will have them!

Dossy Shiobara — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:57:44 +0000

After a bit of drama with my old pair of glasses, I went out and got myself an eye exam to update my prescription and have ordered myself a pair of tie-dye frames from Zenni Optical for $40! They are made of so much win and awesome:

I know you’re jealous. Don’t feel bad, it’s okay, you should be. These frames even come with 581% more cowbell.

For my own notes, my prescription is now -5.50 OD/OS sph, DS (SPH) cyl, and PD 32/33 (65).

Tags: vision, glasses, Zenni Optical, tie-dye

I fail at retail therapy

Dossy Shiobara — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:06:03 +0000

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

SAA’s in-flight entertainment runs on Linux, apparently

Dossy Shiobara — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:42:24 +0000

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

My Mongolian ball-in-cage puzzle, solved!

Dossy Shiobara — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:45:46 +0000

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

TiVo Hacking: Getting a Linksys WUSB54G working

Dossy Shiobara — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:12:16 +0000

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

Selling a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition Verizon phone on eBay

Dossy Shiobara — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:17:20 +0000

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.

Life is sweeter with the ‘Berry

Dossy Shiobara — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:00:58 +0000

After not being able to get data services on my Treo 650 last week, I finally had enough. It was over two years old and I was eligible for an “upgrade.” It was time to say goodbye to Palm and its aging hardware and operating system and move on to something more modern … or at least, switch to a product from a company that’s a little more commercially viable. I considered the Apple iPhone, but just can’t bring myself to pay the ridiculous “Apple Tax”–the extra money you pay for Apple’s fancy design. When a carrier offers the iPhone for $99, I might consider them.

What at&t was offering for $99 this time around was the Blackberry Curve 8310 [at Amazon]. So, on February 4th, my wife and I went to the Willowbrook Mall at&t store and bought them. I also picked up an Aliph Jawbone [at Amazon] Bluetooth headset for myself and she chose the Motorola H12 [at Newegg] Bluetooth headset. We could have saved some money ordering it all online, but there’s something to be said for immediate gratification, being able to walk out of the store an hour or two later with everything just working. However, I did end up ordering two Sandisk 4GB MicroSDHC memory cards for the phones from Amazon.

I’m not going to try and do a full review of these products as there are already plenty out there if you search for them. What I will do is list the things that I discovered, especially stuff that surprised or disappointed me. It’s going to be completely subjective and folks may not agree with what I point out as being important, but they’re important to me.

(1) The 8310 has GPS which is very cool, but TeleNav’s service is $9.99/mo for unlimited routes. Ouch. Still, the software and service seems excellent so far and it’s still cheaper and more convenient than buying a dedicated GPS unit.

(2) The 8310 has GPS while the 8320 has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. Yeah, I really would have liked my new phone to have Wi-Fi, but in reality, having GPS will be far more useful for me.

(3) The Blackberry OS 4.2 that currently ships with the device doesn’t let you record video. Luckily, RIM is working on their next upgrade, OS 4.5 (formerly referred to as OS 4.3.1, apparently renumbered by marketing) that will. I just hope they don’t keep slipping the anticipated release date over and over. Anyone know how to get into their beta program? I’d love to play with the beta release.

(4) Even though the 8310 has GPS, it appears that pictures taken with its camera do not store the GPS location in the image’s EXIF data. Again, not a big deal but something that I had expected and it not being implemented surprised me.

(5) The push-email sync. delay is a lot longer than I expected. My guess is that the Blackberry Internet Service doesn’t poll my IMAP mailboxes as frequently as I’d hoped, because even manually performing a “Reconcile Now” doesn’t seem to help. I’m guessing they only poll every 10-20 minutes which isn’t that bad, but not having a proper manual “sync now” that triggers the back-end poll is a let-down.

(6) When paired with a Bluetooth headset, answering the call with the green phone button defaults to the headset. I expected that answering the call by pressing a button on the phone would default to activating the handset. If I wanted to answer the call on my headset, I would have used the headset to pick up the call. This matters because I often have my phone in my pocket but leave my Bluetooth headset in my jacket pocket; I only wear it when I’m actually out and about. So, when I receive a call, I’ll grab my phone and answer it but the phone sends the call to the headset–argh! I then have to hit the menu button and select “Activate handset”, or press the $/Speaker button to use speakerphone, to actually talk on the phone. At the very least, this needs to be a configurable option in the phone application, whether to answer the call using the Bluetooth headset or on the handset.

(7) The Jawbone is an awesome headset. The noise cancellation really works well. It’s really comfortable to wear; it feels lighter on the ear than it actually is. But, it’s butt-ugly. I mean, it’s embarassing to wear this thing in public, it’s so ugly. When you buy the Jawbone, you’re definitely not buying it for the looks, that’s for sure. But, if you spend a lot of time talking on your cellphone, especially in public places or, like me, in the car with the window open, this headset will not let you down.

(8) On the other extreme, the Motorola H12 is gorgeous. It is small, lightweight and aesthetically pleasing. Even the charging base looks great on a desk and the use of magnets to attach the headset to the charging contacts on the base make my inner geek go “squee!” The sound cancellation on the H12 is adequate, but I’m not convinced it’s nearly as good as the Jawbone. However, where the H12 falls short in technical quality compared to the Jawbone, it more than makes up for it in sexy. I’m actually tempted to return my Jawbone in exchange for another H12, for just this reason.

That’s it for now. I’m anxiously awaiting the Blackberry OS 4.5 and what improvements it will bring. I’ll post an update once it arrives.

Do you have a Blackberry? Have any tips for me? Your favorite applications that you think I might enjoy? Any cool undocumented features or shortcuts that you’d like to share? Please tell me about them in the comments here.

Tags: Blackberry Curve 8310, Aliph Jawbone, Motorola H12, Bluetooth, TeleNav, GPS