Brian's World

Routers, GSoc, etc.

This post will be mainly technical and computer related.

This past week I recieved my FON in the mail. FON is a Wireless Access point provided for Free or Low cost by Fonera with hopes to spread public free/cheap wifi around the world. I was interested because it was free, and it has wifi, who doesn’t like free wifi? After I got it I learned it can be upgraded to DD-WRT an open source? (maybe) firmware for routers that supports lots of different features, bells, whistles, etc. Of course I upgraded it. Now I had my FON minus the Fonera sitting around and wanted to put it to good use. Bingo.

I hate RPI Wifi, the VPN is dreadful with Vista, and 802.1x authentication support is non existant, so I haven’t been able to connect to many wireless hotspots outside my dorm room. So, I grabbed my Fonera and the power cable and applied some advanced electrical tape skills to produce a truely portable access point, the power and router are all in “one”, all it needs is an ethernet cable (which i just didn’t want to tape into the bundle).

Here are some pics of the final product, minus the ethernet connection.

FON

I’ve also been looking for some summer work. Google Summer of Code has been in my sights since it first came out, I’ve emailed the projected the coordinator several times regarding high school students and under 18 and all that jazz.. but now that I’m over 18 and in college it looks like I’m good to go. I filled out one application yesterday, and am looking for maybe one more as a backup. I’m aiming for PHP/mysql driven stuff, hopefully I get chosen!

I had a dreadful ordeal on Wednesday, trying to digitize a VHS tape to my computer for editing in Adobe Premiere. It was awful,with the right equiptment I could have done it in 30 seconds but no, I have to jump through several dozen hoops. First the DV port was only DV in on the deck, so I couldn’t do anything with that. I dubbed the VHS to DVD and then started attempting to rip the DVD to an editable format. I tried everything, mpeg, mpeg2, xvid, divx,avi.. nothing seemed to like the format change. My final solution involved: DVD -> XVID AVI -> DIVX -> AVI. I got it done 2am on Thursday, long night.

Well I have some Diff Eq to attend to, and some PHP to attack, I’ll catcha later.