How much would you pay for such a neat little device? $100? $120? What if I told you that this device is ~$35. What a deal. Lose your P4 electricity guzzler and stick this on your shelf with some harddrives plugged into it.

Now the next question, what Linux distro should we use, and how does one go about installing it? After all, there is no keyboard ports, no display, no cdrom drive. No problem.

To hack this thing, all you need to do is connect to its internal serial port. Here are some instructions to hook up a serial port to the Seagate Dockstar.

Now, there are lots of distros, not too many that support the ARM processor. The stock OS is indeed Ubuntu 9.04, however my OS of choice for this hardware is OpenWRT. Openwrt is a very light, simple, linux distro, designed for embedded systems and routers.  If you wish to follow my steps, here are some instructions on installing Openwrt on a Dockstar. I plan to buy a bunch of these and build some sort of super cheap SAN. I’ll let you know where it goes. The possibilities are only bounded by your imagination. (And I guess maybe the hardware)

Things you can do with a PXE server

Sound like something that you could benefit from? Setting up your own PXE boot environment is easy and Fun! Check out my presentation and then later my wiki page for notes, commands, and configuration snippets to get your own setup going.

                                           My traceroute  [v0.75]
kyle (0.0.0.0)                                                              Tue May 18 15:14:52 2010
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit

 Host                                                           Loss%    Snt  Last  Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 192.168.0.1                                                 0.0%     10   12.0  15.6  11.3  33.6   6.7
 2  UPGRADE-YOUR-CONNECTION-1800-COMCAST.res.comcast.net        0.0%     10   13.1  15.8  11.5  31.1   5.9
 3. TURBOBOOST-UP-TO-50MBS.car1.Den.core.comcast.net            44.4%    10   15.3  17.7  11.8  23.1   4.5
 4. LIKE-WHAT-YOU-SEE?-GET-WITH-LEVEL3!.Level3.net              0.0%     10   27.5  22.5  12.5  43.5   9.0
 5. v----LEVEL3-EATS-SAVVISs-PACKETS.Level3.net                 0.0%     10   43.6  35.9  29.7  43.6   5.7
 6. ^----SUCK-IT-L3.das3-v3037.ch3.savvis.net                   50.0%    10   31.2  32.1  30.8  34.5   1.5
 7. FOR-A-GOOD-PING-TIME-CALL-888-638-6771.dallas3.savvis.net   0.0%     9    28.8  31.8  28.8  43.5   4.8
 8. We-heart-savvis.dllstx0.us.bb.gin.ntt.net                   0.0%     9    30.1  33.1  29.4  51.5   7.0
 9. 4.2.2.2......jk..25.209.2.4                                 0.0%     9    70.3  83.1  68.1 186.6  38.9
10. 0.0.0.zero                                                  0.0%     9    51.6  58.0  51.6  72.9   8.0
11. nothing.here.move.along.                                    0.0%     9    55.4  55.1  51.7  62.1   3.5
12. THIS-SPACE-FOR-RENT!!!                                      0.0%     9    86.3  87.4  83.7  91.3   2.7
13. the-real-site.net                                           0.0%     9    103.9 105.9  84.0 128.2  12.0

However, Youtube requires too much interaction. I wanted to vege out and let it just feed me the stream of random images and sound. Selecting purely random youtube videos sounded like a bad idea though…

I decided to do a twitter search for anything with a youtube link, and then let a script just enqueue them into totem, ad-infinitum. Here is my abomination:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ];
do
 for EACHVIDEO in `wget -O - -q "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=youtube.com" | grep http://www.youtube.com | grep "<content" | sed 's/quot;/\n/g' | grep "http://www.youtube.com" | cut -f 1 -d "&" `
 do
 totem --enqueue `youtube-dl -g -b "$EACHVIDEO" ` &
 sleep  2s
 done
 sleep 30s
done

You need a recent version of the youtube-dl script, located here. Put it in your path as appropriate. Press N for next! Next! Next!

These key pairs were graciously provided by Eric Betts. They do not conform to my existing WEP key calculator.

Maybe Verizon wised up and made them random? The previous correlation was dead obvious, but this one I can’t see.

Of course, I am only a wannabe cryptologist

For those of you who believe that “microblogging” is a new form of communication between people, then listen up. If you have an account on twitter, why do I have to have an account on twitter as well to subscribe to your updates? What about facebook?

If you have a hotmail email account, I don’t have to have hotmail to email you, why should it be the same with microblogging?

What we need is a common protocol, so people on different networks can follow and join the conversation! What we need is a protocol… what we need is…

Yes, Status.net! Status.net is an application that allows you to microblog, and converse with people even if they are different networks. That’s right! Now you can follow your favorite pets on Petstatus.com even though you are on Identi.ca. People on Swisen.com can subscribe to people on WowTweet.net. Amazing!

And guess what, you can actually MOVE and DELETE your status updates. Yes you actually own them. You can move them to another server if you want. Does twitter allow that? Didn’t think so.

If you are using Dreamhost to host a website, installing Status.net is super easy! They have one-click install for status.net. If you have trouble working with their installer, I have some notes that might help.

So when you are ready you can follow me! http://xkyle.com/status/

Well I don’t know if your friends will stop calling your or not, but I was curious about what the graph would actually look like. The graph in the comic looks like it was created with Graphviz, one of my favorite programs!

So I wrote a quick bash script to generate the approrpiate links for graphviz to interpret:

#!/bin/bash
echo "digraph \"xkcd\" {"
for NUMBER in `seq 1 100`
do
 if [ $[$NUMBER % 2] -eq 0 ]; then #We are even
 let OUTPUT=$NUMBER/2
 else  #Odd
 let OUTPUT=$NUMBER*3+1
 fi
 echo "$NUMBER -> $OUTPUT"
done
echo "}"

So what does it really look like? Here:

There are lots of straggling links. This is of course only because I went to 100. Why not 1000? It is a little big… click Here.

Turns out with even more numbers we end up with even more isolated links, no big super chain.

If you would like to run this code for yourself, first make sure you have the graphviz package installed in your linux system. Then copy that code above into a script, say called xkcd.sh. Then run like so:

./xkcd.sh | neato -Tpng | display

Adjust as necessary.

“Room 9 BR” -> “Room 5 Top”

This means that Room 9′s Bottom Right door drops you into Room 5′s top door. I inputed all the all of the connections, and let one of my favorite programs, graphviz do the rest!

Using the graphviz mediawiki plugin, all I have to do is input the graph text into a page on my wiki, click save, and it will spit out a graphical version (click to see the full size):

It could use some tweaking for the overlaps, but its pretty good as is if you ask me. It certainly gives you an insight into the developers thinking when creating the maze. This would certainly be very difficult to do on paper and have it come out clean.

Here is the link to my actual wiki article. Feel free to edit the graph and click save to see what change happens. (You will have to create an account. Really feel free, I don’t mind, edit away!)

And if you have some suggestions to make the graph look even better, just make them! I watch the recent changes rss feed and I will see it.

This is mostly for my archival purposes.

What a cool start! Combined with the already cool scenery:

Only one problem: no silo access. We’ll see if that changes for day two…