Radio Free Meredith

Good hacking night last night. D came over so that we could hack on owen, my little NSLU2 box that's been on the shelf for, oh, a few years. After a few false starts (involving things like having to remember passwords I haven't used since 2005), we threw together a quick LAN off my laptop, got owen on that network, and successfully logged in. We then figured out that trying to configure a bridge between eth0 and ra0 was more trouble than it was worth, so no updating owen straight from the package server for now. I'll need to get the switch set up before I can actually drop owen on the main network, and I don't have the furniture for that right now, but owen clearly still works like a charm and now speaks DHCP, so overall I'll call that a win.

Our eventual goal is to set up pokylinux, as a "just to see if we can, since there's not a pokylinux build for this particular hardware yet" project, which will probably involve doing some compilation on the box itself. That's going to be slightly hilarious; I haven't done a multi-day toolchain build since, oh, 2001 or thereabouts. Good times.

Laterish today I'm going to pop round to the electronics store that also sells RC cars, planes and helicopters to see what my battery options are; I assume it's easier these days to supply 5V/500mA off something rechargeable than it was four years ago. (I need to be gainfully employed before I can actually buy one, as I expect sticker shock, but this is how budgets are made.)

I also dug up the little USB-to-Roomba-serial-interface circuit I was assembling some time back, and found the ostensibly Linux-compatible Bluetooth and 802.11g dongles that have been waiting ever so patiently. Yep, that's right -- after far too long on the shelf, the Evil Robot Vacuum Cleaner Army project is rolling once more.

Man, you take apart a monitor at a party and everyone wants to know what the hell you're doing.

I mean, L. and I had a perfectly good reason for it: it was a hacker party, we were working on hacking together a high-voltage power supply from a CFL and the flyback transformer from an elderly CRT, the setting and the task at hand seemed to go well together. Within a few minutes of arriving, we met a guy who had taken apart many, many CRTs before, and who was quite happy to hang back and give helpful tips. That was great, and I was equally happy to give the twenty or so people who wandered by in the next hour and a half a quick explanation of what we were up to. ("We're making a Jacob's Ladder, so we need a flyback transformer. Later we're going to use the power supply for another project, but a Jacob's Ladder seemed like a great way to test it.")

Where it got annoying, though was the couple or five people who basically demanded we justify our right to plunge our hands into the guts of a sacrificial monitor. "Isn't that going to release dangerous gases?" No, that's only if we break the tube, and we're not going to do that. "Those transformers can hold a lot of charge even after the monitor's off." Yes, and not only has this monitor not been turned on in two years, L. held a screwdriver across the leads to discharge any remaining charge. "But what do you need that strong of a power supply for?" A Jacob's Ladder sounded like fun, dammit.

The absolute best exchange, though, went something like this:

WELL-MEANING BUT ANNOYING PERSON: Does anyone here actually study electrical engineering?
maradydd, grinning: Not me!
L, grinning even larger: Why yes, in fact I do.

The irony, of course, is that L. is getting his PhD in electrical engineering because that's where they decided to put the cryptographers. Me? I build radios and do the odd bit of electrical work on cars.

I'm half tempted, if I do a hardware project at one of these things again, to print out a sign that reads YES, I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING, PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT ME.