Posts

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Pagers as Remote Actuators

I’ve been struggling for the last month or so trying to find an 802.11b
coprocessor similar to the NetMedia SitePlayer
or Lantronix XPort.
Something that is easy to strap onto the side of a little microcontroller like a PIC
or Stamp, or maybe even could work stand-alone for simple tasks.

(Yes, eventually there will be the Lantronix WiPort
and maybe the DPAC Airborne will be made availble
to mere mortals, but until then wireless is sorta out of our reach)

Except that if all you want is to do wireless actuation without feedback,
one can get a free pager with a six-month contract for ~$40, rip it apart, intercept the data
going to the LCD (or hopefully there’s an earlier stage one can get at the real data sent)
and use it to trigger at least 1B diferent things (10-digit numbers).

Initial web searches prove kinda useless. Searching for “pager hacking” gives you lots of
2600-style crap about intercepting pager messages with PC soundcards.

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Adium beats Fire

With respects to multi-protocol IM clients on Mac OSX,
I used to be a big user of Fire,
since it was really the only multi-protocol IM client for the longest
time.

Now, Adium comes along and starts
using libGaim and also has tabs for its chat windows so that no longer are there
many many windows popping up all over the screen.

Out of the box though, Adium is kinda annoying: it has an iChat like word-balloon
layout (which you can partially turn off) and the contact list is kinda anemic.

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Sony Ericsson P900 / T-mobile Redux

So after six weeks T-mobile was finally able to wrest control of my number from the cold dead hands of Cingular.
And thanks to MobileWhack’s P900 pages for
providing the correct settngs to get the P900 on the Net. It is very cool to be able to web surf, IM, and check
email anywhere I can get a cell connection.

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Flash-based display for RRD data

RRDtool is a great gizmo for storing and displaying time-series data.
Normally it creates PNG or GIF graphs to display info,
but often I want to zoom in/out, turn on/off data lines, etc.
This is normally non-trivial. But a Flash-based UI for RRD display would make it easy.

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Canon iR5020 / iR6020 printing on Mac OS X

At work we have this cool Canon copier that is also a printer. It has a duplex widget that allows one to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Of course this is fairly niche enough for Apple to have not supplied drivers explicitly for it, but the ‘generic Postscript’ driver does work well enough to print, just not duplex.

And of course the drivers listed on Canon USA’s page for the copier is just a bunch of Windows files. A websearch for ‘ canon iR5020 ppd turned up a Canon Aussie site that had a nice .sit file with a PPD in it. For future ease, I’ve placed this file here:
CNIR61U1.PPD

To use, just add a new printer, choose ‘IP Printing’ -> ‘LPD/LPR’ as the type, put in the hostname and print queue name, and then for printer model select ‘Other…’ and use the above PPD file.

Now I can print 2-up with duplex and get four pages on a single sheet of paper!