Wiring a gigabit network out of phone lines.

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img_3166So this morning I got up at 4 a.m. ( yes on a saturday ) and I was ready to go. I have been wanting to get quad-monitors but I had no spots PCI-E or PCI to put in another graphics card. I however had a PCI wireless card that if I could get rid of, I could replace with a dual-headed graphics card.
I was willing to do anything to get a Ethernet line to my room, my dad and I had a plan, it involved going through the unfinished base boards and running Ethernet that way from the heater room. When I was looking for a phone jack to plug the modem into ( for digital telephone, our modem does cable, internet, and telephone all from coaxial ) and I found this wiring that looked like a phone line but it had extra wires. It kept me perplexed for about an hour until I found a website that said most new houses had Cat5E wiring in them for telephone and I knew my house was only about 3 years old so I wondered… I went back and looked at the wire and sure enough it said Cat5E!!

So this is my “make shift gigabit switch and phone switch” as the real 8 gigabit switch and connector pieces are en route. It is connecting my room line and the line to the router as everyone else is yet to get on the bandwagon.

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Dropbox, lots of uses, lots of greatness.

I have decided that dropbox is so cool, it deserves a blog post! The uses for this is endless! I have seen people who keep their application data in here to keep applications synced or people who keep their keedb databases in here to keep them synced too. A really creative idea is to use it to start downloads on your home computer through uTorrent.

The things I use it for are more simple and normal however Dropbox still does a great job at it! Mostly I use it to keep my school papers synced between my desktop, laptop, and my iPod touch so I can work on them anywhere. Also it is extremely valuable with it’s version control system to use it for my code. I just use the free 2 gb version ( but they give out free upgrades and I am up to 2.5 gb ) but 2 gb holds a lot if your not storying videos or music. Also on the iPhone/iPod touch you can have “favorites” which are basically saved locally used for offline situations.

Written from the iPhone/iPod touch Wordpress application during first hour at school.

Linux Terminal Twitter Client

Today I was bored so I decided to write a Twitter client centered in Terminal. It’s not a super-client, it’s just plain and simple. It was more of a test of myself. Anyways be looking for versions in more languages, hopefully in Python or Bash in a few days, maybe in Perl someday.

  1. Download & Unzip
  2. Put it into /home/youruser/scripts ( so tweet and twitter and etc. are in that directory )
  3. sudo bash install.sh ( it will try to install php5-curl if you don’t have it, you need this )
  4. . ~/.bashrc ( include the period at the beginning )
  5. setupTwitter twitterusername twitterpassword
  6. You may now use twitter to view the 5 latest tweets or tweet “YOUR Text here to tweet something

Download [tar.gz]

Download [zip]

Download [tar]

Why do people need so much space?

I have been browsing Lifehackers Flickr group, and some people have ridiculous amounts of external hard drives and file servers! They’ll have 6-12 tb. just at their home office! There is no way one person can use that much space.

Example person:

  • 25 gb. of music
  • 25 gb. of power points, word docs, etc.
  • 100 gb. of programs and settings
  • 50 gb. of movies
  • 15 gb. of pictures

Thats more than generous on each part but that only comes out to 215 gb! In my room I have 990 gb and that is more than I could ever use. On my main desktop I only use 200 gb and that includes my game/dvd ripping project and backups!

Holy cow people I don’t see how you need that much space!

Oh Windows… why can’t you be like Linux?

Today I had to try and fix my computer today, everything was going wrong. I had only about 4 minutes in my OS before some vital program crashed. During this terrible, blind, expierence I was just hoping, oh why can’t they take Linux commands?

My favorite Linux commands I would want in Windows:

  • wget ( I downloaded a program that does this and set it as a variable so it works great! )
  • sudo
  • apt-get install/remove/update/upgrade
  • /etc/init.d/xxxx restart/start/stop ( really nice and simple! )
  • /var/log/ ( always helpful in debugging )
  • cd ~
  • /etc/fstab ( ugly, but it works just the way you want! )
  • mount
  • netstat

I use a lot of those commands daily, they just WORK, not fancy GUI’s, they just get the job done! Windows why can’t you be like that? Your command line is a joke while Mac and Ubuntu’s terminal is their brightest point.

P.S. PowerShell sucks still Windows!

Free Google Wave Invites

I have 15 Google Wave invites going out, to you! How to get one, leave a funny comment andĀ  make sure you leave the email address at which you want the invite. It’s first come, first serve except in the case your joke isn’t funny.

Update: 4 left!

Update: 3 left!

Rewriting Code

When I was younger, I used to play a text game online. You would play with other people, get better units, the classic game. It was so cool. I was able to get my hands on the code, and wanted to replicate a version for myself. Little did I know the game was based on some weird PHP settings and the code looked like this.

Extremely Ugly, and Hard to Follow Code

Extremely Ugly, and Hard to Follow Code

So as it would not work, I have setout to rewrite it into an exceptable format. I am writting this into a MVC type framework. This website code is extremely mess, even the directory structure. The images and the PHP and the configuration are all in the root directory. So far I have reconstructed a small part of the base, but it is really hard as all this code is useless as you cannot follow it.

Cleaner code, that I am trying to rework.

Cleaner code, that I am trying to rework.

Free Flickr

Okay, I am way too cheap to pay $25 a year for Flickr, but Flickr is such a cool tool, and it’s compatible with so many ways to upload. So I went ahead a wrote a tool, that reads your RSS feed, and copy’s your Flickr photos. Now the even cooler thing, is I don’t want to host the files as it takes up a bit of room, so I added a part that will copy those photos from your Flickr RSS feed to some free FTP site! I have a couple of accounts over at LionDrive, it’s a pretty good service, you can control a lot of things, its pretty fast, 5gb and free! I can even mount my drives on my computer. But anyway, that is what it does, and in caseĀ  your cheap like me, but like Flickr I’ll share it with you.

Download FlickrDownloadR

( It’s kind of slow, but it gets the job done! )

Digital DVD/Game Library

I am not perfect with my CDs/DVDs I will lose them, scratch them, or just break them. Becaue of this I have started a project to backup all of my Games and DVDs that I would not like to lose. What I am doing is ripping DVDs and Computer games to ISO’s on my computer using MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD. This software is freeware for Windows and allows you to do two very cool things, A. you can rip your CD’s/DVD’s/Games to ISO’s which isn’t that rare but B. is that you can mount those ISO’s virtually as a drive and install that game, or watch that DVD on your computer. And it supports more than just ISO’s but that is all I use it for. And with a big enough harddrive you can keep everything on your computer, safe and sound! If you have a semi-good Zip Archive Utility you can get into those ISO’s and say add a cd.key file with the code so you don’t have to worry about that either. Cool eh?

My Programming Studio

A lot of people have trouble finding the perfect editor for whatever the might be doing in the programming world, or atleast I once did. I believe my setup is one of the better ones, but I know it comes nowhere close to Coda. When most people look for an editor they want it to do it all, SCP Support, SVN, or Code Highlighting. People are picky, that’s a plain fact, so they only way to please picky people is to let them make what they want.

Eclipse gives you that option, to easily and simply get everything you need, and nothing more. In my verrsion of Eclipse I start with Eclipse PDT, which stands for PHP Development Tools. It comes with the Web Tools Platform which includes Server Tools and an Ajax Framework. So now that I have my base setup, I will install some plugins via the handy-dandy and simple update manager in Eclipse. The first plugin is Subclipse which is a nifty Subversion client to go with the built in CVS client. Also to go with PHP I add Python support with PyDev and lastly I have SFTP support incase I need to jump onto a server and change something so I use JCrafts SFTP plugin for that.

Some tools I have read about that sound cool, and interesting, but I have personally never used are Zends Community Server Edition and their PHP Debugger, which both perfectly integrate with the Tools in PDT. And if you need anymore tools just Google it, I bet you someone has made a plugin for it. Thats what great about Eclipse, you build it, your way.

UPDATE

I tried something new today, I hadn’t been liking JCrafts SFTP plugin, it required me to export updates everytime I saved so I would use a built in “Remote Systems Explorer“. That had some errors in my PDT installation so I went and got a standard Java version from Eclipse.org, and installed RSE on the regular version. Now to get my PHP tools back follow the steps here to get the PHP tools on your version. And continue on like normal! This SFTP client is a one that works just like it’s a project instead of having to do a lot of work. Also Remote Systems Explorer does a lot more like Shell and stuff… garsh now it’s starting to sound like Coda.