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

I'm looking for a method to do phone number reverse lookups, more specific for mobile phone numbers. I know there are plenty of services for the US but I actually need this for the rest of the world and especially for Europe.

Any hints or tips would be very welcome, thanks!

I just saw a Google Street View car driving through Darmstadt passing me on the Rheinstrasse. Lets see when the pictures show up on Google.

so more fun with Apple MacBooks :-] This time the IR remote. The remote is basically for controlling music or video play back and for doing presentations/slide shows. The fun part is the the IR receiver is on by default and that the MENU button suspends the current desktop and brings up a MENU for choosing music, video or picture play back, thereby interrupting what ever the user is currently doing. So you can take your MacBook remote and go to some place with a lot of MacBooks and annoy people by interrupting what ever they are currently doing. If you don't have a MacBook remote you can just take a programmable remote and record the 6 keys of the MacBook remote and use that. I used my Palm (T|T3) and OmniRemote. So I recorded the signals of the remote and tried, it worked of course.

So tomorrow I will try to find another MacBook to test it if it works there too. I really think there is no authentication or so going on. Hopefully the IR port can be switched off other then with a piece of duct tape *G*

Yes I know this is not really a new thing, still it is funny. Apple people are funny :-)

Update:

Here is the OmniRemote file to emulate the MacBook remote, just send/beam it to your Palm. The Favorite button is mapped to MENU, the Power button is mapped to PLAY, right side up/down is mapped to up-down, left side up/down is mapped to left/right (volume). Have fun! OmniRemoteSeetingsForMacBookRemote.txt

Update2:

It looks like I was wrong. Each remote needs to be paired with the computer(s) before it can control it/tem. The documentation tells you how to do it. What a bummer. Anyway it still should be possible to sniff the IR signal while somebody is using their paired remote. Also I wonder if the pairing is two-way or if only the computer stores a list of allowed remotes (which could possible be brute-forced).

my friend Chris just got his MacBook (the black version) some days ago, and he really likes the MagSafe. The MagSafe is the magnetic power adapter on the new MacBook and MacBookPro (see here). So the thing is that the MagSafe seems to be pretty strong in terms of magnetic force, he put it on a table and when he looked at it again later the MacBook sucked in the USB cable from his external disk. Is it supposed to have this super force? I'm not an expert on magnetism or computer hardware but could the MagSafe damage other hardware that comes to close to it? I guess the MagSafe itself is protected against short circuiting it, since it is wide open - where other power adapters just have a tiny hole for the plug. If it is able to damage other hardware this would be a potential killer. I remember some story where table magnets in wagons of the German railway (Deutsche Bahn) damaged laptops that where put on them.

Anyway I find the whole story very funny and thats why I post it here :-)

Check this out: I will purchase the $100 laptop at $300 but only if 100,000 other will too. I think this is a good idea, you support the good cause and get a cool toy :-)

ARD and ZDF (Germany's national/public TV stations) support open IP-TV standards and refuse to support Telekom's Microsoft based IP-TV project. Spiegel reports. This is really good for all kinds of reasons such as the likelihood that non-Microsoft users will be able to use IP-TV services. Anyway I'm kind of happy that the German government or affiliated organizations get some stuff right :-)

update: heise has the same story

since now mulliner.org is reachable via IPv6. Many thanks to Patrick for compiling Apache2 for me! Everything should work just fine, if not just contact me.

You will notice the difference on the main page and ? Search and leave a comment :-)

due to high demand and a lot of emails I wrote this small FAQ on Bluetooth Spam (BlueSpam)

Hopefully I get less mail now about this kind of stuff :-)

I just read heise for breakfast and saw that Google Talk is just Jabber. This is so great! Finally Jabber is used by a big player and should therefore get more widespread soon. It's really time to get rid of stuff like ICQ,MSN,YAHOO chat and move to a open protocol. Nothing is more painful then having something like 5 IM accounts so you can talk to everybody.

Anyway I just setup my Google Talk aka. GMail account in GAIM. Google actually has some documentation on their site on how to use other clients then their own client to use their service *WOHU* The only bad thing now is that Google Talk doesn't accept server-to-server connections right now, this prevents someone with a jabber.org account to talk to someone with a gmail account. When the remove this feature Google Talk will really help Jabber.

since I am updating all the services on our server to handle IPv6 I also wanted to see how much IPv6 is used. Therefore I installed a new DNS stats tool called tinystats, which is a simple but nice tool for tinydns stats. Unfortunately it doesn't support IPv6 (the log format generated by tinydns with Fefe's IPv6 patch). Fixing it took a few hours (with testing). The patch is available for download. Also Luca Morettoni (the author of tinystats) will integrate it into tinystats.

so today I setup IPv6 for my laptop. I basically use OpenVPN to play IPv6 tunnel broker on my server. The configuration sucked a little bit because IPv6 tunneling is not supported by OpenVPNs server mode so now I have to run one OpenVPN session for each IPv6 client on my server. Anyway it works and I'm satisfied. Now I need to check if all my favorite network applications support IPv6.

A good howto on OpenVPN as IPv6 tunnel broker can be found here and some nice IPv6 tools (webtools) can be found here

By the way the ip route tools set rocks!

I have played with IPv6 in the past and recently at WhatTheHack! so that I now have decided to get IPv6 on our server running. 1und1 (where our server is hosted) offers IPv6 tunnels for free, you just need to write them a nice email. Also the responds was very fast (1 day). So I could setup everything in one day. Since we already have IPv6 in the Kernel I just needed to patch a few applications (ucspi-tcp and tinydns) and add the IPv6 addresses to our nameservers. I did a few quick tests using ping6 and dig aaaa and everything seems to work fine. The only thing we need to do is patch Apache or upgrade to Apache 2 to serve our web pages to all the IPv6 users.

Now I need to find a decent IPv6 tunnel provider with support for dynamic IPs so I can have IPv6 on my laptop.

just apply the two patches and ignore the warnings when compiling. I also had to disable (compile as module) DRM (direct rendering manager) to get it working. Now it just forks fine on my IBM Thinkpad T42p (FireGL T2).

These are NOT written by me, I don't take any credits! I found them on the web!

fglrx-2.6-agpgart.patch
fglrx-2.6.12-inter_module_get.patch

there is many information available about running Linux on the T42p here, but I want to share some information I didn't find right away... first here is my kernel config.

All the hardware is very well supported just install the distribution of your choice and add things like:

the fglrx driver for the FireGL T2
if you run >= 2.6.10 you need to apply this patch to build_mod/agpgart_be.c in order to get it compiled

if you want to switch between X and console you need to comment out the Load glx in your X config file

the Madwifi driver for the Atheros wireless chipset

the Synaptics (touchpad) driver for XFree/XOrg
This will give you nice features like: switching off the touchpad clicking/tapping or what I like most a scrollwheel. The scrollwheel is simulated by disabling the normal mouse movements for about 1cm (0.4") on the right side of the touchpad (full configurable!). Up/Down movements in this region are interpreted as scrollwheel movements.

This is a must have!

get the latest version of the IBM ACPI driver
this will get you some nice features, also make sure to load the module with experimental=1 to get all features

powernowd for frequency scaling
also make sure to set the scaling steps to 200MHz instead of 100 which is the default, because the scaling can only be done in 200MHz steps and (for me) it seems to behave better when set to 200. I also changed the lower threshold to 30% instead of 20.

and last but not least install tpb to get all of your thinkpad buttons to work and a nice OSD (on screen display) for brightness, volume, etc...
I always bind the Thinkpad button (Access IBM) to spawn a xTerm :)

things to bee done are: ACPI suspend and maybe Laptop-mode