I'm Sensing Something

I’ve been interested in having small weather station for my house - so I know exactly what the weather at my house would be. At first, the big turnoff was the cost of the pre-packaged solutions, which are an uneconomical “all-or-nothing” approach. After digging into it a bit more, I found something cool - I found 1-Wire weather stations. Read More...

Asterisk & VoIP

I’ve recently moved to a new home; one of the consequences is the shift of utilities such as power, gas, water, and the topic of this post: phone. Being a Linux using geek, I’ve long been aware of Asterisk, but never really looked into it until lately. What I found was fun, useful, and economical. Read More...

Linux Virtualization

I’ve been using virtualization on Linux for the better part of a decade now. I’ve tried about everything available too - VMware, Xen, KVM, UML, VirtuaBox, and more. I’ve got some preferences, and I’ve learned that a lot of the decision process depends on how you’re going to be using it. Read More...

Openswan vs strongSwan

From the beginning of my VPN project, I knew about strongSwan... but I stuck to Openswan because that’s what is covered in the Openswan book I bought and read.

After perusing the strongSwan website for a few minutes, one thing became apparent: strongSwan is documented much better. After some research, I’ve switched from openSwan to strongSwan. Read More...

Success in the land of the VPN

I can finally report success with my recent obsession with getting a functional VPN for my home network. Actually, I can report two... Read More...

More VPN

I haven’t made any progress with an IPsec L2TP VPN - mainly because I’ve discovered that my ‘secondary’ internet connection (ie. the office) blocks IPsec. This makes it hard to test and verify anything. I’ll give it a go Tomorrow when I go and see my brother. Read More...

VPN Madness

The past few days (Labor Day Weekend), I’ve been learning about VPN’s - specifically, about IPsec VPNs using Openswan. A couple of years back, I bought a book by the Openswan developers about how to install, configure, setup, and use modern VPNs. Read More...

ntop

I’ve been playing with ntop, a rather neat way to monitor network traffic. I’ve got it connected to my personal machine at home, and it’s able to monitor all network traffic (of any kind - TCP/IP, raw ethernet, whatever). It’s slick and powerful. Read More...

MythTV Follow-Up

After having tweaked my MythTV setup some, I can say it’s starting to actually work. I found another HDMI cable, and a joiner that let me join two fairly long HDMI cables into one cable long enough for the run. I then found I had to replace my nVIDIA GeForce 6200 with a newer card, preferably one that supported nVIDIA’s VDPAU extensions for X11 (VDPAU is a GPU/video decoder library). So with a cheap $40 GeForce GT 220, I can now play full 1080i HD video, with 5.1 surround sound. Read More...

Backups & Anniversaries

Well, Angela & I have now been married for one full year. We’re celebrating our anniversary first with a family reunion (not really a celebration for us, but hey, free food & company), and then we’re going to Wendover for the weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing the Bonneville Salt Flats, if nothing else. I certainly could use the relaxation.

Life has been pretty good for me; work is looking promising, with a feeling that we’re making a difference.

I’ve had a couple of my R/C Helicopters out already (just back yard hovering for the moment); I still have to service my Rappy & get it ready to fly. That machine hasn’t flown in years now...

And I’ve discovered a really awesome tool for system backups: CrashPlan. (Click for details on CrashPlan) Read More...

MythTV

A short tale of my experience with MythTV - probably the most popular Linux DVR software package. Read More...

GRUB Woes

It's all fun and games until the computer won't boot. Read More...

The plans of mice & men

RAID Array failure sucks. Read More...