Every once in a while you come across a busted piece of kit that you know you make useful again. This week, it was an ACN Video Phone. For the unknowing, ACN sells ip phone/video phone service bundled to their video phone hardware. On the upside, the resale value is very low. On the downside, this means it’s worthless without the monthly fees.… Or IS IT??
The short story: The flash worked and I’ve got everything working that worked before. The long story?
After a power out blanked my wallclock’s memory, I was not eager to go searching through ten year old websites looking for a new terminal emulator. Luckily I found a ten year old NES emulator that loads fine! Behold wallclock 2.0, NES edition! Also be sure to peep the ancient medical tablet that is pulling duty as my new serial terminal. Fun!
10 year old HP Jornada Windows CE 3.0 device – 15$ Serial extension cable – 1$ Shell script to display network and system statistics – 0$ Using Linux – Priceless.
A couple of months ago, Mark and I were playing some wormux on the PC. I had all my characters and teams set up, and all my macros just the way I liked them. The next day my computer crashed and lost everything. To prevent this from happening again, we sat down and wrote this python program, “Save Game Saver”. Basically you set up a profile for a game (location of save game), then it allows you to upload those saves to gmail. Each upload is versioned in gmail, so you can store and retrieve multiple saves you uploaded on any day for any game. Considering Steam and Xbox are both moving towards this internally, this would be kind of a stepping stone till game developers get off their asses and figure it out. Mark and I both found it really useful though, so go ahead and download it or alter the source. As usual, it’s GPLv2.0.
As it turns out, with a little bit of effort you can put together a cheap (50$), handheld, wireless, graphical wikipedia browser ala the HitchHiker’s Guide.
It turns out that with a bit of source code modification, you can get dosbox running quite well on your zipit z2!! This is HUGE for me, as I’m currently reliving my youth with a Pools of Radiance campaign on...
So I’ve got a new pet project, the zipit z2. If you don’t know this 50$ handheld is actually a moderately powerful computer. 32 megs of ram, a 2g sd card, and a 300mhz arm processor means I can do quite a bit of interesting stuff (we’ve certainly worked with less!). After doing the prerequisite install of Angstrom linux, I decided to see what it would take to run tor and privoxy on it.
Ok, So having lost 30lbs since I wrote the python calorie counter, I’m a big proponent of counting calories. It WORKS. Not only that it’s easy, and it appeals to the chewy mathematics center of my brain. All is well...
Ok so here’s a hilarious photo from Halloween 2008. If you like it as much as I did, feel free to buy a mug at my cafepress store. I make no profit from anything sold, just the thought of that photo being out there is hilarity itself. King Me!
