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An iPod AdventurePosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 15, 2006.
This is the sad story of my iPod nano, which lasted exactly one month in my hands. The first few things I did were harmless, and merely voided the warranty. I installed iPodLinux on it, and from there installed Doom. I had plenty a joyful French class with that toy in my hand. I also managed to loaded a few System of a Down videos onto there, using some clever but illegal methods to download the videos, hack up the file format, and transfer them to the pod. Perhaps I'll post about that some other time. The next few things were dangerous. I downloaded some spec sheets on the connector cable, and used that to power some LEDs from the iPod's battery. I also wired it into my stereo (version one, sans safety measures). In retrospect, a few of those things could have caused fires. I don't really care at this point. One day, however, the iPod succumbed to my abuse. I wanted to see what would happen to the sound if I poured water into it. It was kinda fingerprinty anyway, so I turned it on and went to wash it. It ran fine for about two seconds. Then the music began to cut out and get choppy. I removed it from under the tap and frantically dried it off. It was too late; the iPod had stopped playing, and the screen was dead. The screen seemed a little cloudy from the water. Knowing that most electronics will live if you simply let them dry, I set the iPod aside and went to do something else. Ha ha! That, of course, was a joke; I can't put down broken electronics without toying with them. Instead, I tried to dry it faster. I did this by opening up the iPod. All the websites I had visited told me that I could do this easily and safely using a putty knife. So, I ordered a putty knife. After spending ten whole minutes waiting for the UPS guy to show up, I simply took my pocketknife out and stuck that into the iPod. I heard a loud crack, and ignored it. I continued to force it open until it came apart, after several other odd cracking sounds. When I looked at the screen, I found that I had jammed the knife into the LCD, and crystals were leaking out. "Oh shit," I said. At this point I still wasn't worried; I could use the pod without a proper LCD; I'd just look at the square centimeter or so that wasn't all black and drippy. I would just leave the iPod open and let it dry, and tomorrow it would be all right. Ha ha! Once again, I'm kidding. Realizing that I had an opportunity to play with an iPod while it was open, I decided to power various LEDs off of the battery directly. I closed and opened the iPod a few times, just to make sure that I could. I could, easily, but the second time my knife cut through some wires connected to the battery. I let this slide, because I figured that I could always solder it back together. I put it back together and left it for a few days to dry. For real, this time. Two days later, I soldered the battery back in. That took me several tries, because the iPod's circuitry is much tinier than you'd expect. When I finally finished, I discoved that the iPod didn't work. At all. I taped the battery in placed, checked my solder, and left it for about a week. After a week I opened it up and studied the extent of my damage. To my surprise, there were traces peeling off of the connectors on the clickwheel. Hmm. That was never to function again, but I figured that with Linux, I'd be able to script everything, eliminating a clickwheel. Upon further inspection, I found that I had no screen, either. I sensed that the dollar value of this iPod was dropping ever so slightly. Two months later, I returned to the iPod and tried to reconnect everything. I connected this to my stereo, which was at version 1.2 and had a motherboard. After some quick scripting, I managed to mount it as a HFS+ partition. Wee hee! It mounts! I ran over to my Mac and reinstalled Linux on the iPod, and decided that scripting the music could wait until later. For now, I'd just take it apart a few more times, just for fun. When I did this, I ESD'd the NAND memory, which had a far worse effect than I'd expected. After a 12 hour scan by my stereo, I found that I had exactly 0 blocks of working memory left on the pod. Wondering whether I could return it, I went to Future Shop and gave it to the guy, saying that it didn't work when I opened it. He opened the box and dumped the thing on the desk. "Impact damage isn't covered by warranty," he said. "Oh no," I laughed. "There wasn't any impact. I stuck a knife in it." The FS guy looked at me funny, so I tried to backpaddle. "Uh... actually, I misspoke. I simply put it under a running tap. Um... I mean I overwrote the firmware. I mean..." But as hard as I tried, I couldn't convince the guy that the broken iPod was Future Shop's fault. This wasn't fair to me, because maybe the iPod had been defective, and I had masked that by doing all that stuff to it. Maybe Apple's warranty says that I'm supposed to have done all that crap. I'm pretty sure that FS guy didn't have a copy of any warranty behing his desk. Anyway, I walked home dejected, but figured that somehow, some way, I could make the iPod work again. I counted all the wires connecting the fried NAND memory to the logic board, and they're the same as the ones connected the flash memory in a USB stick I broke. I'm considering attempting a transplant some day, and bring that iPod back... to the future!
How to bypass your school's proxy serverPosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 10, 2006.
Lots of people have been creating proxy sites allowing you to bypass your school's filtering techniques. These proxies work sometimes, but in any school with a decent security system, they won't. Also, they're targeted at preteen girls trying to get onto chatrooms. You don't want to be lumped in with them, do you? The only issue with my method is that it can be slow (although I've found its not too bad), and you don't get any graphics. If you want graphics for some reason, you've found the wrong guy to help you. To use my method, you need a *nix system that you have complete control over. Most other OSes will work, but setting them up is up to you; I only really support Linux. I can almost guarantee that Windows won't, especially if you want security. First things first. Make sure that you have a secure shell daemon. Most every Linux distro on the planet has one, including most diskette distributions and one I tried that fit into 210Kb. Once working, make sure you have some sort of text-based web-browser. I prefer lynx, but elinks and links will both work fine. Without a browser, you can't do much that you couldn't without hacking about. Now, a step-by-step:
  1. Edit /etc/sshd/sshd_config. Change the listening port from 22 to 443. This is important because most schools block port 22, but no one can block 443. This is because 443 is the secure HTTP port, and without it no banking or email programs would work. And then what would your computer teacher do during the day?
  2. If you have Apache, edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf. Change the listening port from 443 to something different. If you need Apache running on that port, you need to find another machine. Sorry.
  3. If necessary, restart Apache with /etc/init.d/httpd restart. In any case, restart SSH with /etc/init.d/sshd restart.
  4. Now that the ports are working on the server, time to set stuff up at school. Download Putty, a free SSH client for Windows that Google will find you in no time. If you can save stuff, then keep it. Otherwise, you can redownload it to a temp directory each day.
  5. Open it up and type everything in. Your host name is the IP address of the server, and the port is 443. On the left, under 'Connection', click 'Proxy'.
  6. For most schools, the proxy type is HTTP. Figure out your school's proxy server address; the easiest way is to go into C:\Windows\regedit.exe (for some reason schools like to disable Start->Run) and search for proxy. In most cases you can leave the proxy as 'proxy', but you need to make sure you've got the right port. My proxy port is 8080.
  7. Return to 'Session' on the left and click connect. Ignore the "identity cannot be confirmed" warning by clicking yes, and wait. If you get a 'login' prompt, you've succeeded.
  8. Log in the way that you would normally onto your computer, and then run 'lynx' or whatever your browser is called. You'll now be able to go to all the sites your school has banned, and since the pipe is encrypted, they can't do jack about it. Have fun!

How to build a stereo - Part ThreePosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 8, 2006.
Finally, we come to the final part of my three-part series on my stereo. In this section I fix the following issues: Basically, I replaced everything. Here's a tutorial from scratch.
Supplies: Now, the tutorial:
  1. Prepare the PSU.
    1. Velcro strap all the cables together into a nice bundle. Make sure that one connector is free for the drive.
    2. Place a foot or two of speaker cable into the motherboard connector, with the copper wire in the green wire's slot and the aluminum immediately to the right.
    3. Take the the drive and strap (or tape) it to the top of the PSU. Plug it in with the PSU connector.
  2. Set up the speakers.
    1. Put cabling into the back of both speakers, about a foot and a half into each.
    2. Alligator clip the aluminum wire from both onto one end of the headphone cable: <=|==|===|||||||
    3. Clip the copper wire from one speaker here: <=|==|===|||||||, and the other here: <=|==|===|||||||
  3. Build your styrofoam chassis however you want. (See the picture for my setup). Drill a hole through it.
  4. Run the free end of the headphone cable through the front, as well as the speaker cable connected to the mobo port. Once done, check to ensure you didn't wreck your connections.
  5. Install the stereo where you want it. For me, that meant lifting the thing into my shelf. If you were lucky, you built it where it belongs, because it isn't made to move well.
  6. Install the power switch. Solder the speaker cable hanging out of the front to your power switch. This should be fairly simple. Press it into the styrofoam and tape it in place.
  7. Plug everything in. Put the 3.5mm headphone cable into the headphone port on the front of your CD drive, and the power cable into the wall. Flick your on/off switch to on, and press play!

How to build a stereo - Part TwoPosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 8, 2006.
DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any personal injury you aquire when copying what I did here. I strongly recommend that you don't try this, and bear in mind that the fact that I do stuff like this is not a reason for you to. Kids, I do stuff like this, and I'm always getting hit by cars and electrocuted and impaled on something or other. Trust me, you don't want to live like that. Now, part two deals entirely with putting a new fan in my power supply. This would normally be a minor issue consisting of the following:
  1. Unplugging the power supply and leaving it overnight to drain (there are huge dangerous capacitors in there).
  2. Opening the power supply and noting how the fan is plugged in.
  3. Removing the fan and disposing of it however you want.
  4. Installing the new fan as the old one was.
  5. Putting the cover back on the power supply, screwing it together, and you're done!
Unfortunately, my power supply was shockingly old (about 10 or 12 years) and my fan was shockingly new (about 10 to 12 days). So, they weren't 100% compatible. I checked to make sure they used the same voltage, which they did (12 volts), and other than that, theoretical compatibility was assumed to be okay. Physical compatibility, however, was not. For the remainder of this tutorial I had a friend over named Nick. All he did was sit and laugh at me, but he was necessary because if I died, someone needed to call an ambulance. The first issue we encountered was that the power supply had funny screws. These were like a torx, but had a nib in the middle, meaning that a regular torx wouldn't work properly. After an hour or so of deliberation, I hit upon a plan. We took the power supply outside, and I put the screwdriver into the screw and hit it with a hammer. HAMMER SAFETY WARNING: Don't hit yourself. I almost broke my hand, and that was one of the reasons Nick was laughing at me. This seemed like a bad idea, but it served to flatten the nib and weaken the screw in place, with only minor denting of the surrounding area. After that, we removed the screws and left them for another day; we had some decent '+' screws laying around that fit. After getting into the power supply, we were glad we were outside. We went in and got a large fan, and blew the eight kilograms of dust away from us. My neighbor wasn't happy about the grey cloud, especially as he's a firefighter and all, but we had opened a power supply! From there we removed the old fan, and noted some interesting characteristics:
  1. If you stuck your finger in it and tried to move the blade, it wouldn't spin.
  2. When you plugged it in, it warmed up.
  3. Therefore, if we had left that fan in there, the power supply would have caught fire and exploded.
Now that we knew that we were doing the right thing, we pressed on, and opened the new fan. It is one of those cool ones with the blue LEDs. As I learned later, blue LEDs aren't cool in the middle of the night when you're trying to sleep and you have a blue light that you can read by lighting up the darkness. Part 3 fixed that, but we aren't there yet. However, due to the age of the power supply, we encountered some problems. The original fan used a two-prong setup, with positive on the right and negative on the left, like so: 
 | |
 | |
 N P

The new fan used a three prong setup, with an extra pin for speed data
 | | |
 | | |
 D N P
This would have been fine, but the 3-prong had a tab preventing me from putting it into a two-prong port. It's almost as if I'm not supposed to be doing this. Stupid hardware manufacturers. It took me 4 hours to figure out this solution, but in the end it was relatively simple. I took another 3-prong socket and switched some wires, taping it onto the original socket. Now I had, coming off of the new fan, this: 
 | | |
 | | |
 D P N
 | \ /
 | / \
 D N P
Seems simple, but taping that together and plugging it in (there wasn't room for my hand, so I had to use needlenose pliers), was a pain. In the end, though, it was worth it. When I get around to it I'll post a picture of my power supply, which is currently being used in a computer. If that doesn't scare you, consider this: the power supply that I beat open with a hammer is currently hosting this blog. Update: Boom! The blog recently moved to a newer, less explody server.
How to build a stereo - Part OnePosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 5, 2006.
This will be a three-part series, due to the length of each stereo version. Version 2 introduced very little, but it took a lot of work, and I nearly died several times. Version 3 came with a lot of new features for asthetics, efficiency, safety, and maintainability. Let's start off with Version One, because I made it first. It is much more difficult to build than the current one, and maintaining it was a real pain. Here is the parts list: Contents: Unfortunately, I can't give you a pictoral tutorial of this, as I didn't have the blog when I first built it and didn't think to take pictures. Here's the finished product: [link broken] Here's the step-by-step tutorial. If you don't understand anything, perhaps you should try version 3, which will be posted eventually.
  1. Plug the drive into the power supply and place it on top. You might want to tape it in place.
  2. Short the power supply's on-off switch. To do this on an ATX power supply (most new ones), connect the green wire on the motherboard plug to its neighbor on the right. For older PSUs, find the 3-wire plug and connect two of those. I don't remember which ones, but it won't hurt the thing if you do it wrong.
  3. Plug in the power supply to make sure that it is working; you should be able to hear the drive spin up. Now, unplug it for safety reasons.
  4. Now we need to make some cabling.
    1. Slice the IDE cable so that you have two wires in whatever length you think you need. I recommend a foot. Make two of those.
    2. Strip the ends of those and put them both into one end of the floppy extension cable, so that all four ports are being used.
    3. Take four small wires and put them into the other end of the floppy extension cable, and twist two together like so: 
        Spkr_1 ------ [--------]------------ Wire 1
  Spkr_1 ------ [ Floppy ]--\/\/\/\__  Combined Wires 2/3
  Spkr_2 ------ [  Cable ]--/\/\/\/
  Spkr_2 ------ [________]------------ Wire 4
      That is, the two speakers end up connected by one wire.
    4. Use the dental elastics to connect the three wires to one end of the 3.5mm headphone jack. You'll note that the jack looks like this: 
        <=|==|===||||||||
      the double equals signs). Connect the combined wire to the last section (the triple equals sign).
  5. Now we can plug this in. Put the untouched end of the 3.5mm headphone jack into the stereo, and the other end of the IDE cable into the speakers.
  6. Test. Plug the power supply in and wait for the CD to spin up. Press play, or forward, or whatever button you have and listen. Play with the volume control. If you don't hear any sound, check your wiring.
  7. Now that it is working, you can make a styrofoam chassis. I drilled a hole in the styrofoam with a screwdriver and a pencil, and ran the headphone cable through that.
  8. Once again, here is my picture, which unbfortunately does not show the wiring. [link still broken].

Opera 9 BetaPosted by Andrew Poelstra on April 30, 2006.
After reading an interesting review on IE7 that basically said "All these features are incredibly awesome, unless you've used something else, in which case they're anticlimatic and incomplete". The odd thing was that this was worded in a way that made it seem as though they were promoting IE. I've seen a lot of reviews like that of late, similar to the Liberal Party of Canada's ads wherein their pictures of their leader made you question just what party was being advertised. Needless to say, they lost that election, just as IE will lose this browser war. The point of this post is that this particular review casually mentioned that Opera 9 had a beta out. Now, I've always loved Opera, but Firefox was always so much easier to use. But the features mentioned were so seductive that I just had to try it. The first thing I noticed was the download site. Download Opera 9 . It correctly detects my OS as Linux, but just what distro seems unclear to it. I switched the box from 'Xandros' to 'Fedora', and found that they already supported Core 5! For the record, Firefox has been working almost perfectly from day 1, but most software doesn't support fc5 yet. However, Opera only supports i386 right now, so when I tried to install it on my 64-bit machine, I had problems with the qt libraries. Instead of fixing those problems, I switched over to my 32-bit Athlon, which has been working far, far better than the 64-bit machine for much longer. (Note to readers: Never purchase a HP media center, even if it has a Athlon 64 in it.) (Mainly because your son will put Fedora on it and brag about it on his blog). Installing Opera was incredibly easy. I downloaded and installed the RPM, ignoring the 'this software is not signed' warning, which you can safely ignore for a few more years, as there is no malware for Linux out yet, aside from the proof-of-concept codes. Once installed, I had a pretty Opera icon under Applications->Internet->Opera. I dragged this to my top panel, and immediately noticed how much prettier it looked than all of my other icons. I clicked on this icon to open the application.
WARNING: My actual review of Opera is about to begin!
Upon opening Opera, I noticed that by default a lot of the Firefox keys had been set up. When I checked on this, I found that the default keyboard mapping was 'Opera Defaults (modified)'. Huh. That was, of course, not the first thing I noticed. Firstly, I had a lot more screen space, and pressing F11 gave me the whole screen, sans icons. I've never had a browser do that before. Also, the pages started loading pretty slowly, although it sped up after a few seconds of use. I disabled Javascript, Cookies, and Java, and attempted to browse the internet. I first went to a message board, where I wanted to keep myself signed in. I right-clicked on the page and clicked 'Edit site preferences' and re-enabled all the stuff I got rid of. I liked this, because a lot of the sites I go to leave cookies I don't want on my machine. Another great new feature is "Opera Widgets", which is a small white button (which you can drag around the top of the screen). When you click on it, it allows you to download widgets for your browser. This seemed a copy of OS X Tiger's dashboard, and it was. But surprisingly, it was just as clean, and a whole lot faster. I've never seen a Microsoft ripoff manage that before. I met some opposition from certain sites for my browser, specifically Blogger. This struck me as odd, considering Google's insistence on promoting alternate browsers. I got a 'Cookies not enabled' error page, even after enabling Cookies on that site. Not only that, but I can see their test cookie in my list, which the site has decided is non-existant. No cookies, my ass. I temporarily switched to Firefox to post this. Scarily enough, the Opera Widgets button is still there, on my Firefox toolbar. Other than that minor issue, which the other features more than made up for, I was really happy with Opera, and I'll keep using it. I had better end this post, though. I have a bash menuing system to finish debugging.
IE7Posted by Andrew Poelstra on April 26, 2006.
Because of traumatizing experiences with the second beta, I refuse to try the third. Also, I don't use Windows ever anymore (the final switch was media center, which we fixed with MythTV a few weeks ago). Here's my review for the second beta: Posted by Andrew P February 15th, 2006 at 1:47
This browser sucks! As I was typing in this comment, the textbox is jumping around (might be a feature of the site, but it's also moving the text I'm typuing, so that I have to close my eyes to avoid screwing hem up. And, the 'end' key's behavior is volatile due to this, and it keeps resetting to the top of the text, so I couldn't see what I'm typing if I tried to. Auggh! I agree with the guy who hates anti-aliasing; I have a great LCD and this still is overbearing. Plus the stupid display bugs, the lack of proper CSS support, and the screwed up UI. Who the hell wants the menus to be hidden by default?? If you care, you can disable the anti-aliasing:
  1. Press 'alt' to get your menus back. They'll be in the wrong place, but the whole thing is so horribly implemented that it won't matter. If you press anything else the menu will vanish, so don't try to keep typing.
  2. Click 'Tools', 'Internet Options' and then click 'Advanced'.
  3. Under 'multimedia' (the perfect noun to describe plain text), there is a tiny, varely visible option called 'Cleartype'
  4. I assume you have to restart IE; I'm not even going to try those steps, lest it erase this post again.
Note: If you bump the keyboard, it will take you back and erase anything you'd typed into forms (yes, I bumped the left arrow while holding alt for the tutorial above, but even so). Also, the pages load slower than Firefox still; they haven't fixed the bug wherein IE wouldn't regognize a proxy if it bit it in the ass. The tabbed browsing implementation is crap; There's a blank tab that actually means 'new tab', the X is only visible on the tab that is active (which means that you have to click twice to kill an unwanted tab), and there's a delay of half a second before it loads a freaking blank tab. None of the button icons make sense except for the RSS one, which they admitted to sharing with Firefox. I got a popup from Google asking me to switch from MSN search; had to run an EXE to install it. So much for security. Finally, the icons on the so-called "streamlined" display look like crap. The back and forward buttons are jagged and aliased, even thought the text isn't (which I want to have defined edges so that I can read it). How this is called a beta, let alone a second beta, is beyond me. Pretty sad, considering that I've said that of all MS's browsers (this one is supposed to be different). I'm STILL waiting for IE6 to come out of beta, which I figured it never would, after 5 years of inactivity. How crap like this ever made it into production code, I'll never know.
I also added this a few days later:
  1. Acid2 compliance has not changed at all. Still all bloody red.
  2. Google gives me popups even after I installed their search engine extension garbage (which was an EXE, of all things).
  3. I mentioned that this is not beta; after ten minutes of playing with it, I can assure you that this is not even worthy to be an Alpha. I've used Firefox releases that were just nightly builds, less than alphas, that worked far, far better than this.

OpenOffice.org MathPosted by Andrew Poelstra on April 24, 2006.
A neat tool included with OpenOffice that few people know about is OO Math. This is a replacement for what I believe MS calls "Equation" in their suite. This program is not in your Applications menu, so there are two ways to get to it:
  1. Open a terminal and type 'oomath'
  2. Download my desktop shortcut[link dead] and rename it to something useful (the original name had spaces, so I had to change it for the web).
Once in, you'll find a really neat interface. You have your formula window, and below that your equation window. You'll also have a small pop-up menu with all the buttons you need. After a few minutes of playing with this, you'll get used to the language used, and be able to directly type your equations: 
"s_3 = (a(1 - r^3)) over (1 - r)" is a simple example.
Really, the program needs no explaination beyond that, so I'll compile a list of gripes, and see if you can help me around some of these problems.
  1. My font freedom is limited; I can't make individual parts of an equation bigger or smaller; when typing double summation, both sigmas are equal size beside each other.
  2. The button interface is poorly organized. I can't find it now (not that I need it), but infinity was under miscellaneous, instead of in a "special number" tab with pi, i, e, and a variety of other constants.
  3. The only decent way to export these is in PDF form, which is cumbersome and difficult to format decently.
Despite all this, I'm really happy with this tool, and it's a great addition to any hobby mathematician's desktop!
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