09.14.06
Posted in diy, hardware at 1:33 pm by brainstorm
First of all: What is rattan ?
Rattan, called “mimbre” in spanish, is a commonly used material to construct hampers and furniture.
Wasn’t this blog about tech ?
Yep, that’s it’s main theme and I’m not a furniture expert, so why not add a computer to the mix ? Here you are:
All the components are holding by transparent nylon fishing wire. That way the visual impact of the hack is minimum 
It was not easy to fit all the stuff in such a limited space. For instance, the PSU had to be unmounted outside the furniture, put the parts inside, and mounted again like a ship in a bottle :-P.
The hardware specs are quite minimum: PII 233 with 256 MB RAM, 10GB HDD, a couple of wireless network adapters (one PCI Atheros-based wifi card and the other one is a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card on a PLX PCI adapter). Finally there is also an ethernet card connected to an ATA which is in turn connected to a cheap DECT phone. Now I’m using this computer as a free hotspot+PBX, and it’s working quite good ATM
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08.25.06
Posted in diy, hardware, howto at 2:39 am by brainstorm
Everything started with the following question:
Hi dude, tomorrow I’m going to Helsinki and I don’t remember this laptop’s password, can you help me ?
A few searches looking for the typical master or universal passwords didn’t help much (nope, “admin” does not work as a backdoor bios password as most sites say, really). The owner was really fed up with HP support and it was quite late at night, so calling nor sending emails were going to help either.
Searching a bit deeper on forums, people were complaining about the same problem without solution: “Cannot reset omnibook xe3 bios password”, and the well known common thrick to erase the bios password was futile (removing the CMOS battery for a while to erase the password and settings). According to some posts, the password was actually stored on a 24C16 EEPROM close to the BIOS chip… So there we go
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01.24.06
Posted in hardware, software, unix at 7:24 pm by brainstorm
Reading KT mailing list I’ve found an interesting project called sdhci that fills a well-known gap on linux driver support: read/write capabilities for memory card readers as those found integrated on laptop computers like mine:
#lspci
(...)
01:03.2 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
The code is not yet upstream, but you can easily patch your kernel getting latest patches from the mailing list. Once compiled as usual (make modules && make modules_install) you only have to load the following modules, mount the device and you’re done:
# modprobe mmc_block sdhci
# mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/cards
I’ve been able to read a 16MB SD card and a 32MB MMC card without problems whatsoever. Please, report bugs if you find any, the sdhci-dev team is currently dealing with driver timing problems and they need feedback !
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