Listing of Atlanta/Decatur Digital OTA Channels

transmission tower 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 -MyATL
  • 43-1 WUPA – CW
  • 46-1 – WGCL-HD CBS

RadioShack HDTV antenna, Catalog #: 15-2186

    Parts for a MythTV box

    I've built a MythTV home media PC, attempting to keep the costs down. It's already cost $539, which is more than a Tivo HD ($299), and very close to a Tivo Series 3 ($575). The advantages over buying a TVIO include:

    1. DVD / CD playback and archiving to HD.
    2. Cheaper subscription costs (Free over the air, or 20-40$ a year from Schedules Direct).
    3. Automatic commercial detection.
    4. Open Platform, which allows for easy network mounting of file-systems, administration, and customization.

    Continue reading

    Upgrading the miniPCI wireless card in a Thinkpad X31

    A few years ago when I first bought it, I installed a Lucent Technologies Prism based mini-pci wifi card in my IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X31 laptop because the prism chipset had good linux support.  But, it does not support WPA2 encryption. I decided the easiest fix was to upgrade to an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 Lan adapter, which is now supported and works with the wpa_supplicant program to support WPA2 encryption.

    The only problem I ran into durring the procedure was that my laptop BIOS had a "whitelist" of approved cards (those sold by IBM) and when I booted it after installing the new card a warning message came up as follows:

    ERROR

    1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card.

    and, the laptop wouldn't boot. (I just LOVE vendor lock in….)

    Luckily, somebody had already figured out how to disable the BIOS whitelist and I found the following program in the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/6/13/69

    Continue reading

    Finding hosts in new known_hosts files which are hashed

    Older versions of SSH kept a ~/.ssh/known_hosts file which contained the name of each server you had connected to, along with it's public key. If you ever wanted to erase a public key, you simply edited the file with your favorite text editor, found the name of the server, and then deleted that line. (You might do this for example if the server admin had changed the public key of the server, and you wanted to tell SSH that it was ok to grab the new key and use it instead of the old key.)

     New versions of SSH store the server name in a hashed form, so you can't visually identify it (it's not human readable). This is a security feature so that somebody with access to you known_hosts file can't figure out what other machines you have connected to (and that they should try to hack next, etc). But it makes your job harder when you want to delete a single host's key.

    The inelegant solution is to just delete the whole file and then accept new keys from everybody, but this is a security risk. To find out which hashed entry matches the server whose key you are trying to replace, simply run the following command:

    ssh-keygen -F servername.com
     

    Or, even better, to simply remove the server from your known_hosts file all in one command, use:

    ssh-keygen -R servername.com

    Adding custom headers (such as Approved:) to Thunderbird mail

    Sometimes you want to send email or newsgroup posts with custom headers. For example, the Approved: header can be used to post to a restricted "Announce" newsgroup for a class, or you may want to mark your email with an "X-No-Arc: yes" header to prevent a mailing list archive from saving a copy. 

    The easy way to add a custom header to the Thunderbird email/newsgroup compose window is by adding a user.js file to your configuration directory ( .thunderbird/default//user.js ) with the following line in it:

    user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "Approved");
     

    Motorola Razr V3xx SIM Lock problem

    Apparently, many (but not all) Motorola V3xx phones from Cingular have a problem where they will not work with a locked SIM card. If you change your SIM code it will apply the changes, but as soon as it turns on the “SIM Lock” feature, the phone will not be able to access the Cingular network. If you call Cingular, they will insist you have “locked up” your SIM and that they must send you a new one. A thread on the Cingular forum about this topic appears here.

    If you have access to a different GSM phone however, you can fix the problem yourself by moving your SIM card to the other phone, typing in your SIM card number, and then turning off the “SIM Lock” feature. When you move the SIM card back to your V3xx phone, it will work again. Just remember, don’t turn on the “SIM Lock” feature on a V3xx until Motorola/Cingular issue a fix unless you have another GSM phone around to correct things if you have one of the broken v3xx’s.

    I verified that my V3xx has this problem and notified Cingular.

    Changing the outside display logo on a Razr V3XX

    Electronics My RAZR V3xx has two screens, a small one on the "outside" and a larger one inside. During normal phone usage, the outside screen shows the Cingular logo. (Or the Motorola Logo if you have a non-branded phone.)

    I decided to replace the Cingular logo with one of my own, so I used P2kCommander-v4.9.9 to replace the cl.gif file in a/mobile/ with my own. (I'm currently using the picture of electronics, which makes the outer screen look like a window into the phone, but I've included a few others you might want to use instead.) Remember to back up your original cl.gif if you ever want to go back!

    Other hacks for the v3xx are here and here and my review is here. Continue reading

    Review: Motorola RAZR V3xx

    V3 Gold The Motorola RAZR V3xx  is one of Cingular's new non-smart 3G phones, and can be purchased relatively inexpensively with a contract. (Amazon sells them for 0.01 with a 2 year contract, cingular charged $79 the last time I checked.) Although it doesn't have a mini-qwerty keyboard and good email support like the Blackjack, 8525, or Treo 750, it also costs $200-400 less. The Motorola RAZR V3xx is in the same class as the Samsung A707 SYNC and the LG CU500 Phone in that it supports 3G, playing music, and Cingular videos, but it's 3G chipset is twice as fast (3.6 vs 1.8). Continue reading