David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ve said before how to eliminate wifi dead spots, but perhaps I didn’t give it the focus it deserves. I think almost everyone has wifi dead spots in their house that they would like to eliminate. It turns out you can do it, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune either.
The idea is to supplement your existing router with one or two additional access points. Read more
A rather hastily written and sloppily edited piece showed up on Slashdot yesterday morning that caught my attention, because it was about the Amiga 2000. The Amiga 2000 is a dear machine to me; in 1991, our family upgraded to one from a Commodore 128. I still have both machines, and there isn’t much that I know today that I didn’t first experience on one of those two machines.
Although I think the piece was little more than a used computer store’s effort to unload some hard-to-move inventory, I do agree with the premise. For a machine that had a tremendous impact on the world as we know it today, the A2000 is criminally unknown. Read more
If you run the Raspberry Pi as a small server, you may want to throttle the CPU when it’s not under load to save energy. Throttling the Raspberry Pi is easy and only requires changing a few settings in /boot/config.txt.
Here’s what I did with mine.
I’m fed up with ISP duopolies. Why? Because Netflix paid Verizon the ransom it demanded, and yet Verizon hasn’t lived up to its side of the deal. To the contrary, evidence suggests Verizon is actively slowing down Netflix, because when Colin Nederkoorn encrypts his Netflix connection so Verizon can’t see what it is, it speeds up.
News flash: Encrypting data via VPN adds overhead, so it ought to slow the traffic down.
I’m starting to doubt whether net neutrality is enough to solve the problem. A better solution is to break these companies up, let them serve whoever they want, and let municipalities compete with them if they want.
Not that that is ever going to happen.
Twenty years ago, I was a promising young–and very unseasoned–columnist for a student newspaper at the University of Missouri–home of the Tigers–called The Maneater. Get it? Tiger? Maneater? Actually, healthy tigers never resort to eating humans, but legend has it by the time the founder learned that, the newspaper was already publishing and it was too late to change the name.
We were a ragtag bunch putting together a newspaper on a shoestring. Our computer network was quirkier than our staff, which took a great deal of doing–trust me, I’m used to being the weirdest guy in the room, and there I didn’t even stand out–but the piece of equipment that probably gives the production crew the most nightmares to this day was an old Apple Laserwriter–don’t ask me the specific model–named Mt. Fuji. Read more
I went looking for a reliable, modern controller to use on my Retropie setup. I eventually settled on a Logitech F310, betting the Logitech F310 on Retropie would make a nice combination based on my experience with other Logitech peripherals in regards to their quality and value for the money.
The reviews I found suggested the F310 continued in this tradition, and I found enough people who said they got it working with Linux to feel confident I could get it working on the Raspberry Pi. And sure enough, I did.
I paid $18 for mine, and my first impressions of the quality were good. It’s precise, and button pushes register with a slight click. It’s no worse than a Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo controller, and if anything, I think I liked it a little better. A pair of Logitech F310s costs more than the Raspberry Pi board, but playing games is a lot more enjoyable when the controller does what you want it to do all the time, not just most of the time.
The F310 wasn’t a drop-in replacement for the controller I’d been using, though. I had to configure it for Retroarch, the software that provides most of Retropie’s console emulation.
No wonder the Raspberry Pi Model B was on sale. The day after I bought mine, the Model B+ hit the streets, at the same price of $35. Same CPU, same memory, but the board layout is much nicer–cables come out of three sides now instead of all four, which makes placement much less awkward–and it now comes with four USB ports instead of just two, so you can connect a keyboard and mouse and still have ports available for other things without having to plug in a clunky USB hub.
It’s an incremental improvement, but there’s definitely the potential to build stuff with it that looks more refined than the predecessor. I’m sure I’ll use one on my next Raspberry Pi project, and there will be another one. If not 12.
I bought a Raspberry Pi over the weekend intending to turn it into a retro gaming system. I’d rather not have a mess of systems and cartridges out for my kids to tear up and to constantly have to switch around at their whims; a deck-of-cards-sized console with everything loaded on a single SD card seems much more appealing.
I followed Lifehacker’s writeup, which mostly worked. My biggest problem was my controllers. NES and SNES games would freeze seemingly at random, which I later isolated to trying to move to the left. It turned out my Playstation-USB adapter didn’t get along with the Pi at all, and was registering the select and start buttons when I tried to move certain directions, pausing the game.
When I switched to a Retrolink SNES-style pad, the random pausing went away. The precision reminded me of the really cheap aftermarket controllers of yore for the NES and SNES. I concluded my controller, which I bought used, was worn out. Ultimately I ended up switching to a Logitech controller, which worked well. Read more
I heard this week that the first vulnerability in smart light bulbs has been discovered–they can leak your wifi password.
I suppose I can take comfort in the cost of the bulbs–they cost $129, which means not a lot of people will have them, in a world where people complain about paying $5 for an LED bulb. Then again, for $129, I think it’s reasonable to expect a little bit of security. This isn’t a $15 router with a $2 profit margin. To its credit, the manufacturer immediately issued a patch to fix the vulnerability.
The problem with devices like these with security vulnerabilities is that they will be around a very long time. Read more
Yesterday I wrote about finding old computers. Here’s how I determine how old a computer is.
There’s a registry key called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\InstallDate that stores the system build time in Unix format (the number of seconds since 1 January 1970) and hexadecimal. With a few mad skilz you can make that data human-readable.