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Category Archives: Useful Links

Links to resources & pages that I have found useful

Free wireless at the Gamboa rainforest resort at the panama canal (Panama)

I was given the following 3 day access code for the wireless internet at the Gamboa Rain forest resort (at the panama canal):
username: 3day136
password: 6856670
However, the internet was turned on for everybody when I was there, so I didn't need to use it.  If you find yourself at the Gamboa resort, feel free to use [...]

Compressive Sampling: Beating the Nyquist Limit for certain signals

Compressive Sampling is a new field of sensing theory that sidesteps the traditional Nyquist sampling limit. The Nyquist limit is an information theory result that says to perfectly capture a signal which is bandwidth limited at a certain frequency, X, you must take 2 times X samples per second.  So for example, if you want [...]

Phillips Webcam with Linux

I bought 30 Phillips SPC  900 NC webcams because they claim to support up to 90fps and I have had good luck using linux with the PWC drivers in the past.  Plugged into a generic Ubuntu 7.10 install, I found that 640×480 resolution was automatic, with 15fps. 320×240 worked at 30fps. (I tried 160×120 resolution, [...]

Freeing my V3xx phone from Cingular

After getting ATT/Cingular to take the subsidy lock off my phone, I decided to flash it with the generic International Motorola firmware. The advantages:

The Motorola firmware is not "branded" and gets rid of all of the "Shop Cingular" links, menu items, etc.
The quadband firmware claims to support all 4 GSM bands (instead of the 3 [...]

Moving encrypted partitions from Mandriva to Ubuntu

Red Hat based distros such as Mandriva use loop-aes and losetup that have some default options that are different from a debian based distribution such as Ubuntu which use dm-crypt. To mount my "old-school" encrypted volumes I had to use the loopaes script from Gary Larson. (I also had to install the hashalot package [...]

D-link DWL-G122 with WPA under Linux

The D-Link DWL-G122 USB 802.11g (revision B1) wifi adaptor works great for open or WEP encrypted networks and is supported by Ubuntu out of the box. Unfortunately, the open source driver doesn't support WPA2 (and only supports WPA via non-standard iwpriv settings, and even then, the support is flaky).
I was able to get it [...]

Screen Scraping Amazon Album Art for MythTV

I wanted to get Album Art for all of my (newly ripped) songs on my MythTV box. 
Thierry has a nice perl script which finds album art on Amazon and automatically downloads it, but unfortunately for me the music plugin for MythTV has upgraded their database schema and the script no longer worked.  I am [...]

Join now to get 3 credits at Paper Back Swap!

PaperBackSwap.com is a service that I have used for the last several months and find extremely useful. They give you credits for sending a paperback to other members, and allow you to use your credits to request paperbacks. They also provide an easy to print mailing label and you can pay them to add [...]

Encrypted home directory under Ubuntu linux 7.04 & 7.10

Using directions from Felipe Alfaro Solana, I set up an encrypted home directory in Ubuntu 7.04. I only had one problem, that exhibited an error message as follows:
Command failed: Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.08 (2006-07-17)(compat) and kernel driver
This was caused by the dm_mod module not being loaded. I fixed it for the session by issuing [...]

Listing of Atlanta/Decatur Digital OTA Channels

A list of the channels easily avaliable with a small amplified Radio Shack antenna from the Decatur Area:

2-1 -WSB-DT - ABC
2-2 (Blank, no signal)
5-1 WAGA - Fox HD
5-2 WAGA - Fox SD
11-1 WXIA-D NBC-HD
11-2 WXIA-D (NBC Weather, All the time!)
14-(1,2,3,4) - Ion subchannels.
17 - WTBS-HD - TBS
30-1 - PBS
36- WATL-D [...]