Inside the mind of an otter

Got back from UNB last night, completely exhausted. Slept. Long car rides completely take it right out of me. Lots of pictures and footage of the stuff that happened, but it's not mine, so I have to wait till other's host it somewhere so I can link to it. Was very interesting. In the end, we came in 8 / 21. Not bad, but not exactly great either. Got to see some neat fursuits

In other news, recently, I've become interested for various reasons about connecting external DIY peripherals to my computer, but the line levels directly from the serial port are enough to trash logic and microcontroller chips, so I needed a converter to adapt this to suitable voltages in order to use them. With this in mind, I decided to build a small, compact RS232 to logic level adapter.







You'll have to forgive the webcam quality pictures, because a webcam is pretty much all I'm stranded with at the moment. The converter is fully operational and can run reliably as low as 2.5v. The 4 pin header on the back provides an area for a supplied voltage, Rx and Tx signals and ground.

Also, the SD card reader came in the post while I was away. Looks neat, should be able to find an interesting use for it eventually. I believe it shows up as a COM port, but I haven't checked that out just yet. Fairly heavy and robust little thing, I didn't expect very good quality for six cents.







That's it for right now, more later when I remember it all x.x

Been a long few weeks. Got really really sick. Then I got better. Hauled ass on a tough math test yesterday.

Found this, it got a giggle out of me.



In other news, I won a USB memory card reader off ebay for 6 cents, free shipping. Reads SD/XD/MMC cards. I'm hoping to be able to interface it with a microcontroller and establish some sort of sketchy link. Actually, that's a lie. I bought it just because it was 6 cents.

Robotics EAST competition coming up this weekend, which means another weekend in New Brunswick. The hotel we're staying at has high speed, but no wireless, so I brought one of my wireless routers back from the dead, wound a high gain omni antenna (Yes, I actually did the math for this) and soldered it internally so that it fits along the side of the case. The router in question was scrapped a long time ago because it dropped connection every few seconds, and I actually took the antenna connector off it for my USB-Wifi mod. Ever since I wound and attached my own antenna, I've had no problems at all. It's been running for 48 hours now without a single dropout or loss of connection, which pleases me greatly. I modified the settings so that it'll plug and play directly into almost any basic network and provide a secure wireless link. Basically, the LAN from the upstream router connects to this router, which provides all the necessary IP and DNS handling, and passes off new IP addresses to clients over the wireless network via it's own DHCP. I've got it set up for WAP2, and I'll be SSH tunneling while I'm there to make sure nothing important is compromised. I've also got the SSID hidden so that the access point won't be visible to anyone under Windows, however, I believe apps like Kismet or Aircrack in a Unix enviroment can spot hidden SSID's. Regardless, perhaps it's overkill. =P

What do they all have in common? Well, me, I suppose.

First off, I got accepted into Dalhousie University yesterday! I'm really pumped about that. I'm taking a 4 year degree in electrical engineering, and hope to go a bit further after that. Now comes the anxiety about money, loans, finding a place to live (As much as it's looking like I'm probably going too, I really don't want to live at home.) etc.

Second, made some parabolic reflectors for my antennas the other day. They're made out of 1/16" steel sheet, so there's no worry about them easily losing their shape. They were created on a roller machine to ensure they were at least relatively precise. Here's something not quite good enough to be called a picture so that you can look at it.



In the representation above, you can see my professional test setup. Laptop and antenna on bed, being held up by a can of shaving cream, which is further held up by the other little reflector, in hopes it will at least be kinda vertically accurate. Which it really isn't. x.x Oh well. I was testing out the big reflector on my little antenna. As you can see from the laptop screen, the signal strength changes depending on where I aim the reflector. As I found out later, the access point I was probing was actually about another 20 degrees counterclockwise from the current target location, and the signal strength spiked significantly when I found it.

Yesterday evening, I went wardriving with my friend Matt. He drove me around a few roads while I probed for access points using my laptop and new antenna. We slowly drove around for approximately 10 minutes and I picked up 56 access points.


Click to view full.


Interestingly enough, 28 out of those 56 access points were unsecured, and I was able to successfully connect to some of them from my car before we drove out of range.






Also, some random crap I picked off my memory card. I took these before the camera died. I kinda like the depth of field effect in environments with lots of objects or detail, and electronics tend to be unique for this due to the heavily populated circuitry.

And it gets hacked. Big surprise, huh?



I've been wanting to tinker with something like this for a while now. I was given a USB wireless adapter for the Nintendo DS/Wii and wanted to see how much I could squeeze out of such a relatively cheap device.

I first had to overcome a significant obstacle: the adapter is designed for proprietary Nintendo devices ONLY. This means that you can only connect to Nintendo products. To overcome this, I first popped open the case and found what chipset was used. It turns out that this product is a rebranded Buffalo WLI-U2-KG54-AI. Armed with this knowledge, I downloaded the Nintendo drivers to see how the software interfaced with the hardware. After some extensive research and trial and error, I found out how to modify the drivers to release the adapter from it's Nintendo captors.

I saved and installed my driver, and tested out the adapter by sticking it in a USB port. It recognized as a Buffalo USB Wifi adapter, and proceeded to flicker into life. I disabled my integrated laptop wireless, and probed for access points using the new adapter. Much to my surprise, I received a slightly stronger signal then using my inbuilt wifi. It connected perfectly, and I was granted a solid, stable connection.

I didn't want to stop here, though. This wasn't enough; it needed something more, so I wanted to try adding an external antenna. This would allow me to attach high gain antennas to my laptop and scout for long range wireless access points.



I pulled a Reverse-polarity SMA connector off some old wifi gear. After carefully making sure I'd found the internal antenna points, I tinned the ground pads of the adapter with solder and carefully attached 2 ground points towards the rear of the board. Using a small, very thin piece of solid core copper wire, I cautiously soldered one tip to the solder pad on the board, and the other to the center conductor of the SMA connector.





After making sure the connector was firmly attached, as to avoid being torn off by torsion applied by adding/removing an antenna, I began reassembling. I lined the plastic case with grounded foil tape to prevent unnecessary noise from entering the circuit. Electrical tape was applied over this to prevent shorts.





I placed the lid halves together and covered the exterior in foil tape connected to USB ground. I realize this is most likely overkill, but it certainly won't damage anything; too much protection is better then too little in this regard. I wrapped the finished unit in electrical tape to make it look better, since foil tape isn't very pretty.







Now, the most important question: Does it work? Well, yes! In fact, it works far better then I anticipated, but not in the ways I hypothesized. I expected to see good gains from my large 10dBi external AirLink antenna, but in fact I got the highest gain from my 4" direct mount AirLink antenna! Further observation seems to point towards inefficiencies and wasted transmit power through the large antenna, resulting in access points I could see, but not transmit too. Also, due to the cheapiness of the antenna, I'm doubting it matches the proper 50 Ohm impedance which the circuit was expecting. This resulted in null access points which are out of my range. The little antenna, however, had no problem talking to routers over 300ft away through walls, a hill and a road (Aka, my neighbour :D ). I used this signal, as well as my own home network, as a test, since I live in the boonies and there arn't many wireless networks close to me.



As you can see, my integrated laptop wireless has a signal strength of approximately -75dBi at home, which isn't that bad, but it's not particularly wonderful either. My modded USB adapter with the 'high gain' Airlink antenna shows a signal of approximately -69dBi, which is a -6dBi improvement over my integrated. Adding a 4" Dlink antenna shows a signal of about 60dBi, a boost of around -9 or -10dBi. Once I add the 4" Airlink antenna, the signal jumps to >-45dBi, an improvement of over -15dBi! This is a -30dBi gain over my integrated wireless, and is very significant! Leaving the adapter with no antenna, the signal plummets back to about -71dBi.

Pros:
- Greatly improved wireless range and performance.
- Antenna upgradability: can add a reflector, etc.
- These Wifi adapters are ALL over the place, at least around here x.x
- Cheap! Cost me 0$.

Cons:
- Requires a steady hand and some good soldering experience.
- Probably not legal.
- Can easily damage your equipment if done incorrectly.

In conclusion, this project required some very precise soldering and planning, even though it doesn't quite look that way in the large, highly magnified photographs. Incorrectly performed, this modification could severely and permanently harm your wireless card, or even your computer. In my situation, I was able to yield quite satisfying results with the equipment available to me. This project gave me a fair bit of experience in driver writing and modification, as well as RF circuitry and engineering. I had quite a lot of fun, and it was well worth the work!

So, about two months ago, I set out to buy an otter plushie. I found a really cool one, 20" tall, but absolutely no place I found would order him, or had him in stock. After a few email exchanges with an employee at this place, they agreed to order it for me, and said they should get one in stock within the next week or two. Well, here I sit over a month and a half later, with this in my inbox:

Alex,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I apologize for the delay. But unfortunately, the manufacturer didn't include it in our last order as planned. We have requested again that they include one with our next order and hope that it will be arriving in 2-3 weeks if not sooner.



So, great x.x I'm really starting to lose interest in putting so much effort into getting one. Meh, what's another 2-3 weeks, plus however long it takes them to ship it here?



He looks really cuddly; I'm rather bummed it's such a hard time trying to get my paws on one. Oh well. Hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.

Well, it's been a few months since I posted last =P Big surprise there. It's a little past 3 in the morning, and I'm up working on Precal. Ugh, it's driving me insane. I really wish I didn't need this credit.

Robotics EAST 2008 is gearing up quicker then I imagined. I'm not really looking forward to it; it's a lot of work. At the teleconference a few weeks ago, I represented our team, which was fun. I do rather enjoy leading events such as this. We got to ask and discuss a few serious questions to the Robotics competition administrators, and we also asked some silly ones. As teams cycled through the roster and asked any questions they had about the competition, I had the pleasure of asking interesting, and yet somehow still relevant questions regarding weather or not we'd receive a penalty for invalidating the rules of gravity, weather or not we're permitted to attend the competition without pants, etc. Having an, err, interesting track record with this annual competition, we were quickly humorously reminded that Miller (our mascot, a big blue dragon) was NOT to get into any fights this year, and that we're still not allowed to equip armaments to our robot. It's a long story. A very long story. And since I'm half awake, chances are I'll wake up and realize I wrote jibberish in my LiveJournal.

My soldering iron is dead.

I need a new soldering iron! Quickly! Someone bring me one! This is like an artist without his paintbrush!

If you haven't already done so already, bookmark this.

Go otters.

Working my ass off on this PreCal course and feeling like I'm going nowhere. It's been 2 weeks and I'm only on Assignment 2, and I work on this every single day.

Feel like I completely tanked this History test I had today. It fucking sucked, and I barely remembered anything I was supposed to know for it.

Band performance tonight, was just about the only thing I actually had a good time doing today. Oh! And a friend sent me a Christmas card with an otter on it. I was pretty pumped about that.

Had to study for tomorrows Chem test. Shouldn't be hard; acids and bases. Regardless, studying = sux.

English class is BEYOND going down the tubes. It's already down the fucking tubes. Our teacher is so... she's just... it's just that... >< Ugh. She can't teach for SHIT. So far, we watched a movie, wrote a short paper, and read a book. She's supposed to be preparing us for a Provincial Exam. We haven't done ANYTHING of relevance. Students, myself incl, are getting pissed the hell off. Parents are too. The school board is getting involved, and all the complaints from students and parents are getting heard. Some nasty shit is going to go down soon over this. I'll keep you posted.

Computer now refuses to hibernate. Fucker. It doesn't need to sleep anyway.

And bits and pieces of random other stuff made today rather craptastic! Oh, the joy. Firefox says craptastic isn't a word. I think it should be. Don't you?

I've found the cutest picture on the internet! Otter suckling on his tail while sleeping = WIN.

This was taken last week sometime, during the huge snowstorm that we had. It took a bit of work to remove all the snowflakes from the photo in order to show the scenery.


A few weeks ago, there were some deer in my backyard. I couldn't get close, and ended up taking this shot from about 250 ft away, from the window of my house. It required a little touching up to get rid of artifacts and a few incorrectly rendered pixels.


Also, I think this photo looks pretty awesome.

No update in a while x.x Ick.

Got enrolled in a correspondence PreCalculus class; I need the credit to get into a decent engineering program at University. Picked up my materials the other day, and wow, looks a bit overwhelming. Should be able to get through it, though. I've got till the June at the absolute latest to get it all done. Gunna try and pick up my textbooks from my school guidance counselor tomorrow; she said that the library had the one I need, and it would save me 80$ if I just borrowed it from Lockview. Good enough for me! So, hopefully I can get started on this stuff tomorrow.

I finally got and played through Call of Duty 4. Holy crap! It's intense in every single context. The overclocked 7300GT I've got under the hood of this beast runs it fairly well, albeit at a lower resolution then I'dve liked, but meh, can't complain, right? Some seriously wicked parts, especially "Death From Above", if anyone else out there has gotten that far yet. It's a really neat style of gameplay to add to an FPS.

Err, lessee, what else? I'm working on designing and building an amp for a set of bookshelf speakers I picked up a while back. I've got an initial design breadboarded so far, and the mid/high ranges sound really good, but the bass is somewhat distorted, and weak.



I've revised it a number of times since I did the drawing above. I noticed that the transistor wasn't turning fully on, so I added another, smaller buffer transistor to amplify the output signal from the opamp and drive the main transistor harder. This is a basic low power Class-A amp. It's not very powerful, right now it's only giving a few watts, but it's a starting point. I'll keep tinkering with this as time allows.

Father got me a really nice mousepad from work today. It's got one of those gel wrist-rests built into it, and goddamn, it's annoying. It feels really uncomfortable, but I'll probably get used to it. It's fun to fondle and press my fingers into when I'm bored, though!

Dammit, I need to shave tonight. But it's really late, and I'm too fucking tired. I'll do it in the morning. Dammit, I have a timed harmonic minor scale circle test in music first class tomorrow. Dammit, I've got a history paper to present. Dammit, I've got a meeting at 10:20 AM, which means I need to haul my ass out of chemistry and drag myself all the way across the school to sit around and nod my head and smile while I waste valuable chem study time.

On the upside, my grades are doing fairly well:

English 89.0%
Music 98.0%
History 93.3%
Chemistry 93.8%

I know I can do better in chem. I'm aiming for %95+. It's the only real important class, besides the PreCal I'm working on at home, that I have right now. English could use a boost too. Need to keep that average as high as I can for scholarships.

Tired otter, signing off. x.x

It wasn't so bad after all.

We lost power for perhaps 15 hours or so, nothing major. No significant damage, though it was really cool to see the footage of the exploding and burning powerline transformers on the news. Managed to get a few pictures. Nothing really exciting happened though. Bit of a letdown.






































These shots were taken just up the road from my house, about halfway up our hill. You can see for an incredably long distance. Really beautiful in the wintertime, when there are no leaves to block your view. Click for larger image.







Thanks for the warning... You know, those wheelchairs can get loose and attack you if you're not careful.

Today and tomorrow are supposed to be hell. We're getting hit by Hurricane Noel, and as I type this, I can feel the house shaking because of the wind. They're saying it's going to be as bad, if not worse then Hurricane Juan, which left the province in one hell of a mess. We're expected to lose power for a fair amount of time, so if people who know me are reading this, and I'm not online, then this is what's happened.

Aside from that, there was a really cool Halloween party at Erica's on Wednesday. It was SO much fun! I really love hanging out with the gang =)

I've been really down for the past while. Won't bother explaining here, as the power's going to go out soon (or so it feels) and I'd rather not have my post scrapped due to a power failure.

That's it for now

So, after finding an article the other day mentioning how overclockable my low end (nVidia 7300GT, 256MB DDR2) graphics card was, I decided to give it a try myself. Overclocking is easy, as the nVidia nTune program they offer on their site allows direct adjustment of the core and memory speeds. It also gives you warnings in case something's being pushed too hard, and allows you to write short script-like rules defining what to do when such-and-such an event occurs.

Anyway, to benchmark and record data, I used a neat little HDR rendering demo that can be found here. I used FRAPS to record the first 60 seconds and calculate the average frames per second my card would render. I'm not sure of the default settings for the HDR program are the same for every system, or if it dynamically adjusts settings for best performance, but the settings I used were:

--640 x 480 (Windowed, by default)
--4x multisampling

--The Fresnel effect and "Fill inside transparent model" options were enabled.

The card is factory shipped at 350MHz Core / 333MHz Memory. I started by bumping up the core and memory speeds by about 25-30 MHz each. This went well for a bit, but the memory seemed to hit a wall at 439MHz, and wouldn't budge very much after that. Setting it above 439MHz caused instability. The core, however, just kept on going. I managed to get it up to about 630MHz before it started getting slightly unstable as well. Performance slightly started tapering off after the memory got to it's limit, but it didn't hold the card back too much. By looking at the graph below, you can see that performance almost doubled, going from 35 FPS to 63 FPS.



The heat generated by the card is probably what's holding it back, as the stock cooler on the eVGA 7300GT is somewhat skimpy and small. At full load, it reaches a maximum temperature of 83C, that's only about 5C higher then full load at stock speeds.

I found that at 630/439, it was rock solid stable, and I was able to play Unreal Tournament 3 for an hour without any problems whatsoever. The increase is performance is mindblowing; things that were once somewhat choppy and laggy now run nice and smooth. Naturally, I don't keep the card overclocked all the time. When I'm not playing any games or rendering anything, I keep the speeds at default.

Hopefully, overclocking the card will keep it alive at least a little bit longer before it gets too far behind technology to be usable. I also played the Crysis SP demo this morning. Damn.

shiver_raccoon!

Met up with him this afternoon around 1:15 to have some lunch. He's a very cool guy, a really wicked personality =) I hope to meet up with him again someday. We snagged some pizza from a little place beside Sobeys. I didn't really eat that much, as I'd woken up perhaps 30 minutes before I got there, and otter's stomach wasn't too pleased with pizza for brekkist =P

Rain + fallen leaves = pretty

Summer is my favorite time of year, and I really dislike when it starts to go away. It starts becoming cold when you get out of the shower, it becomes a pain to go outside, driving becomes shitty, the toilet seat is always so damn cold, and it means wearing heavier clothing. Bleh.

On a side note, something everyone needs to try: cutting a jawbreaker on a bandsaw.





It inside is quite yummy, especially when eaten from the inside out =) Nom!

*Sigh* I hate facing the inevitable, but summer's gone. I wandered outside for a bit while the power was down today (a tranny on the main road fried, took a few hours to get power back) and observed how bare everything is starting to look. Ick. People that enjoy winter need to be killed until they are DEAD. :P







That's about it for tonight. Played the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare demo the past few days, it's extremely cool. Lots of interesting gameplay. My graphics card is reaching the end of it's lifespan; it's starting to barely play things even with the resolution cranked way down. Might look into finding a cheap 8600GT or 8800GTS 320.

Took these the other day. Just found them on my memory card and decided to upload. It's some random tiny fly I found on my deck outside. He stayed still long enough for me to snap a few shots of.

First off, the Unreal Tournament 3 Beta demo is AWESOME x.x It's wicked! Graphics are extremely vivid and intense, and there are lots of cool stuff to do. Runs fairly well on my machine with low/med gfx. One thing that kills me is that the mouse lags a hell of a lot x.x Response time is terrible, and that really throws gameplay.

Secondly, I made a surround sound setup ^.^ I found an old pair of speakers I used to use, and configured my onboard sound to output Rear L/R channel through one of the jacks. All the jacks are programmable, so you can output or input anything through any one of them, even multiple instances.



So, after a bit of fiddling and running cables, I found that the left and right channels were reversed. The left speaker was on the right, and the right was on the left. I couldn't physically change them, because the cable layout didn't allow it, so I built a small channel inverter. It swaps the left and right channel signals, so now it's all set up right ^.^ The speakers are pretty low quality, but it's still neat to have a full 5.1 surround system.

Also came across a really cool furry DDR game a while ago, and I've been playing it a lot lately. It's addicting. It's called Mungyodance 2, and you can get it here. There's a ton of music, mostly metal/electronica, which is pretty wicked. Here are some quick screenshots I captured:









Need to start sorting collage/university stuff out soon x.x Ugh, I'm already stressing over that.

Anyway, that's all for t'night

Demo got released a few hours ago, I've got my copy downloading! Woohoo! I've been looking forward to this game for over a year now =) Can't wait to try it out!

What am I thankful for? I'm thankful for my family, my friends and fellow furs who mean so much to me. I'm thankful for my education, and for music, which at times is the only thing that keeps me sane.

I'm also thankful for meat. Awrr. <3 meat.

Took a random time lapse of my father and two younger brothers trying to fix the dent in the Civic from where mum had the accident. My bedroom window is high enough up that they couldn't see the webcam. I showed it to them after, first thing Dad said was "This better not show up on YouTube". So naturally, here it is. Crappy quality, thanks to the cheapo image sensor.



And a photo from this morning:

I'll explain the title later.

Today was interesting.

Me, Shugo and Moon_Dog decided to all hang out today. So, I drove over to his apartment for around 1:30. Wasn't really a hard place to find, but like I mentioned in an earlier post: Halifax = Cheese. We hung out for an hour or so, but the movie we wanted to see ("The Game Plan", which was wicked, btw) didn't start till 6:50, so we had a fair amount of time to kill. We piled into Moon_Dog's Jeep and headed over to buy tickets.

After making sure that was out of the way, we walked over and wandered around Sobeys for a bit. Then, we hit Zellers. We found an awesome sofa on display with the sort of material that, if you rub it in a certain direction, it becomes lighter/darker. We wrote 'Yiff' in large letters on the back of the sofa before we left =) We also found a bunch of Halloween costumes, and played around with those for a bit. We eventually bought a large box of candy, one of those Halloween packs with Areo / Kit Kat / Coffee Crisp and Smarties. 100 in total. Was on sale for 5$ :3 We eventually smuggled it into the theatre.

We had a discussion about dumpster diving, and decided to see if any of the local stores had thrown anything cool out lately, so we headed around back to take a look. Me and Shugo found a pair of very large styrofoam rods, and started to swordfight with them. Moon_Dog suddenly spotted an employee coming towards us who didn't look too happy, so we quickly removed ourselves from the area.

After that, I think we went to Subway for some eats. We hung out there for a bit until it started getting close to movie time. When we arrived back at the theatre, there was still about half an hour to spare, so we played around in the arcade.

The movie wasn't bad at all. It has The Rock in it, and it's fairly well done. A lot of the football action scenes are filmed via high speed camera, and they put it to good use. It was a little over 2hr long. When we got out, it was about 9:00. We arrived back at Shugo's around 9:30, and just lounged around and listened to music and stuff together till we had to leave. At one point, we were all lying in his bed eating the rest of the candy we bought, and I think I fell asleep. We had so much damn chocolate. 100 bars split between 3 furs is still 33 bars / fur. I can't remember much. I managed to get home for 12:00 on the dot.

So, here I sit, about to hit the sack, getting extremely tired because of the medication I took. I'll probably wake up around 2:00 tomorrow. Today was such a busy day. We were all over the place. I wish I brought my camera, but I'd forgotten it at home. I've currently got a time lapse recording going just outside my window. It's been taking one shot every 6 seconds for the past 2 days, and I plan to do 5 more days for an entire week. Then, she'll get strung together and YouTube'd. Looks good so far.

Ugh, so tired. Gunna sleep now, will prolly post more tomorrow. Pce!