...stuff I do and things I like...

I bought a MSI Wind netbook a while ago and I really like the size and how small it is. The one thing I really hated was the bad RealTek Wifi card. It often lost the connection to the access point and almost never worked after resuming from suspend (to RAM). All this on Ubuntu 8.04.1. Last weekend I finally got my Mini-PCI-E Atheros Wifi card I bought on eBay for 20 Euros. The card works great, no lost signal, suspend/resume works great. My MSI Wind now really rocks. As soon as I get the 6 cell battery it should rock even more :-)

Ubuntu 8.04.1 works just fine on the MSI Wind just make sure you really have 8.04.1 since 8.04 will not install due to module crash.

Stuff that worked out of the box for me: Audio, Ethernet, WebCam, Bluetooth, SD/MMC card slot.

Wireless LAN was the only thing that didn't work out of the box. After I installed the right driver for the Realtek Unknown 8199i (rev 22) it worked. The driver is auto loaded and the network manager can configure it for WPA-PSK and unencrypted (only modes I tested).

The driver is rtl8187se get it from here the current version seems to be from 07.16.2008, this works for me.

The whole wireless lan issue with the MSI Wind is kind of strange. The initial report said that the Wind will have an Atheros based wireless card. The Media Akoya Mini apparently has a RaLink wireless card. My MSI Wind has a Realtek card. Anyway it works so I don't care.

I finally got my MSI Wind (one month after I ordered it). I bought the black version with a pre installed 2GB upgrade (yep I'm getting older). Right now I'm installing Ubuntu since there is no way I use WinXP (home).

First overall impression is good.

...now it fully supports the Huawai E220.

Finally CradlePoint updated the firmware for their mobile access point PHS300 that bridges your GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA USB device to wireless lan. The PHS300 supported the E220 already but it was not as nice as it could have been. Now it works like a charm. I can have my E220 plugged into the PHS and just need to flick the switch to have Internet access a couple of seconds later. Some other features they added are: support for a SIM pin and display of the GSM signal strength.

After this firmware upgrade the PHS300 is a really good piece of hardware that was totally worth the money.

I just came back from Aldi (Darmstadt) without a new netbook and I even got there before 8am. They only had about 10 pieces of hardware and almost everybody in line before me got a black version. When it was my turn there was only one sliver version left. So I left. I probably just buy a real MSI Wind. Just 3-4 weeks of waiting.

This is so funny, I never had the Aldi computer/laptop buying experience before. I especially enjoyed the upset people behind me in line.

Over the last weekend I finally managed to setup my RaidSonic NAS-4220B. Now it runs OpenWRT ported by this guy. I only added a few kernel options (cryptoloop, md, and raid1) and added the mdadm utility (raid config utility). You probably ask why I use cryptoloop and not dm_crypt. The box has hardware acceleration for AES but this is only implemented for IPSEC and LOOPAES. So now I run LOOPAES on top of RAID1. The performance is not very good but this is due to my tests using scp to copy files to and from the NAS. I only get 1.1MB/s. CPU is maxed out on the NAS while the copy process is running. Since the box will be doing automated backups over a DSL line this is fast enough (faster than the downstream of the DSL line).

Some notes: I have two 500GB disks in the box, when I tryed to create a ext2 file system on the disk I got an out of memory error from mke2fs. This is due to the fact that the NAS-4220 really runs low on memory (10M free). The easiest fix was to hook up a USB disk and use that for swap space just until the file system is created :-)

I'm not completely done yet with the setup lets see what other surprises there are for me.

since Friday I own a CradlePoint PHS300 (personal hotspot). The device basically is an WiFi (802.11 b/g) access point that connects to the Internet using a mobile phone or data card/adapter (just some hardware that has a USB connector and supports PPP). The nice thing about this device is that is has a build-in battery. The battery also powers the connected USB device. I just write this because connecting a USB GSM modem to an access point is not really new (access point like these have been around for quite some time now). The battery just makes it portable and that is what I want. My Nokia N810 is the main reason for buying it, well that and the cheap HSDPA SIM form Fonic.

Today I've hooked it up and got it to work with my Huawei E220 HSDPA USB adapter. Besides some small problems it works really good. The speed also seems good (got around 180K/s down stream). The problem with the E220 and the PHS300 is that the PHS300 doesn't seem to detect the E220 when they are plugged in before switching on the PHS300. So you have to power up the PHS300, wait a bit plug-in the E220 and it is working (also sometimes you have to unplug/re-plug the E220 again to have it detected). I already contacted CradlePoint support to tell them to fix this and I'm pretty sure they will do it since I'm not the only person who uses a E220 with a PHS300. See here. Also CradlePoint seems to publish firmware updates quite often so I think there is a good chance.

The PHS300 has an almost complete feature list: custom AT commands, dial-on-demand/autodial/manual dial selection, port forwarding, DynDns, WEP/WAP/WAP2, 802.11b/g/superG, dnscache, ntp list goes on.

Btw. buying this thing in Europe is a pain! I only found one online shop that had a decent price and where I could pay with PayPal since non of them accepted a NON-US credit card. This NON-US credit card thing is soo stupid anyway. Why do I have a credit card that is supposed to be accepted anywhere? Anyway the shop is GeminiComputers.

All in all this device looks really nice and I'll post some more about it after some weeks of using it. It will go into my laptop/gadget bag and I will carry it around with me most of the day.

Frank setup a Twitter stream for our NAS-4220 hacking activities. We are both posting on it now.

twitter.com/nas4220

earlier today I've done a small benchmark of the 4220's crypto capabilities (the speed at which you can up/down load when using crypto on the 4220). The results are quite ok for such a small and cheap system.

Upload (to the NAS) was between 3.5MB/s and 4.5MB/s

Download was about 4.70MB/s

It's nothing when comparing it with the unencrypted speeds (10MB/s up and 19MB/s down).

today my NAS-4220 (RaidSonic ICY BOX IB-NAS4220-B) arrived. The 4220 is a really small NAS box with a lot of nice features like: size of a shoe box, 2xSATA (internal), 2xUSB-2 (external), GBit Ethernet, TCP Offloading, hardware crypto acceleration and it runs Linux and has an open boot-loader (RedBoot). In short this is a totally hack able piece of hardware.

Today I checked out the default firmware to see what it is capable of. The web interface is really bad but who cares. Some cool stuff. It supports RAID0, RAID1, and SPAN (make one disk out of two). You can create crypto volumes through the web interface and it seems to have a build in bittorrent client. Quite nice.

Since this thing has GBit ethernet I wanted to see how fast it is. I just used FTP to upload and download some files from my ThinkPad. For upload I could only get 10.5MB/s downloading was much faster with about 19MB/s. Since this was I quick test only I didn't try to tune anything. Btw. my setup was: the NAS box was running RAID1 (not crypted) and my laptop has a crypted disk. This looks quite good for a 120Euro NAS (without disks).

Now I'm going to build my own Linux image (kernel + buildroot filesystem). I will do this together with Frank who also just got him self a Nas-4220.

[1] NAS-4220
[2] Some infos on the used chip set and Linux support from Harald Welte
[3] NAS-4220 Infos from GPL-Devices.org
[4] NAS-4220.org community
[5] RaidSonic GPL code download (end of page section Sources)

One cool thing of 24C3 is that people/geeks come from all over the world and bring the latest and greatest gadgets. So if you are a gadget fan like me you have a good time convincing other people letting you play with their latest toy.

I had the chance to play with a Asus Eee PC (the black version). This thing is really sooo light you almost can't believe it is a laptop not a PDA. Also I must say the screen is a little small (the size not the resolution). I didn't had the chance for a long run because there were just too many other people. Nice little thing!

The next device was a Flybook. I know this is not really new, but I never saw one in real before. The thing I remember best is that the track point seems quite usable even being at a strange position. Nice device all together.

The most expensive mobile device I ever saw. The Vertu Constellation mobile phone. According to the owner this is a 6000 Euro (!!!) mobile phone. The phone is kind of heavy and kind of feels like it is made out of pure gold. The owner told me that it is really tough (indestructible) also Vertu will replace it if it breaks somehow. The money you pay is not only for the device but also for services attached to the device. You have a kind of a personal agent 24/7 that can arrange things like Hotels/Flights for you. It doesn't have any cool technical features - so nothing for me.

I talked to many people with a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. I wrote a separate story about this here.

I also took a look at the Chumby.

There was a crowed of OLPC owners. They seem to all have a final device, since they had the logo printed on the cover lid (as far as I remember this was not the case with the developer version).

The iPhone. OMG everybody has one now. Steve says: thank you ;-)

Something I really didn't expect, I found bunnie one of the guys behind Chumby at 24C3 - no surprise he was sitting together with the XBox hackers. He had a bunch of Chumbys with him so I took my chance to take a look.

I found that the Chumby is slightly smaller then I expected (nothing wrong with this). It has a nice look and feel (pictures are ok but nothing is as good as reality). The Chumby has nice leather-like skin which makes nice and squishy. Playing with it at the congress was kind of hard, since the Chumby needs a power adapter because it doesn't have a battery and power outlets are kind of hard to get at the congress. The second obstacle was getting Chumby onto the wireless network which was almost impossible (this years wireless network sucked big time). Interacting with the Chumby touchscreen worked quite nice (I didn't had much time to play with it). It didn't feel slow or anything. One particular funny part is the touchscreen calibration which has a nice different addition, a drag'n'drop test at the end.

All in all it was quite fun (much better then the Nabaztag). Also I must say I wouldn't buy a Chumby but this is not because it is not cool or functional but because I already made my own Chumby-like device (which can also play Chumby content).


[1] Chumby
[2] bunnie's blog
[3] The Nabaztag

One of my colleges just bought a Nabaztag so I had some time to play with it. The Nabaztag is a small WiFi Toy in the shape of a rabbit. It basically consists out of some WiFi chip, a speaker, a microphone, a bunch of color LEDs and some mechanics to move it's ears. The thing doesn't have a real purpose it is just a toy. The Nabaztag claims to be able to read out my emails, RSS feeds, weather information and many other things. The device is configured via a web interface on the Nabaztag.com website where you first register the device. Here you can select the applications you want to run on your device. One can select a date/time for each application so you can get the weather report every hour or so. One of the main features of the Nabaztag is the voice interaction with the device. Press the button on the bunny's head and speak a command. We found this to not work very well - it sucked! The guy who bought the Nabaztag then tried to listen to shoutcast (mp3) streams on his Nabaztag (one of the new features of the second version) - this was disappointing again. The stream was choppy and didn't sound very good (he actually setup a local shoutcast server in order to rule out a bad internet connection but still it did not sound good). In the end he actually sent it back after 2 days of testing - it was just too bad.

The Chumby is another device like the Nabaztag but it is more visual since it has a small display build in. After the bad experience with the Nabaztag I would really like to test the Chumby to see if it is as bad. Actually I don't think it is as bad - but who knows?!

[1] nabaztag.com
[2] wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag
[3] Chumby

Two weeks ago I bought a PX10000 the first available pico-itx board for one of my projects. The thing is really really small 10cm x 7.2cm (smaller then the Nokia N800 as you can see on the picture). The board seems too be 100% Linux compatible (I haven't tried the SATA and PATA controllers yet) once you find that you need the openChrome Experimental Branch to get your X running nicely (VESA driver works but sucks as all ways). The thing really boots from everything you connect to it: hard disk, cdrom, usb-stick, usb-disk, usb-cdrom (I installed ubuntu 7.04 from a usb-cdrom to a usb-disk).

I only had a little trouble with the Wake-on-Lan functionality, since there is no setting in the BIOS and it didn't just work. The trick is to enable wake on PCI card event, after that use ethtool to set the wakeup type and you're done.

The board seems quite fast (I gave it 1GB of memory). The only annoying thing with this board is the fan in the middle of the heat sink. Also the fan is not to noisy I really would like to see a version that is cooled passively.

The bad part is that PX10000 is quite expensive compared to a Mini-ITX board, the PX10000 comes around 230 Euro while you get a Mini-ITX for around 130 Euro.

If you really need something small for a project I think this is a good choice.

A more complete review can be found at: Mini-itx.com

I found Chumby on LinuxDevices early this evening and just couldn't get it out of my head. The Chumby is an alarm clock sized data display device in a funny looking casing. The Chumby basically is a small ARM-based computer equipped with a QVGA display and a two USB ports; the software is Linux. From what I understand from the Chumby website the device is designed to display/run Flash applets (widgets).

The point of this device really seems to have some kind of pimped alarm clock - which I think is quite cool! It is kind of strange to find Chumby right now since I was just planning to build something similar. I want to have something to stick to the wall to just display some text an images. My plan was to use an old Palm and a F*nera access point but maybe I just wait for the Chumby to become available also I kind of hate Flash.

Anyway I kind of like the idea of Chumby, especially the part of being totally hackable.

I recently bought a T-Online S100 for about 45 Euros on eBay. The S100 is the name for T-Online's version of the Zenega VOD (Video One Demand) box. Actually I bought the thing to build a FAT wireless access point but I discovered that some guy had build a real nice video player distribution for it called zenslack (obviously based on slackware). The distribution is made to be run from a harddisk/usb-stick/usb-disk attached to the box but since I already had a Debian based system running it via NFS I wanted to go this way. This way I can just switch the box off with out worrying about filesystem corruption and such.

By the way the NFS server is my MythBox, so I really only use the Zenega as a viewing client in another room.

Setting up this thing is quite easy once you can get over your self and read the Zenega User Forum (I hate forums!). Also you need to get a user account since you need to request a download password for zenslack, which is kind of stupid since it is all free/open source software.

So far I'm pretty happy with the whole thing. The IR remote works, the S-VHS and SCART connectors both work. I was able to play all of my test content (mplayer really really rulez).

today I saw the new MacBookPro my boss (aka. Master Advisor) got and WOW. This thing seems to boot right quick and he was all about how fast Safari started up. Also the tiny camera build into the display seems to be really good, not like these shitty webcams but more like a digital foto camera. The magnetic power cord also looks interesting ... anyway I'm a Linux nut and I hate touchpads so I will stick to my ThinkPad with the awesome trackpoint.

Yesterday I found this thing in a computer hardware store and just had to buy it. If you wonder what this thing is, it is a massage ball. It's for your neck, shoulder or feet. It is quite nice and 10 Euro is cheep enough for a use once gadget. Here is the link to it at USBGEEK. I also connected it to the PMA400 but it turns off every few minutes because the PMA goes into standby because the device only get power from USB and doesn't register with the host controller.

Anyway, lets see how fast it breaks...