Olympus SmartMedia Card Error: Repairing/Recovering Corrupted Cards

Quite a few months ago my Father gave me a pile of large SmartMedia cards that stopped working in his Olympus digital camera. After a few months of use, each card slowly started reporting CARD ERROR on the camera LCD. I was able to use the cards in various other devices, but they never worked […]

Marketscore.com truly frightens me…

I noticed quite a few hits on my various domains from proxy servers at Marketscore.com, so I decided to do some digging. According to articles at Wired and Slashdot, Marketscore is a marketing and trends firm that installs tracking software on your machine that basically acts as big brother and watches every single Web site […]

useradd: invalid user name ‘first.last’

Starting somewhere around the migration from Red Hat Linux 9 to Fedora Core, useradd (adduser) stopped allowing dots in usernames. This was all well and good to fix some of the problems that dots can cause under certain circumstances, but it left some systems administrators high and dry when it came to creating new users […]

Tin ceilings and Wi-Fi

Much to the amusement of our friends Chip and Val, tin ceilings completely block all Wi-Fi signals from passing from their upstairs 54g access point to their downstairs kitchen, dining room, and family room. No big deal; I’ll just install a second access point or drop an external antenna down through the wall to cover […]

Internetishop.com out of business?

It appears that Internetishop.com (aka Hugebee) has disappeared off the face of the planet even though their Web site is still taking orders and charging credit cards. Brian and I originally used them a year and a half ago to purchase Athlon 2400+ workstations at an amazing price so they immediately came to mind when […]

Pepper Pad 2 Linux Web Pad

Pepper Computer debuted their $800 Pepper Pad 2 at DEMOmobile 2004 this week. Specs include a 624 MHz XScale processor, 8.4″ 800×600 TFT touchscreen, 802.11b+g, and 20 GB HDD running MontaVista Linux CEE. Out of the box the Pepper Pad 2 loads the Pepper Keeper as its GUI, but a full-blown Linux distribution with Java […]

Pepper Pad 2 Debuts

Isn’t she a beauty? She’s what I’ve been slaving over for the past two weeks. She’s the reason I put in a full work week’s worth of hours over Labor Day weekend. She’s why I didn’t sleep last night. We launched this morning at 7:00 AM and are officially announcing the Pepper Pad 2 at […]

Running Verisign Payflow Pro under PHP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core

When running Verisign Payflow Pro under PHP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core, all of the SDK instructions assume that PHP is getting recompiled and reinstalled from scratch. This is all well and good on testbed systems, but not so hot for productions systems that use subscription-based package and security updates. Luckily, pfpro.so […]

High Power Wi-Fi Cards

In addition to the ORiNOCO Classic Gold PC Card, the Senao NL-2511CD PLUS EXT2 is a favorite among radio geeks that Wardrive with dual diversified antennas. Pushing 200 mW with two antenna jacks, a 3 dBi or 5 dBi short range antenna can be used to pick up close signals in tall buildings while an […]

Hacking the ORiNOCO Silver into an ORiNOCO Gold

The ORiNOCO Classic Gold PC Card is the radio of choice for Wardrivers and Netstumblers worldwide, and its massive internal antenna and external antenna jack make it an extremely versatile radio for both portable and mobile applications. Distributed under many different monikers, the PC Card may sport a decal for WaveLAN, ORiNOCO, Lucent, Agere, Avaya, […]