Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Life

I desperately need quiet wireless router. Currently old Pentium does the work, but it's too noisy and power consuming to be still on. The problem is that I use it for another things as backup, file and print server and those things can't be easilly moved to some generic router.

I thought about buying some VIA EPIA board with fanless power supply or some router supported by OpenWRT which could be later expanded to do at least part of jobs currently done by "router".

At the end I've chosen ASUS WL-500g Deluxe which is reported to be fully supported by OpenWRT. For now it will live with generic firmware, later I will start to experiment with OpenWRT to get out of this hardware as much as possible.

I have weather these days. It's seven clock in the morning and here is nice 25°C. How could man sleep in that? And I didn't mention that over day are temperatures around 35°C.

So could somebody there up finally switch off the heater? Thanks a lot.

I finally made local copy of my articles which I made for Linux software server. They were sitting for long time on my disk to be published somewhere under my website, but till now I didn't manage to do that.

You can find original article listing on Linux software and it's mirror is at my server: http://cihar.com/publications/linuxsoft/.

As a special bonus you get there file which is missing in articles on Linux software :-).

Most of railways in Czechia are operated by Czech Railways. However there are few places where private companies exists such as Railways Desná. When you need to use only one of them, everything works fine, but travelling with both looks sometimes like a big trouble.

You have no problems when starting on private one, they sell you ticket for whatever you need. But Czech Railways only tell you, that there is private railway and you need another ticket. They don't bother to tell that you can buy the ticket by them. So you travel with Czech Railways, switch to private with no time for buying another ticket because Czech Railways are allways delayed and now you have to pay penalty because you don't have your ticket. Funny, isn't it?

When I today first saw this, I really liked that. I saw various useless USB toys, but this one is the best of them. And it even works fine from Linux!

I'm talking about USB Misille Launcher. You can control it using keyboard or even combine it with webcam and use motion together with small script to automatically aim it (no auto fire yet :-)).

After more than week ignoring computers I'm back online. It's horrible to see those hundreds of unread mails, but I promise I will manage them soon, just be patient :-).

Anyway vacation was great, we had nice wheather and Jeseníky is wonderful place. Yesterday we were lucky that we're on correct side of mountains. otherwise we would be in the middle of floods.

And once more I got impression that travelling with Czech Railways is horrible experience. First train had outage and we went with replacement bus. I rued those few who took their bike with them. Next train was of course full of people, nowhere to sit, but it was only three hours way…

As it turned out that my previous blog post is first returned by Google while searching for this company, I got some feedback about them. They seems to send spam, attempt to steal site keywords to get before them and do other simmilar silly things. If you want to know more, just try more Googling or read discussion.

If you want to fight them, either block them by iptables:

iptables -A INPUT -s 208.66.195.0/28 -j DROP

Or deny access to webserver (this example is for lighttpd I use):

$HTTP["remoteip"] == "208.66.195.0/28" {
    url.access-deny = ( "" )
}

As I live in another part of city since last Wednesday, I also have to find new ways for my bicycle. I know how poor situation in Prague is, but I hoped that marked way I noticed while moving will be good for travel to work.

But it looks like expected too much. Maybe somebody forgot to tell people marking this way that most people don't use bicycles on stairs. I don't know why does this way in about 3 kilometers I used it go over three stairs.

If you want to go through Prague on bike, forgot to use marked ways, you will most likely end with troubles. Better find some local people who will guide you.

During yesterday afternoon I moved most of my things to new flat. I didn't expect I have so much things :-). However it went smoothly, I only feel really tired today.

There is still lot of work there, but we will hopefully manage it soon. One of first thing is internet connection, which is must for me. Until it is ready don't expect me to react quickly on emails and or bugs. Anyway I'll try to handle regullar mails during day at work.

It looks like somebody in company Digital Infinity Ltd loves to read my blog. Maybe they should consider setting up personal mirror as if every computer in their address space is going to download whole blog as they did it today, it will cost them lot of bandwidht and I will get really upset and iptables will get new rule about 208.66.195.0 - 208.66.195.15.

So it's up to you, you have been warned.