406 Not Acceptable

Merry Christmas!

I am really starting to love the N900!

I have been playing outside of the maemo repositories and decided to give everyones favourite ’security’ program Aircrack (aircrack-ng) a go. After setting up a debian repository from an official mirror installation was easy via the command line, a simple sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng.

Once installed, you cannot use the program straight away. This is because your wireless card will already be in use, or have been set up for ‘Managed mode’ where the operating system deals with setting up wireless networks. To get out of this, and into Monitor mode, you will need root access and go through the following commands:

root

ifconfig wlan0 down

iwconfig wlan0 mode Monitor

ifconfig wlan0 up

If you wish to use a different mac (useful when doing a fake auth,) go through the same process but instead of setting monitor mode use macchanger (e.g. macchanger mac=11:22:33:44:55:66). You can now use monitor mode and aircrack in all it’s glory! See the following for an injection test:

I crashed out early, due to my battery being on its last legs!

This is the result of a dump, the command used here was airodump-ng wlan0 -c 6

As you can see the N900 captured my WPA handshake, so I could crack my own WPA network; but that would be silly!

Airodump running on the N900: hope you like my faked mac address!

So aircrack looks like it can simply be moved to Maemo-extras (devel or testing.) It just needs more testing to check if inject is really working. My N900 had been up for 48 hours at this point, so didn’t wish to comply with testing

The N900 uses gstreamer, a media system used by many Linux distros and it does support Flac; however, the built in media player is unable to read the Flac/Vorbis tags because it can only read IDV3 tags. This results in all your Flac media being dumped in one folder marked ‘other’. This makes the N900’s media player useless for lossless audio. This can be worked around, but if you plan on putting a lot of music on to the N900, you may want to wait for the tag to be supported.

Basically, what you need to do is get IDV3 (ideally IDV3V2) tags on your Flac media. Now, many tools will not let you do this, as the Flac format is designed to use Vorbis tags; but, the format does also support IDV3 tags! I found that using DBpoweramp, you can set the encoder to use IDV3 tags when dealing with Flac files. So all you have to do is re-encode your Flac media collection, to Flac (yes, that is weird!) and the tags should be automatically changed the IDV3 by DBpoweramp. It should only take 2 minites to ‘encode’ an album, so it won’t take ages to encode enough Flac files to fill the N900!

You can use a tool such as Mp3tag, which states the type of tags used by the file to confirm the changes.

The files should now automatically be indexed by the media player in the N900. This will also work for Canola.

After waiting for what seemed like an eternaty, I recieved by Nokia N900 in the post on tuesday. I was using a G1 beforehand, and the N900 does a good job of killing my interest in Android!

First, let me start with something that has been worrying many people eyeing the N900: the size. From previews, the size and weight were frowned apon. To be honest, neither is an issue. The N900 is pretty much the same size as the G1. In fact I use my G1’s carry case for my N900! Whilst a collegue noticed the weight of the device when looking at it, I don’t really notice any difference in comarison to my G1.

Next up is the touchscreen, it’s resistive, but a very good one. I would say the N900 sets the benchmark for all other resistive screens to be measured against. Coming from a G1 I did notice you either have to push a little more or tilt your finger to use the tip or the edge — rather than the pad. Once you have the technique down it becomes second nature and is just as good as a capactive screen. To be honest, i used the same technique when trying to select small links on my G1. The resistive screen demonstrates superior prescision and is far better at dealing with small links/menus. Another, although rarely used in my case, benefit is the stylus; which helps when using debian applications.

I don’t think the keyboard is an improvement on the G1’s. The keys feel too close and the lack of rows does slow me down; although, the predictive text implementation is outstanding.

Maemo itself, feels much more like a real linux distro than android ever did. That’s probably because it is one! Already real linux applications are being ported, many of which will never see light on Android unless there are substantial changes to the platform.

This post is already getting wordy! I’ll post some more impressions later.

Google has released a beta of their new search engine algorithm: Caffeine. Many analysts see this new release as a direct reaction to the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, which will soon be used by Yahoo.

The new algorithm looks to give Google a much-needed jolt by delivering more results, and better results. The engine seems better at removing, or not indexing, spam and hence shows more good Web sites. So there should be less instances where the top results for what you want are simply parked domains or the now ubiquitous price comparison site (how I hate those sites!)

A simple search for Toshiba 37″ in the current Google engine brings two comparison sites in the top 10, one in the number 1 position; however, on the new Caffeine engine no comparison sites appear in the top 10. For me that is progress. Often I will search for a product, to look for information on it before buying the item. The current engine is cluttered with these comparison sites, many of which are useless in the first place (often the cheapest seller has a fake price…) So I am happy this this change.

Other changes are much more subtle, typical searches keep the same site/page in the top rank and just shuffle the rest of the top 10 around. So whilst no-ones SEO looks like it is going to be shafted, the changes seem to be less dramatic than all the hype would suggest.

I have been waiting eagerly for the past  year for a Ion powered netbook to replace my 12″ Advent radiator; however, no-one seems interested in releasing a 10-12 inch netbook (whether 12 inch counts as a netbook is another topic for another day.) I have had a look at all the other smaller machines on the market, that have a dedicated graphics card such as the Dell M1330 toa even the MacBook. In the case of the MacBook I would have to sneak a dual boot Windows/Linux it and wipe all memory it had of OS X! The problem with these machines is the same one that plagues my Advent — they get too hot under heavy use.

The heat levels are mostly down to the Core 2 processor used by most of these portable laptops, so the only way I can avoid one of those is to head down the netbook path; however, every single one of these machines uses the same Intel graphics that’s in my Advent. Sure, you can install Compiz on them with ease, but you can’t use them for a quick gaming session. The only game I really play much is Trackmania, which on the lowest settings almost runs on an Intel machine; however, any onboard by ATi or nVidia would easily cope with the game. I thought that the Ion netbook would solve my problem…

During the back end of 2008 Nvidia announced the Ion platform, which at the time looked like it would shake up the netbook market. Whilst it has managed to find its way in to nettops, not a single netbook has been released in Europe or the US which uses the platform. A few months back Lenovo announced the S12, the first ion powered netbook; however, they decided Europe did not need the Ion in their version. Still there are no signs of the Ion variant coming out in America. Next came OCZ, with an Ion powered Neutrino, the DIY netbook. Announced at Computex this June, but no sign has been seen of the thing since.

There are a few items in Asia that are interesting, such as a dual Atom powered machine with the Ion chip, but importing can cost a lot once you get stung by the duty fees. Even better you will find yourself with no support!

So just when will the Ion based netbooks start coming out over here! No-one seems to be able to get their act together and just release one, just paper release after paper release!

Today I realised how strong a hold caffeine has on me. I have gone cold turkey on the drug before, but I’ve never felt as bad as I have today.

After 10 am this morning the dreaded caffeine headache hit me, the aspirin could not hold it back! I felt horrible all day, I just needed a quick coffee… but I knew that would be giving up early.

By 2 pm I started to feel like I needed to go to sleep. That just shows how much caffeine has been propping me up these last few weeks!

The plight continues aided by a ton of caffeine free diet coke, hehe.

I mentioned previously that the site would be moving to a new host, Linode. Well I can now confirm that everything has worked out fine and for all the hard work I’ve treated this place to a new lick of paint. I hope you like the new look! The site loads faster for me, so I hope that’s the case for everyone (my 3 avid readers.)

I have copied across all the articles from Tech-Rant, as I plan on deleting the site. I know Google penalizes duplicate content, but the old site should disappear in a few months. I have FINALLY found a download manger for Wordpress, so the old downloads database can be moved here too. I guess the downloads will work a lot better now they are supported by 25Mbit of bandwidth, instead of whatever could be salvaged from the line at Dreamhost. I’ve kept all my domain names with Dreamhost, they never caused me any problems so I felt like keeping some business with them.

The SpeedForever Trackmania server is also being hosted here; although, that ran fine on my home connection.

Hopefully I will try to post more often, even if I can just schedule some dull posts here and there.

With some regret I have left my old host Dreamhost. So I guess I better do a mini-review, which explains why I have left them.

I started using Dreamhost in the middle of 2007 and started by Postnuke powered, but now dead, site Tech-Rant. This was back before they launched the single price plan system that they currently use. They had a mixed reputation; however, their hosting experience, user forum, and rather cheery blog brought me round to using them. In my opinion, a host without a forum for their customers is a host to avoid; although, I am sure there are some good ones out there!

I had no problems setting up Postnuke and the webpanel provided by Dreamhost was rather handy with simple administration tasks. I tried using their automatic install and updating Wordpress and Mediawiki installs on other domains. The automatic install feature is good, but restricts users with plugins, so I never stuck to it. I did experience moderate downtime, but overall my sites have been up for around 98 to 99 percent of the time.

For a while I have had one Postnuke site, two Wordpress blogs, and a Mediawiki wiki hosted on the plan across various domains. The sites load fast enough for me and Dreamhost have never complained about about the server load under reasonable use. The one time they did was due to a bug on a Postnuke comment system, which led to the games on Tech-Rant being spammed over nine thousand times each. Hence you can imagine the SQL query for each load of those pages! Still they were reasonable about it and gave me ample time to fix the problem.

I did consider moving to Dreamhost’s Private Server plan; however, I find it rather expensive for what you get. For a new user it costs $25 a month for a private non-database server, with the databases being placed on a shared server. This server only has 150 mhz and 150 MB of memory and based off these specifications I would estimate that the pipe will be shared across somewhere between 50 and 100 users (so 20Mbit to 10Mbit each.) Now a simple Ubuntu Server LAMP install with Apache2, PHP, and MySQL will use around half of this when idle. Add a blog, forum, or your favourite content management system and you can see that the server will be nearing its limitations. Whilst Dreamhost have offered long time customers a discount ($10 off for life in my case,) this still is expensive for a private server; although, it is a semi-managed solution. I did kindly send support a ticket stating that I would be leaving and from their response the cost seems to be an issue for a number of users.

In comparison my nice new host Linode offers me 360MB of memory and the system will only be shared over 40 users (so 25Mbit bandwidth.) Now this is only costing $20 a month, for a superior service; on a host with a better reputation than Dreamhost. So it is easy to see why the Private Server option is rather poor! I already have the LAMP set up and the server is running a Trackmania Server, which has been much better than running it off my broadband (against Sky’s terms!)

I will be sticking with Dreamhost for domain registration as, against my original thoughts, they aren’t that many cheaper registrars… shame really!

I can still honestly recommend Dreamhost to anyone looking for a decent and cheap webhost; just not their private servers!

Sorry for my death like abense!

Finally got round to posting and I’ve found a great application from the Android Market. In fact, its the only reason I have actually managed to post this message!

WpToGo let’s you log-in to your Wordpress powered blog and post articles (with pictures too,) edit articles, and more bloggy goodness. It really is a handy application for people like me who forget to post every few months! Slightly more useful than the plethora of tip calculators and spirit levels that plague the market…