Synopsis: Norweigan FM Pirate explains his buriable transmitter from 30 years ago while inside his homebuilt cat-cage (complete with hamster wheel). A fascinating contraption! He is nutty as squirrel poop, and I love it.

I have, for a long while, resisted installing anything but the most nuts and bolts versions of Linux on the machines that I run. But then I realized that I didn’t care for doing hackish maintenance to get simple things to install or work – so I made a step-up to a Linux distribution for people who like customization, but don’t want to get their hands real dirty, and that was good for a while. However, there were still some things that I couldn’t do on my Averatec 3250 laptop that required hackery and mid-level wizardry. Both things that required me to do a lot of maintenance and general wasting-of-time.

Let’s face it – I’m growing older and whereas I used to enjoy maintenance on computers, I’ve been there, done that and yes, I have the t-shirt. I’ve made a giant and stood on it’s shoulders, but dammit, I’m old, I’ve moved on and I just want things to work out of the box! Though, at the same time, I don’t want something that is ridiculously bloated or weighed down with a bunch of apps that I’ll never use. This is a big change for ‘ol Ben. Part of allure and mystique of Linux was that you could “have it your own way”. However, that allure has mostly worn off as I have had it “my way”, but only through a lot of custimization and general time-wasting. Computers are tools to get jobs done, and I need them to “just work” sometimes!

So then, it follows in my progression of Linux distributions that I should end up with something like Ubuntu Linux. Small, lightweight and yet fully featured and easy to use. Installs in under an hour, and so far, everything has “just worked”. Power-saving CPU scaling? Works. Hibernates like Windows? Works. Fan-control so it doesn’t overheat OR be really loud? Works. Sound/Graphics? Works. Wireless Internet without a lot of hassle? Yup. I highly recommend it. More updates at a later date…

Update: While there are many nice configuration options for the Ubuntu desktop (powered by Gnome), there was not one to allow me to change the default habit of the desktop locking when you closed the lid of the laptop. After googling a little bit and figuring out where the configuration files are, I found the /usr/share/acpi-support/screenblank file. To change this behavior you need to just change one line:

From this:

su $user -c “(xscreensaver-command -throttle; xscreensaver-command -lock)”




To this:

su $user -c “(xscreensaver-command -throttle)”

Focused readers of this site know that I enjoy “do-it-yourself” stuff, from my own software projects, to all that soaring stuff and I’ve even made my own beer (not to mention the picnic table)

In a world where most every thing we could want is ready-made and cheaply available from Wal-Mart or Target, there is a certain romantic and satisfying (to some) ideal in making your own whatever, be it a scarf, or a hat, or even a microprocessor-controlled lost-model-alarm.

Last year, I was alerted that the venerable O’Reilly publishing company was going to publish a magazine for DIYers called (aptly) MAKE. It’s a great compilation of geeky and not-so-geeky DIY projects from Kite Aerial Photography to Making Your Own Biodiesel to learning to weld! And, on a not-so-side note, for a day-to-day DIY fix, make sure to check out the MAKE:blog.

Finally, what really fueled this post was Talk of the Nation‘s interview with the editors of both MAKE and ReadyMade magazines back on December 28th, called Inside the World of “Do-It-Yourself”. Give it a listen.

So Kelly and I got new cell phones for Christmas — it had been a long time coming for me, as I was stuck using Kelly’s old phone which, while trust-worthy was feeling quite brickish as of late. So, we got new Motorola V265 phones from a Verizon retailer in Oxmoor Mall. They are cool, small, have long battery lives, and also have little, crappy cameras in them. I’m most pleased with the usability and the battery life of it, but the camera is a nice touch. All that, and we are only paying about $10 more a month and we have beaucoup minutes now. Huzzah!

Now, here’s the rub… (There is always a rub). Verizon had locked down these phones so damned tight! You couldn’t get your photos off of your phone unless you paid Verizon $0.25 to send them via email from your phone. And if you wanted to transfer a background image to your phone, you had to go the same route. You can’t upload games or ringtones or any of the things that you might expect a futurephone such as this would allow. Verizon has that locked down and would like to sucker you at $0.25 a pop. Me, being the meddling user/client/customer that I am did a little research….

Turns out there are a number of pieces of software that can help you with your phone woes — but first you need the phone-to-USB data cable. I found one on eBay for about $8 shipped. Then you have to find a copy of Motorola Mobile Phone Tools (normally $50). One would assume that with the data cable and Mobile Phone Tools, you’d be able to get at your images, right? Wrong! Thanks Verizon! After just a little bit of searching around, I managed to find a very nice walkthrough for getting your photos from a Motorola V265 phone. It requires two further utilities, P2Kman and PST Phone Programmer, which you can also find with a little searching. It requires hacking the software on the phone only slightly, but then you can use Mobile Phone Tools to get your photos off of your phone and upload MP3s for ringtones, image files for backgrounds, etc.

I followed it, only had a little bit of trouble, and eventually got my photos off of my phone and put them into my futurephone image gallery. I also uploaded an image from Achewood as a background image, and as planned, I found and uploaded an MP3 of Kenneth Branagh’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V as my obligatory ridiculous ringtone. Enjoy.

I decided to build myself a nice, flat workbench last night. I looked for some free plans on Google and quickly came up with Building a Basic Work Bench. It’s a little smaller than what I wanted, and I already had a perfectly good workbench-top, a door (80″ x 30″) that we had removed from it’s hinges upstairs! 80″ x 30″ = 2400″ square inches of pure workbench. So, with a rough plan in mind, we headed to Home Depot.

I already had one 2″ x 4″ at home, so we got 5 of the straightest 2×4’s we could find, and box of 3″ deck screws. I returned home and made a quick plan (as you can see in the image above). It only took about 2 hours to complete, so I was happy with my spur-of-the-moment build. Now I have a nice, flat place to build the next sailplane I will crash! Some photos were taken and my rough plan was made with The Gimp, and you can see them in the workbench gallery.

I fooled around with jpg2asc (jpeg to ascii converter) today, and also with manipulating the output with CSS to make it look right… well, here are the results. pretty cool stuff, tho’ the original image is 6k and the asciified version is 25k!

I hacked up camE, a handy and small webcam app for Linux a while back, and finally put the finishing touches on it tonight. Considering camE is written in C, I’m pretty happy I made it work! Najati helped me out quite a bit, tho’ I’m pretty sure he really just wanted another person that knows C/C++ so that they may enjoy the genius that is Citrus :)

Anyway, you can snag my patch here. Note well that my “home” webcam is now fully functioning in the manner that I would like it to…

In other news, I put MPy3‘s new code into CVS @ Sourceforge. This was prompted solely by Paul Jennings submission of a huge patchola (which is in the CVS) that cleans up MPy3 quite a bit. Word to your mother, Paul.