So I have always been fascinated by satellites. So when I wokeup this morning, and was glancing at Slashdot while eating breakfast I was really excited to see an article about Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth.
It took me a bit to figure out how to turn off all the Debris and Spacejunk, and track down my favorite multimedia satellites. All I can say is… bad… fucking… ass…
So my laptop has finally kicked the bucket. Wont power up, wont anything. Because I haven’t been updating my blog, you wouldn’t know that is lacks any internal fans. You also wouldn’t know that the battery wont charge and the power brick has an after market capacitor in it, because it blew up a while back. Oh and did I mention that it like to turn off randomly by itself?
In anycase, I have decided that it’s time for a new one. My choice? The Dell Studio 17″.
They are telling me that it’s going to be 3 weeks before it gets here. A co-worker of mine just ordered a laptop from Dell a month back, and they told him like 3 weeks too but it only took a week to show up on his doorstep, so I am hoping the same happens for me.
I am concerned about driver support in Linux. From what I can tell, the video card looks to be supported by the proprietary ATI(AMD) drivers. The last time I used an ATI card in linux was back before ATI was releasing drivers and the FOSS drivers were not mature.
There isn’t much information on the chipset for the wireless card or sound card. I am guessing the soundcard is supported by the Intel HD Audio driver for Linux. The wireless card will be some sort of Broadcom black box. Hopefully the b43 driver will work.
The internal bluetooth and EV-DO radio are less pressing. I have a USB dongle I can use until I get the internal one working. From what I have read about the EV-DO Radios, they are basically a chuck of programmable ROM and a radio. You have to flash the ROM in Windows for your carrier, and then you connect to it like a dumb modem. Since I don’t even have a plan right now, I’m not concerned about it.
So I was able to get motorola software update, p2kseem and p2kcommander loaded on a windows machine today. Once I got the auxilliary devices to actually show up it was smooth sailing. I have my subsidiary code now and everything that can be unlocked has been. Unfortunately I have inadvertently enabled some sort of stutter dial tone that happens both for outgoing calls AND incomming calls, which is really freaking annoying. The next step is to get a new theme on my phone, and the back LCD image to something other than the Motorola M.
I also picked up a USB Bluetooth Dongle. I spent some time trying to get my phone working to learn that my phone isn’t exporting a DUN service, only Voice and OBEX. Zolan has some expertise in this arena, so hopefully he will be able to assist me with the DUN portion.
The good news is that by way of obexftp ond gnokii I can now access my phone’s filesystem, contact list and calendaring!
Of course, this now means that I will be retiring my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse for a Wireless Bluetooth mouse so I only have to have one dongle sticking out the side of my laptop. Plus the Bluetooth dongle is so much smaller…
So my old cell phone has randomly been “locking up” every since my daughter decided it need to be dunked in a glass of milk 6 months ago.
Well I finally got fed up with it and got myself a Motorola RAZR V3c. I like everything about it so far except that it’s not as easy to hack as I had first though. The tool for linux for P2K phones don’t seam to work with the CDMA RAZR’s, and the tools for Windows don’t seam to like accessing the device through vmware.
Minimally I need to access a native windows machine to upload a theme and seems, and then I can do the rest of what I need over bluetooth from my laptop in linux I think.
