Gabe Ortiz » stuff

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.

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.

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.

Goodbye, LiveJournal.

gabe — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:58:43 +0000

Moving to Google Reader because lack of push notification on LJ is driving me crazy. I’ll be taking some of you over via RSS. No need to adjust your journaling preferences. I’ll be mostly crossposting to LJ from WordPress from now on.