Upgrading the miniPCI wireless card in a Thinkpad X31

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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

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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

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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");
 

Book Recommendation: The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

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The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason follows four  friends through their last year of college. The plot follows Paul as he attempts to unravel a centuries old mystery hidden in The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book more rare than the Gutenberg Bible. Are the secrets it contains really worth killing over? But the story is really about friendship. How it is forged, how it is strained, and how it is lost as people drift and are pulled apart by their separate drives. I found the book to be very enjoyable and interesting.  Continue reading →

Wedding Guestbook Pages

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 Guests filling out guestbook pages Filling out guestbook pages
 At our wedding, my wife and I provided blank guest-book pages at each table, along with a glass of colored markers. The guests really enjoyed filling in the open-ended blanks. After the wedding, we sorted the pages and then had them bound to make a personalized keepsake.

At the bottom of the page I have included an image of each side of the guest-book page, as well as the original SVG source files. Continue reading →

Motorola Razr V3xx SIM Lock problem

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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

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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 →

Book Recommendation: Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

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U-Boat Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson tells the true story of two American wreck divers who discover a sunken U-boat off the coast of New Jersey where the historical records say none should exist. Over the course of several years they risk death (at least three other divers die while exploring the U-Boat) and their marriages searching for the identity of the U-Boat, both underwater and in historical archives.

Robert Kurson makes this historical narrative an exciting story in addition to being a very well researched piece of true history. If you are interested in WWII or Scuba Diving I strongly recommend this book. Continue reading →

Homemade Bokashi (Kitchen composter)

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Laser cut 1/8 inch acrylic support trayBokashi is a Japanese name referring to intensive composting. This Bokashi bucket was made from a Target brand generic cat litter container, a $5 Coleman igloo spout, and some laser cut 1/8 inch acrylic left over from a picture frame. Similar units sell for over $60, and since we were going to buy the cat litter and acrylic anyways, building our own saved quite a bit of money that my wife promptly spent on 3 containers of special Bokashi starter mix. (I argued that we should just throw in some moldy cheese that we also had laying around.) Continue reading →