Monthly Archives: April 2008

Fonera 2.0 Ideas

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The Fonera 2.0 will be released real soon now. The major differences are expected to be a USB port and the ability to add custom features to the router. Martin has his own ideas about what to do with it. Here are my ideas, some obvious, some useful, some original, and some kinda dumb.

  • Various Peripherals
    • Connect to your cable or DSL modem via USB (some don’t have ethernet)
    • Print server
    • Barcode reader to register guest logins at a café, etc.
    • Scanner (scan to email or similar)
    • GPS for actual location of Fonera or as a time server
  • Bluetooth
    • Share over BNEP / PAN
    • Connect to Internet via cell phone
  • External Drives
    • DMAP or UPnP media server
    • NAS (CIFS or even AoE)
    • Web server
  • Sound Card
    • Audio endpoint, UPnP or some other streaming protocol
    • Internet radio
    • Baby monitor (microphone)
    • VoIP client (with USB handset or USB FXO)
    • Traffic geiger counter (one tick per packet)
  • Webcam
    • Network camera (security, lazy coworkers, etc.)

Feed Spam

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I am very sorry if your planet has been spammed by my blog.  I did an OS upgrade on my server and for some reason the distro maintainers thought it was a good idea to globally enable mod_disk_cache by default.

From the mod_cache documentation:

This module should be used with care and can be used to circumvent Allow and Deny directives. You should not enable caching for any content to which you wish to limit access by client host name, address or environment variable.

From disk_cache.conf:

CacheEnable disk /

WordPress apparently doesn’t play well with mod_cache. For me the result was that a request for my feed would return a cached copy of one of my comment feeds. Nice, guys, real nice.

Kites

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Some time ago I started to write an entry about kites. It was about the fun my family and I were able to have with a pair of kites we bought for a dollar. The cheapness of the kite adds a little to the challenge of keeping it up in the air. Economics nuts will agree that I get to realize a lot of consumer surplus.  They really are fun once you figure them out.  You even have some control over how it flies though you only have one string.

Noah and Kite

I highly recommend getting one at your local dollar store or supermarket. But that’s not what this post is about anymore.

Yesterday Marc Christensen took some of his co-workers to fly kites during lunch.  He owns a variety of stunt and power kites.  The smaller stunt kite is a lot of fun.  It’s amazing how much control you have with just two strings.  Marc also has some much larger kites including one that requires a harness and a variety of safety features.

Big Kite

Rusty had a reasonably easy time of it so I thought I’d have a go.  Honestly I didn’t really think about it much.  If I had I would have declined.

Before

With your back to the wind there is a cone-shaped area in front of you toward the center of which the pull of the kite gets stronger. The idea is that you keep the kite to the sides of that cone or above it.

After

This is what happens when you cross through the middle of that cone. I brought the kite over from left to right safely and then started to turn it back to the left. Apparently I brought it too low and lost control. I was launched about 20 feet forward and was very lucky that the kite crashed into the ground. I have several nice bruises and some sore muscles. It was fun, yes, but not a good value proposition for me. I’ll be sticking with smaller kites (or a good deal less wind) from now on.

85% Cocoa

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Sometimes when we hang out with Cam he’ll buy us some junk food. Last night I saw this and my curiosity had to be satisfied.  The darkest chocolate I’d had before was 60% and that was a truffle with a lighter chocolate inside.  Not counting the huge chocolate bar I found in the baking cupboard as a kid, of course.

The packaging is elegant and the texture smooth but the taste?  The package describes the taste thusly, “This full-bodied chocolate[...] is for true aficionados.” In other words only crazy people buy this stuff, the kind of people who convince themselves that if something costs more it must be better.  If 40% is good, then 80% should be fabulous!  You know who you are.

I’m not saying it was completely disgusting.  There’s a shy hint of sweetness, and it really is smooth, but I won’t be going above 60% again.

Update: Apparently they also have a 99%.