YiBi's Life|Live Log » Geek Toys Archives -

Aptitude Easter Egg

yibi — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:04:09 +0000

This Easter Egg has been around for a while, but I just discovered it from Wikipedia. Really geeky. :)

IPhone Tethering – Use and Abuse!

Buying Foscam IP Cameras In Singapore

yibi — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:36:31 +0000

There are now more and more people getting IP cameras for their home use in Singapore. One of the most common use is for home monitoring. For this purpose, a lot of people are getting the Foscam Fi8918W from what I observed in the forums.

There are couple of ways you can get your Foscam cameras. I personally ordered mine from an online seller. The website that go to is http://www.ali2.com. I have ordered a couple of times from them and so far the experience has been alright. One thing I would suggest is to get your friends to pool orders because they will deliver the goods via DHL is there are more than 3 items. Delivery via normal registered mail or parcel will take as long as month and the possibility of lost mail is higher.

There are 2 reasons why I choose to get the cameras online. Firstly, they are cheaper than the one’s sold locally. The markup can be up to 100% sometimes. Secondly, there are more models to choose from.

I hope this is helpful. Happy shopping.

Macbook Pro 加强！加强！加强！

yibi — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:07:08 +0000

Thanks to SingNet for the Macbook + Broadband bundles, I managed to bag a 2011 Macbook Pro at $1400 SGD. This is $248 off the list price on Apple Store. i got Macbook Pro from the folks who are selling the sets to offset their monthly broadband package. There are a lot of such offers on the Hardwarezone Singapore Forums.

This Macbook Pro comes with only 4GB of RAM. Given the obsession to keep wanting to have more, I top up the RAM to 8GB. The 2 x 4GB Strontium DDR3 1333Mhz SoDimm cost $74 bucks ($37 bucks each). This is a damn good deal considering that my colleagues got the same 2 pieces of RAM at $138 about 2 months back :)

Another colleague was with me to get the 1066Mhz for the older revision of the Macbook Pro, but there was no stock. He’s now trying out my 2 pieces of 2GB DRR3 1333Mhz. If it works, he will get the 4GB equivalent. Technically it should work, but there are a lot of people commenting in forums that Mac machines are particular about these minor details so we won’t know until he has tested. I will post an update on the outcome.

And as always, when you are buying an Apple product, it doesn’t just end there. There are (expensive) peripherals and accessories to buy. I always thought Mac accessories are overpriced. Getting them locally could easily set me back by another $200 at least. So, the natural option is to get from 淘宝 (http://www.taobao.com).

The final thing to get for the Macbook Pro is the AppleCare Protection Plan. Given my prior pleasant experiences with Apple, I’m willing to fork out extra for the additional 2 years of warranty for a peace of mind for the next years.

As for my old Macbook, it’s now semi-retired, working as a desktop. :)

New Toy Again! – Apple TV 2

yibi — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:28:27 +0000

Got myself another new gadget, ie. the Apple TV 2. Friends asked me what I wanted the Apple TV for. By right, we can’t buy US contents in Singapore. There’s no harddisk built-in and we can’t plug external harddisks in. Looks useless. Well, not true.

First of all, I can do Airplay, ie. playing my contents like photos, videos and music directly from my other Apple devices to the TV. No plugging in of messy cables.

And of course, I wouldn’t leave my Apple TV alone as it is. Jailbreak!! That opens multiple possibilities. I can play contents from my NAS, I can watch other online contents, especially those from China, eg. YouKu, TuDou etc. This is a quick view of the end result.

I will update more on the setup when I have more time.

New Toy – FOSCAM Fi8904W IP Camera

yibi — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:03:54 +0000

I have been hunting around for security cameras lately for my home. The initial idea was to get an Axis M Series because of the excellent H.264 video compression, but the price frightened me off. After researching various forums, I ended up getting the Foscam Fi8904W.

Foscam Fi8904W

;

Some specifications for the model that I got.

This camera doesn’t come with POE, so I found a seller from Amazon selling the AIR802 PASSPOE-03 Passive PoE Injector/Splitter with 3.5 mm x 1.35 mm DC Size Connector to bring power to the camera. This is how it looks like.

So, in a nutshell, it allows you to make use of the stock adaptor from Foscam to bring power to the camera via UTP. It’s kind of pseudo-POE.

Do take note that the power jack for Foscam Fi8904W is 3.5mm x 1.35mm if you intend to get the POE spliiters.

This is it for now. I will update my blog as I do more fun stuff with this camera.

Bluetooth Support In Ubuntu Is Weak…..

yibi — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:43:30 +0000

I just got myself a bluetooth keyboard to get rid of all the wires running on my desk. First thing I tried was to pair it with my notebook running Ubuntu 10.10. Pairing was ok. And that’s about it?! It was painful trying to get the keyboard properly connected. There’s no indication in dmesg that a keyboard is found, and after a few tries restarting bluetooth, restarting the keyboard, dmesg showed HID device detected, ie the keyboard, but it still doesn’t work.

At first I thought it could be the keyboard itself. Afterall, I got it from http://ww.taobao.com. So, I decided to pair it with my iPhone. Seamless. Paired, got it working right away. Switched off the keyboard, turned it on again and iPhone connected the keyboard automatically. My Macbook was the ultimate. Even in sleep mode, it was holding on to the connection to the keyboard. and I could wake the Macbook from sleep mode with this keyboard. The experience was perfect!

So, what’s wrong with Ubuntu? I know, with some troubleshooting and tinkering, I can definitely get it to work eventually, but it’s so much more troublesome compared to Mac. The Ubuntu desktop experience has improved and surpassed other Linux distros, but it’s still way way way behind Mac.

Enough of rants, I still need to try to get the keyboard to work. Shall update the blog once I solve the problem.

Update: Native Tethering To IPhone On Linux

yibi — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:45:48 +0000

I missed out something important in my previous post on the native tethering on Linux. Turns out my tethering works only after I kick off the tether from Windows (Which resides in a VM on my machine). Further digging led me to the following site.

http://giagio.com/wiki/moin.cgi/iPhoneEthernetDriver

In order to get tethering to work, you need to ‘pair’ the IPhone with your machine. The site above provides the source to the pairing program, which surprisingly isn’t part of any Debian package. Or at least I couldn’t find it. Someone please point me to the right package if there’s one.

Anyway, just follow the instructions on the site to checkout the source from GIT and compile ipheth-pair. Plug in your IPhone and check your dmesg for the following:

[40883.744096] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
[40883.905582] ipheth 2-1:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached

Run ipheth-pair if your IPhone has been picked up and loaded successfully.

Leave the rest to Network Manager. Just connect to wwan0 like connecting to any other devices.

Native IPhone Tethering On Linux (Debian)

yibi — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:58:04 +0000

For some reason, I can get tethering to work natively on Linux after I did an upgrade on my unstable Debian.

This was not possible previously. Now the kernel detects a new device called ipheth (IPhone USB Ethernet device). This is the magic that made the tethering possible. And the best part is that it works out of the box with Network Manager.

This is really cool. I used to tether from Linux using Bluetooth, but the connection is unstable sometimes.

Screenshots of dmesg output etc. Click for the full size image.

I’m running the unstable distro of Debian, so I’m not sure if this is available on the stable release. It might be possible on Ubuntu, since they get all the cutting edge stuff.

IPhone Tethering – Use and Abuse!

yibi — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:46:51 +0000

This is the geeky sequel to my last Linux to IPhone tethering episode where we used and abused the IPhone tethering function.

Some background, I’m one of those people who contracted (and got stuck) with the 50G SingTel Mobile Broadband Plan before the days of 12GB IPhone plan. My usage was about 4G per month, so none of the plans was suitable for me at that time.

Anyway, that aside. For some reasons my team had to work in a place where we had no internet access while we are building the network for high speed internet access. What irony! The only systems engineer in the team (me) decided that I had alot of data to spare, so here we go…use and abuse!

Configuration’s simple. First you have to setup tethering as per my previous post on IPhone tethering. Once you are done with that, do the follow steps. And again, it’s a 5 minute quick hack.

1. vi linux-router.sh

2. Paste the following into the shell script

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o bnep0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i bnep0 -o wlan0 -m state –state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o bnep0 -j ACCEPT

3. Save the file.
4. chmod 700 linux-router.sh
5. ./linux-router.sh
6. Done!

My colleagues are connected to a WIFI router, hence the use of wlan0 as the “inside” interface. bnep0 is the “outside” interface connected to the IPhone via bluetooth. All the machines point to my laptop as the gateway, which bears the IP address 192.168.0.1. All of them are NAT’d out from the outside interface.

I have 2Mbps for my plan. Good enough for the team to check email and do some simple web browsing for information.

There are other things you can do like transparent proxying so that you save abit of bandwidth.

Leave a comment if you have any questions on the configurations. Have fun!

Linux to IPhone Tethering In 5 Mins

yibi — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:57:28 +0000

Tethering from a mobile phone is not new to me. I started from the days of having to script the ppp chat scripts to wvdial to finally having Network Manager recognizing my mobile phone as a 3G modem.

IPhone is new. I have been reading about tethering on Linux as soon as I bought it. Painful ways, jailbreak, run proxy etc etc etc.

Linux didn’t recognize the IPhone as a modem when I plugged in via USB, so it’s only bluetooth now. I tried the tethering of my Mac first. With bluetooth, I found that tethering actually happens over the PAN (Personal Area Network). That should work with Linux, and so it did.

These are steps for me to get tethering on Debian in 5 mins.

1. Run “sudo aptitude -y install blueman” in Debian.

2. Logout and login again. This is for the dbus and stuff to react correctly when you turn on your bluetooth later on.

3. Turn on your bluetooth or insert your USB bluetooth dongle. A bluetooth icon should appear in your system tray or whatever you call it in Gnome. That’s Blueman.

4. Discover and add your IPhone in Blueman

5. Turn on Internet Tethering under “Settings –> General –> Network”. Choose Bluetooth.

6. Go back to your Blueman, click on it and you should see your IPhone. Right click on your IPhone and select “Network Access Point”

7. And you are done!

That’s it! Simple right? No hacking, no jailbreak!

Do drop me a comment if anything’s unclear. The same solution should work with any of the modern distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.