Recently I’ve been trying to establish better wireless networking in my house, and toward that end I purchased a couple of books on wireless networking. The first was Jeff Duntemann’s Drive by WiFi Guide, which is despite a rather egotistical and strange title, actually fairly good. The second was Building Wireless Community Networks. While less of a general book on wireless, this book had some interesting ideas on building wireless networks which can be shared throughout a community. Inside they metnioned several ways to build cheap wireless routers. The smallest way is to probably by a board from Soekris. They make tiny PCs which include both a slot for CompactFlash (diskless booting!) and PCMCIA (wireless cards) as well
as ordinary Ethernet.

But I’m too cheap to spend that kind of money, so I opted for item #2, which was to buy an old
Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 from a seller on Ebay. This is a tablet PC which has a 120Mhz Pentium
processor, a 2.1gb hard drive, a touchscreen w/ pen, a docking station with USB, and two PCMCIA ports. I also bought a DELL Truemobile wireless card (really a repackaged
Lucent Orinoco Gold), which seems to work rather well.

I installed FreeBSD on the little box by swapping its laptop drive into our old laptop, doing the installation, then swapping it back. So far I haven’t done anything sophisticated with it, but
it seems to work, and is running thttpd. In most repects this machine has identical specs to
the machine which ran my website for years.

I’ve got some more project ideas for it, but those will have to wait for a followup post.

While experimenting with Icecast2, I tried out the icesclient. It very nicely handles either live or precompressed streams, and can provide audio encoded reencoded at lower bit rates. But this seemed to be overkill to me: I already had a number of streams encoded at the rate that I wanted. Not only was it wasteful to decode and reencode them, but it resulted in lower quality audio for the listener.

Luckily, the icecast guys provide libshout2, a library for talking to both Shoutcast and Icecast servers. In a few minutes I coded up the relatively simple program shout-mp3.c. It is barely extended from the example that is in the libshout documentation, and merely accepts a bunch of files as command line arguments, and loops them repeatedly. The advantage is that this client takes virtually no CPU time: well under 1% of my old 400 Mhz Celeron box. Much nicer.

I’ve now switched my brainwagon radio feed to spew 12 episodes of the old Buck Rogers radio serial: a show carefully designed to sell Popsicles to the youth of the 50s. Enjoy.