Monthly Archives: February 2006

PAP2 Acquires New Brain, No Longer Speaks to Me

A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter.  Unfortunately, while playing around with Asterisk this morning, my adapter reset itself, promptly redownloaded some new firmware, and now is back to being locked with Vonage, this time, without the apparent hacks that make unlocking possible.

Sigh.  Things like this are enough to really piss you off.

So, temporarilly at least, my VOIP hacking is slowed.  I guess I’ll have to spring for something like a Clipcomm CG200 or a Linksys Sipura 3000.  Or maybe I should just go ahead and buy a cheap IP phone like a Grandstream or maybe a better one like the Sipura 841 or 941.  Anyone have any suggestions?

[tags]VOIP,Linksys PAP2,Hacking,Asterisk[/tags]

Halftime! Steelers Win!

Seattle: 3 Pittsburgh: 7

Carmen’s got 0-0 and 6-7 in her football pool, and narrowly missed hitting either at the end of the first and second quarters.

I’m betting Seattle will come back in the second half.

Oh, and the Stones for the halftime show? Could there possibly be a more tired idea for the halftime show? It’s not that the Stones are bad, it’s just that it is so safe for a halftime show that it’s just boring. I mean really, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction? It’s like singing the Oscar Meyer Weiner jingle.

Addendum: Seahawks: 3 Steelers: 14

Addendum: Shows what I know.  Seattle had all the chances, didn’t do anything with any of them, and played horribly at the end of both halves in terms of managing the clock.

[tags]Superbowl[/tags]

HOWTO propagate an urban legend

Boing Boing presented a link to this: HOWTO cook an egg with two mobile phones

The only problem?  It doesn’t work.  It can’t work.   Dan and his readers figured it out relatively simply: if you take the battery’s capacity, express that in calories, and then take the mass of the egg and figure out how much energy it takes to raise the egg 40 degrees Centigrade, then you realize that even with 100% conversion, it just ain’t gonna happen.

Shame on you Boing Boing.

Bush administration aggressively prosecutes war… on science.

It seems that a collection of public relations officers appointed by the Bush administration are giving NASA a black eye by trying to “recast” (if one is charitable) or “rewrite” (if one is accurate) the scientific research that the technical staff at NASA produce.  In particular, Bush appointee George Deutsch pressured NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen to refrain from talking about global warming, threatening him with “dire consequences” if he continued.   He also worked to change the NASA website so that every mention of the Big Bang was changed to the Big Bang theory, since it was a just “a matter of opinion”.

Deutsch appears to be one of those people who think that the role of federal employees is to serve the commander in chief, when in reality they are supposed to serve the people of this nation and uphold the Constitution.

Phil Plait is even angrier than I, so go read his blog for more info.

[tags]Politics vs. Science, NASA, George Deutsch,Abuse of Power[/tags]

Score: Virus 2, Mark’s Windows PCs: 2

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that it would no longer run. When I got home to check it out, I found that my laptop, which used the identical virus scanner (Computer Associates EZ Antivirus) had been similarly afflicted. I ended up uninstalling EZ Antivirus (why would you use antivirus software that got disabled by a virus) and installed Norton’s on my laptop and F-Secure on my son’s machine, scanned them, and all seems better.

My wife system which runs McAffee seemed to be unaffected. I have another machine which wasn’t powered on and was running Nortons, which similarly seems to be unaffected.

Thanks Microsoft. Thanks Computer Associates. Nice system you’ve got there.

Google Virus News

[tags]Microsoft,Computer Associates,Virus,Nyxem,Blackworm[/tags]

DIY Projection clock

Courtesy of the Make Blog, go surf over and check out these instructions for building your own projection digital clock.  The idea is pretty simple: modify a  cheap digital watch from the dollar store by mounting a couple of bright LED lights behind the LCD display, and then use a lens to focus the enlarged version on the wall/ceiling.  Neat!

The author,  Raphael Assénat, has lots of other cool projects as well: of particular interest to me was his neat article on extracting the sound hardware from a Super Nintendo and wiring it to his PC.  I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for one of these at Goodwill.   Cool stuff.

[tags]Hacks,Make,Hardware,Super Nintendo,Clock[/tags]