Gabe Ortiz » gabe

How to stop your CR48 from going into suspend on lid close

gabe — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:46:14 +0000

I’ve been annoyed by the default going to sleep behavior on lid close in ChromeOS since day one. As I’ve started using it more as my day-to-day system largely thanks to my new Arch Linux chroot, it’s become more of an annoyance. So I finally figured this one out. It’s actually really easy. Assuming you have already rooted your device, just get a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T, type “shell” to get a shell, then:

sudo initctl stop powerm

And that’s it. I added that line to my .bashrc so I don’t have to remember to stop that daemon every time I reboot.

How to get Dropbox working on a CR48 Google Chrome netbook

gabe — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:05:57 +0000

So, sometimes using the web-based Dropbox interface just won’t cut it and downloading individual files from there to upload elsewhere is a pain. I thought it would be pretty cool to have a local cache of my Dropbox on my CR48, and as it turns out, that’s not too hard.

Put your CR-48 in developer mode
Drop into a shell (Ctrl+Alt+t, then shell),
make your home partition executable with
```
sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user
```

Get the stable 32bit Dropbox tarball

wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86"

Extract the archive.
```
tar -xvzf dropbox.tar.gz
```
Run dropboxd:
```
~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
```
You should see something like this:
```
This client is not linked to any account...
Please visit https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link?host_id=7d44a557aa58f285f2da0x67334d02c1
to link this machine.
```
Copy that URL by highlighting and middle clicking it, and paste it into Chrome. Log in and link your account. It will then create a ~/Dropbox folder and start syncing. If you want to put your Dropbox folder somewhere else, say on an SD card, I’d suggest softlinking ~/Dropbox.

You’ll want to edit your .bashrc to make the mount point executable and to start Dropbox. Here’s mine: http://signalnine.net/.bashrc.cr48

Machine of Death

gabe — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 05:27:32 +0000

Some really cool, talented folks, including some of my favorite webcomic artists such as Ryan North and David Malki put this book together. It looks pretty awesome, yet dinosaur publishing industry is all, “Cool story, bro.” So, we want to make it an Amazon Best Seller for one day. That day is today, October 26th. Let’s show the dinosaurs how we do it, internet-style.

Quackspotting

gabe — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 20:46:02 +0000

On the way home from brunch, the wife and I were driving by the usual chiropractic and naturopathy “medical” clinics. We got to talking about how we should picket them to let people know that fake, ineffective medicine is harmful. Picketing is kind of satisfying, but it’s probably not the best way to get the message to the right people. Then, I realized- the one thing that people who are are looking for medical care will probably see is the Google Maps listing for their doctor, and anyone can write a review that will show up right under that listing. What better way to get the message out to people that alternative medicine is bogus? A lot of people don’t even know what homeopathy is, or how ridiculous its claims are. At least this way, it might inspire someone to do a little research. Hell, it could save lives.

There are two issues I can think of- legal ramifications re: libel and Google’s Terms of Service. As I understand libel law in the US, if you sue me for libel, you have to prove that I’m saying something false, which of course I wouldn’t be, since I would be stating only scientific fact. The Terms of Service are a little trickier, the relevant section is here:

…you agree that when using the Products or the Content, you will not:

(a) defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others;

(b) upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any inappropriate, defamatory, obscene, or unlawful content;

As I understand the definition of “defame,” it also requires the statements being made to be false, otherwise it would be impossible for anyone to post negative reviews online, anywhere. It’s possible that someone could claim to be harassed by a negative review, but I’m fairly certain the worst that could happen would be the review getting flagged and removed. Pragmatically, the best way to keep the reviews up would be to maintain a list of reviews so we can mutually “mark as useful.” If you’re interested in participating, check out the Wiki I started to track providers and reviews: http://quackspotting.wikispaces.com/

On Flattr

gabe — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:45:44 +0000

Flattr is a micropayment system, brought to you by the fine folks at The Pirate Bay, sort of as a moral proof-of-concept for a system that can work in a post-copyright world. Users select a monthly payment amount (minimum of 2 euros) that they can afford, then you “Flattr” other people who have bought into the system. Your Flattr monthly payments are shared among the people you Flattr. Think of it as a Socialist Internet Tip Jar. Pay what you can afford.

It sounds great in theory; the problem of course, is that it has not yet hit critical mass for it to work on a large scale. Most of the users are crazy open source people from Germany and Sweden. Most of the projects posted are not from English speakers and not a lot of people know about Flattr yet.

HOWEVER, right now for me I’ve actually just hit break-even. So, enough people are paying me money because they think I’m awesome for me to pay other people because I think they are awesome. I mean, I know I’m sort of a minor Internet Folk Hero, but hey. It actually works.

So anyway, it’s currently in an invite-only beta, but if you’d like to try it out, I’ve got 3 invites remaining. The first three comments get an invite. Comment, email me at gabe at signalnine dot net if I don’t have your email address already and I’ll hook you up.

Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)

gabe — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:42:18 +0000

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Cory Doctorow and I do not agree 100% on many occasions, but he really hits the nail on the head with this piece. The iPad is very bad for the future of computing. I believe that I have a moral obligation not to support that kind of content model, no matter how shiny its packaging is.

Source – BoingBoing

Arch Linux First Impressions

gabe — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:17:52 +0000

Having become rather tired of reinstalling Ubuntu every six months or so to keep current with releases, I recently decided to give Arch Linux a whirl. I was feeling impulsive so I decided to just jump right in without the benefit of a install guide or anything of that nature, I figured I’d get a better feel for what Arch was all about this way.

Install process

Initial install was pretty smooth. I made sure my homedir backup was current, downloaded the 2009.08 ISO, booted up into a live CD environment and ran through the (console mode, so you know we’re serious) installer pretty quickly. I should note that right away that the impression I got was, “Hey, we’ll let you install in a nice ncurses installer app, but after that you’re on your own.” However, even running the installer was not something I’d be comfortable recommending to a inexperienced user.

First boot

Okay, so install was relatively fast and easy, at least for a highly experienced sysadmin. I logged in, ran df and noticed I was only at around half a gig usage for the root filesystem. Hmm. They weren’t kidding when they said it was minimalistic. In fact, upon boot I’m not getting to init 5. All I’ve got is console mode. Right, no problem. I know the package manager is called pacman, and man pacman yields predictably useful results. Good job, Arch nerds!

Configuration

So, I’ve got a console and I know how the package manager works. Well, theoretically. It takes me about a minute to figure out that I need to uncomment some repositories in/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and run pacman -Sy to sync package databases. So, first order of business is to install X. Obviously, I need xorg-server, some fonts and my video driver. They install, bring in all my dependencies and I’m really starting to warm up to pacman at this point. Some fiddling with xmonad, dmenu, xmobar and related window manager packages later, I’m theoretically up and running. Oh wait, xorg keeps crashing when I try to launch it. Time to install elinks and hit the forums. No really, that’s what I did.

Troubleshooting

After a little googling, I find that I need a graphical login manger and some tweaks to my inittab. However, I’m in luck. There’s a lovely graphical login manager called slim that’s lightweight and crazy configurable and some wisdom on Arch’s gotta-configure-it-yourself init process. Arch uses a BSD style init, so 99% of the relevant bits are in /etc/inittab and /etc/rc.conf. The last line in /etc/rc.conf looks like this:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal alsa !network netfs wicd crond slim)

Window Managers

I run xmonad because it is awesome. I needed xmonad-contrib and the related dependencies, and my existing configuration Just Worked, which was nice. .xinitrc works as it should. I did need to add eval `ssh-agent` to it in order to get ssh-agent going.

Conclusions

So far, so good. I’m now running current but very stable versions of everything (Hello, kernel 2.6.32!) and performance is great. My intel video driver finally is performing like it should, and overall I’m quite happy. Rolling releases are great and I’m way impressed with the package manager. So, give Arch a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

Google Fiber for Albuquerque

gabe — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:17:25 +0000

As some of you know, I’m working with Eric Renz-Whitmore, Chantal Foster and the fine folks at the Albuquerque Economic Development office to create the Google Fiber proposal for our fair city. We’re in the home stretch now. It’s been a lot of work, but thanks mainly to the tireless efforts of Eric and Chantal, we’re almost done.

Now we need your help.

Visit us at Googlequerque.com and fill out the survey. Then, nominate Albuquerque at Google’s website. It’ll take you maybe a couple minutes and it could potentially make Albuquerque a much cooler place to live.

Thanks!

Fear the Boom and Bust

gabe — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:48:08 +0000

Remarkably, a pretty accurate summary of Keynesian economics vs the Austrian school AND fairly fresh rhymes. Now there’s a sentence you don’t utter every day.

Verizon 3G Coverage on the NM Rail Runner

gabe — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:06:21 +0000

So, I picked up a Verizon MiFi, primarily to use on the train between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and thought I’d report my findings. Verizon’s 3G coverage is pretty decent and their coverage map looked the best of my various options. So, here’s my log of the trip.

10:45am Train departs Albuquerque, solid 5 bars of EVDO Rev. A signal. Speed tests drop a little bit once the train is in motion. Average downstream, 1.1Mbps. Average upstream, 300kbps. Latency, 250ms.

11:00am Still totally solid departing Bernallio. Speed remains constant, latency now at 300ms.

11:20am First network drop. We’re about here, just south of Santo Domingo pueblo. No signal for about a mile, then RTTx1 picks up.

11:21am Good signal, but 1xRTT speeds, so about 100kbps down and 30kbps up. Latency improves for some reason, now at 100ms.

11:32am About ten miles of 1xRTT later, we’re back in EVDO Rev. A territory. 5 bars of signal. Speed tests at 1.93Mbps down, 320kbps up. Latency drops to 190ms.

11:39am NM 599 Station. Rev. A still solid.

12:00pm We’re in Santa Fe now, South Capitol station. Rev A, 5 bars. Speed and latency remain good.

In conclusion, apart from the ten minutes around Santo Domingo, coverage looks like it’s almost all Rev. A. Color me impressed! Network speeds varied a little, but it was totally usable the whole time minus the one minute or so that it dropped. Looks like this is a viable alternative to AT&T’s non-existent 3G service and shoddy EDGE coverage along this route. Maybe someday they’ll actually get the promised WiFi up and running on the Rail Runner, but I’m not holding my breath.

Edited to add: On the way back to Albuquerque I was disappointed slight by the fact that I got only 1xRTT speeds for about a quarter of the trip, again centered around Santo Domingo pueblo. I’m not sure why it was different, but this time I wasn’t seated in the uppermost part of the train, so that might explain it. It might be worth getting a little suction cup or something to adhere the MiFi to the window or ceiling. That might solve it.