Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Pimpin’ the Mini – one last time.

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

The factory installed 80 GB Seagate (ST98823AS) was increasingly feeling cramped under the weight of ever growing iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

Adding insult to injury the 5400 RPM speed of the rickety old clunker was a painful bottleneck I could no longer endure. Suddenly the unrestful gleam of the legendary Mac Mini opening putty knife caught my eye. It was time.

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Hacking Prowl and Irssi

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

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Running Motorola CNUT 3 on Mac OS X

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Almost a week short of two years ago I ported Motorola’s CNUT tool to OS X. I originally did so to satisfy my personal use but also decided to share the package for others who fall into the tiny niche of being responsible for the administration of Canopy networks and wanting to use OS X to do so.

As my need lessened for such a package due to a change in positions and responsibilities, the package was neglected shortly after. Although the original package still works, Canopy firmware 9.0 and later require the use of CNUT 3.x.

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Banishing Inferno to the Basement

Monday, June 1st, 2009

I’m now back to my regular ol’ routine, just finished a week long “staycation.” So other than spend quality time with the family, what does a system administrator who doesn’t have to go to work for a week do with his time? Pull some CAT5 and clean up my home network, of course!

Inferno, my FreeBSD home gateway, file, web and everything else server has been irritating me with its typical PC fan whirring for too long. It was high time to uproot the beast from its cozy spot on my office floor, where it sat for nearly eight years and drag it to the basement and finally bring tranquility to my office.

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As if I needed one more reason to hate Rogers!

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

As if their outrageous system access fees and astronomical $8 caller ID charges wasn’t enough. Rogers was clever enough to come up with yet another reason to hate them.

I originally bought an iPhone on July 12, 2008 with a three year term. At the time the plan was $60 (plus the multitude of miscellaneous rip-off charges) for a lousy 150 daytime (where daytime in Rogers’ world ends at 9 PM, not 6 PM) minutes and a humble 400 MB of data transfer. I accepted these lousy terms, cause well, I’m Canadian. Our cellphone industry is a joke and I wanted an iPhone. What else can I say?

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