Bash is my favorite computer language. I also love writing programs to help human problems.

Inspired by this online Boggle solver, I decided to write my own solver while my friends were too busy playing the game and having fun

If you would like to test my work, here is the code:

http://dev.xkyle.com/bashboggle/

You will need the linux “words” dictionary, which is installable on Ubuntu by running “sudo apt-get install wamerican”

Why Bash? Yea it is not as fast as C, not as terse as Perl, not as elegant as Python, bla bla bla. But Bash is Fun, and it is good to keep the skills sharp. I think I will port it to python next just for the practice.

Here is an example input and output:

kyle@kyle:~/Projects/bashboggle$ cat board.txt
E    I    D    A    N
I    G    S    S    H
R    R    Qu   D    L
A    Y    T    E    T
I    A    O    A    E
kyle@kyle:~/Projects/bashboggle$ ./boggle.sh board.txt
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
arty
dash
delta
digs
diss
eels
girt
girted
gray
hassle
hassled
rigid
rigs
sans
sash
shad
shads
sled
sleds
sleet
teaed
teat
teed
tels
toed
tray
trig

The board format is pretty flexible. As long as there is some sort of whitespace in between the letters, it will work. It is also case insensitive. For test boggle problems I used this online Boggle site.

But don’t you wish you could peel back reality and see what is happening with the physics from the inside? Well now you can, with the help of a Wii Balance Board.

For the setup you need these ingredients:

• Wii Balance Board
• Computer with Bluetooth
• Linux, preferably Ubuntu
• Jenga Set, alternatively “Tension Tower“
• Some know-how to compile a trunk version of Cwiid
• Some other python stuff (see the build instructions for details)
• And my code

I’m going to maintain all instructions on how to setup all the technical details on my wiki: http://wiki.xkyle.com/WiiJenga

Once you have it setup, you can see where the real center of balance is of your game, and you can tell how close it is to toppling over.

In reality, the balance board isn’t quite sensitive enough to very accurately detect the center of balance of the Jenga blocks, or detect how many Jenga blocks there are, but it is fun to watch:

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!

Here is what the starting / finishing line looked like:

And some judges on the roof watching to make sure the Flying robots do not cut corners.

I was very impressed by the UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). Most of them were able to complete the course in record time. Some were even able to land autonomosouly!

Robota-Landing DougWiebel-landing Robota-Launch

Sorry for the 3gp format, it is native to the Droid. I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of a transcode from ffmpeg or gstreamer. If someone wants to transcode for me, I would be happy to re-upload.

I was unimpressed with the ground vehicles. Only a few were able to complete the course. (Just four turns around the Sparkfun building) Most couldn’t make it past the first turn. Did they simply not test them? Was it the new environment? I wasn’t able to tell.

For sparkfun, having a three-piece band to play during the heats was a big win! They certainly kept the audience entertained, and by the time the 3rd heat came around, every team had their very own made-up-silly-them-song. I suppose it would be the equivalent of the organ player at a baseball game, but on steroids.

I hope to enter and win the next years competition!

I’m not saying that all OS’s don’t have problems, but it would be nice if you didn’t plaster the problems all over the store

So should I throw it away and buy a new one? No! It can be easily fixed. Here is what you need:

• Soldering Iron + Solder
• Flux helps if you have it (If you have not soldered with flux, you are missing out big time)
• Heat shrink or electrical tape
• Sugru can add a nice touch

Start by using a sharp blade to cut off the plastic molding around the connector to expose the raw barrel connector and wires:

Now your soldering skills will be put to the test. Flux helps! Don’t forget to put the heat shrink on first before you solder:

Yea, the sugru, graciously provided by DangerJim could use an artist’s touch.

But it works! Looks pretty good.

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