For a while I have been interested in wearable computers, small devices which let you stay connected to the net wherever you go so you can access data and record important stuff on the go. The main sticking point for this is the displays so you can see the data. They either look big, ugly and kludgy or are very expensive. This is not likely to change for a while.

I opted to go for the cheaper solution and got what would normally be considered a kid’s toy off ebay. It is one of these things kids use to spy on folk and suchlike. The toy consists of a tank like remote controlled vehicle with a camera mounted on the front which wirelessly relays video to the user. The video is shown by way of a head mounted display, which is the part I was after. The display accepts composite video signals through a 3 pole 3.5mm jack (the same as found on headphones).

My phone, a Nokia N95 8Gb has video out capability, conveniently in the form of a composite video signal delivered through a standard phono jack. Combining the two is a relativley simple affair, some minimal soldering is required but nothing that will be permanent between the two devices.

My phone was chosen as the main processor due to the wealth of functionality it provides: bluetooth, wifi, 3g internet, installable applications, media playing etc. If I didn’t know better, I would say this was meant to be.

I do have to credit Soylent_Bomb (aka PseudoKroW) for this, his review and notes on the headset are what convinced me to try it out. The fact that I had to get the rest of the toy is a tad annoying but hopefully I will be able to repurpose the tracked vehicle into a robot chassis, depending on how easy it is to subvert to my whims. If not, it will be ebayed.

Weblog computer, geek, hacking, wearable

Ubuntu 8.10 codenamed Intrepid Ibex was released yesterday. DIligently, I launched the update manager to begin the update process. As usual, a ton of stuff to download. Mostly happened without a hitch.

Flash player was the hitch. Took over 2 hours to download 3.8mb. That is pretty bad. Once it was finally installed, all was good. Upgrading a running system is always gonna be interesting. Things change before you. Like Firefox. I launched it and found that it looked shinier than it used to. Some of the panels had a glossy effect to them. Not sure if it is a theme but it looks good. A yellow bar appeared suggesting that I find out about my rights by clicking on the button. That launches a new tab with the url of about:rights which basically says you can modify and redistribute the firefox code but not the icons. Another bar appeared a while after asking me to restart firefox due to some other upgrades which is a nice feature.

Gnome, in my chosen theme, looks pretty shiny as well. Nautilus has tabs! That is awesome. No more multiple windows!

Transmission (bittorrent client) has also had a polish. The web interface is no longer a seperate addon but is built in which could be useful for folk wanting to check up on their downloads from elsewhere.

I do have a criticism of Transmission though. There is no tray icon to minimise to. I have to keep the main window up to download which is not a good thing. Not sure if it is a bug or not. Thats about the only bad thing I have found so far.

Pidgin has also been improved a bit. Has support for the Live Messenger personal message things. Still no webcam support.

One of the new features is a usb stick creator which allows you (as the name says) to create a bootable pendrive with ubuntu on it. Aparrently lets you store documents and whatnot on it, might be useful. Wonder if it will let you use non ubuntu isos.

Overall, the upgrade has been good. Not had a proper poke around yet but nothing major has broken.

Weblog 8.10, geek, intrepid ibex, linux, release, review, Ubuntu

Repost if you agree

“I am in a heterosexual marriage, and neither need nor want it “protected” by bigots who think that so-called gay marriage hurts it somehow.”

Weblog marrige, meme

I believe winter is upon us. I had to scrape car windows this morning to allow my brother and I to get some stuff done. As it is winter, it means the end of British Summer Time and so the clocks went back an hour this morning. This caused some confusion on the part of my brother. For some reason, his phone wasn’t set properly and I had to get him up for uni.

I also had a small amout of confusion. I woke at about 6am this morning and was cursing since I thought it was only 5 yet I wasn’t tired. Turns out my phone automagically changes the time so I really was up at 6. I’m sure my body thought it was 7.

We should abandon this whole idea of daylight saving time. All it does is give us an extra hour of light for a week or so and promotes confusion.

Now, to finish resetting clocks.

Weblog confusion, daylight saving time

Just a quick note to say congratulations to The Doctor and Lyssa who have just got married. Even though I do not know you, I wish you many long years of happiness.

Weblog marrige

Yesterday was the first time I went to the local LUG/university linux society. I was meaning to go for some time but never got round to it. My mate Ed mentioned that a presentation on rainbow tables was the topic for the night so I made a point to attend.

One thing I was surprised at was that the head of the society and the speaker was Finux who is a Hacker Public Radio presenter. This meant that the talk he did for free software day was done at my uni and I missed it! Goddam that is annoying. What the hell was I doing that day?

Anyway, the presentation was done very well. I’m gonna try and get a copy of the slides and upload it here.

Edit: Here you go.

The next presentation (in 2 weeks time) is going to be about the internals of an ISP which should be very interesting. For those who are interested, this is a link to the website. The meet is every 2 weeks in the cinema, 3rd floor of the Abertay student union, Bell Street, Dundee.

Weblog geek, linux, LUG, password cracking, rainbow tables

The latest douchebaggery to come out of parliament in the UK: passports will be needed to buy a mobile phone.

Let me make my feelings perfectly clear on this:

FUCK OFF AND LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE! THERE IS NO NEED FOR THIS AT ALL!

When will the madness end?! Sooner or later we are all gonna be chipped, monitored and catalogued. This just pisses me off. My next phone will be from Ebay. Good luck getting me to register it. It will be pay as you go and only topped up with cash.

I want my privacy dammit. Noone has the right to know what I’m up to on a day to day basis.

I would rather be completely free and take a chance being killed by some idiot trying to scare folk than being safe and watched 24/7.

Weblog big brother, fucking retarded, privacy, surveillence

I have rediscovered a cool thing that can be done with Wordpress involving static pages. I run my site with a static index.php as the front page. It would be a massive pain in the ass to re-theme it every time I changed my Wordpress theme, along with any other pages I make. I remembered something in the documentation about adding a line of code to your php files and being able to access all the functions available in Wordpress and went looking, unsuccessfully.

I then remembered that the index.php file of a Wordpress install contains something like what I was looking for. I copied it (require(’./path/to/wp-blog-header.php’) ) into the front page along with the functions to display the header, sidebar and footer (get_header(), get_sidebar() and get_footer() respectively) and found that it worked.

Full code for this is below (assumes that your wordpress install is in /wordpress and your page is in the root of your site)


<?php require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="container">
<div id="content">
<!--your stuff goes here-->
</div>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
</div>
</body>
</html>


Weblog code, geek, theme, wordpress

If you are like me and want to run mainly in command line while using a laptop, you might have trouble finding out how much charge is left in your laptop battery. GUIs always have some sort of widget that reports battery info but the command line is sorely lacking. It would suck to be typing away then your screen going dead in the middle of something important.

I have been looking for a simple solution for a while and came up with one. The idea is to print the output of the acpi command in your bash prompt. It is a pretty simple thing to do.

[ `acpi` ] is the fragment of text you need to put into the PS1 variable in your .bashrc file. My prompt looks like PS1=’[ `acpi` ]\n${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ‘

Looks complicated but the bulk of it is colour making the prompt look better. My prompt looks as such:

Hope this helps someone.

Weblog acpi, bash, geek, power, prompt

Why must governments be such fascist assholes? The UK government wants to record details of every mobile phone conversation, email and possibly instant message (not mentioned but possible) made in the UK for the prevention of Terrorism™ and for Saving the Children™. Jacqui Smith (a pox on her) has gone out of her way to say that the content of the communications will not be monitored, just the location and identity of the comms.

I hope I’m not the only one thinking “Yeah, right” to that. It would be so easy to flip a switch and monitor everything.

Whats the solution? As a first step, encrypt EVERYTHING! It won’t stop the location monitoring but when they flip that switch (not if), it will be a lot harder for them to snoop on stuff. Grab a cheap pay as you go phone that does nothing except call and text. Only pay for credit with cash. Pull the battery when you are not expecting a call.

To avoid the current level of snoopage proposed, I suggest we follow what SKTFM said and create our own internet, with strong encryption as standard. Look into packet radio, can’t be that hard to do.

Lastly, vote Labour out of government. The other parties seem to be less fascist about our privacy. If that doesn’t work, run like hell.

Weblog facism, government, Jacqui Smith, law, monitoring, privacy