Staring at the Sun.

Of course I’m not staring at the sun, that’s dangerous and could damage your eye sight. Now I’ve said it, but there is no need for the stupid amongst you to go outside and see if it’s actually true. My own eyes are bad enough as it is, mainly because I was born with sub par eye sight, but I guess years if staring at computer screens has also taken its toll.

Then why am I’m referring to the sun? The reason why I’m rambling on about the sun is that yesterday we saw the first real hot summer day here in Oslo - at least the first one I’ve noticed. Despite being a nerd, I like the sun - since it’s one of the main reason we’re able to stay alive and stuff - so I took the opportunity to take a walk downtown to buy something we all need from time to time: New socks. Exciting!

But I also spent a little money on a little something I’ve been meaning to get for a long, long time. Over the three last years, I’ve been slowly buying speakers for my 5.1 surround system. First two great Dali Blue 5005 front speakers, then two budget Proson rear speakers, a Dali Concept Center and now my surround system is finally complete with a marvelous Dali Concept Sub. It’s really a great piece of Danish engineering - you can’t really tell it’s there until you turn it off and a lot of the dynamics in the sound suddenly disappears. It’s present in the audio without dominating it, but it’s still able to deliver that extra “omph” when necessary.

No, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I like to pretend I do.

For Sale: GTA IV compatible game console!

Yes, I’m at it again, selling stuff off my site. This time I’m letting go of my Xbox 360, all the extra hardware I’ve bought for it and every single game!

This is what you’ll get:

• Xbox 360 console with 20GB harddrive, wireless controller, headset with microphone and all the cables you need to hook the console up to your TV and stereo.
• Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel with force feedback. Supports both the Xbox and the PC platform.
• Xbox 360 Memory Unit (64 MB)
• Xbox 360 Quick Charge Kit with one rechargeable battery that’ll fit in both the racing wheel and the wireless controller.

You’ll also get these 14 high quality games:

• Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock (with guitar - this game is bought at Platekompaniet and still sealed, so you can go to the store and exchange it for something else if you want to).
• Battlefield 2 Modern Combat
• Need for Speed ProStreet
• Need for Speed Carbon
• Kane & Lynch Dead Men
• NASCAR 08
• Test Drive Unlimited
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Project Gotham Racing 4
• Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars
• Saints Row
• Forza 2 Motorsport
• Colin McRae Dirt
• The Orange Box

All this is yours for a mere 6995 NOK! That’s over 500 NOK off the price I’m advertising elsewhere on the interweb. Why? Special price for you, my friend.

Because of the size of the bundle it’s preferable that you can come pick up everything in the Oslo area, but I can of course ship worldwide at the buyer’s expense.

Grab it now before it’s too late!

Victory!

After having fought with my Linksys router and wireless access point for three weekends I can finally declare victory. I’ve got the wireless repeater bridge working with WPA encryption! Not thanks to Linksys, but thanks to dd-wrt.

There is one challenge left, though: Because of the fuse box right next to the router, quite a lot of network capacity is lost because of interference. In the living room the download speed ranges from 3 to 5 megabits per second - it doesn’t matter if I connect to the wireless repeater in the living room or the router in the hallway - right next to the router in the hallway the download speed is between 10 and 13 megabits per second.

Right now I consider it a small annoyance because what matters is that I have a wireless repeater bridge that works. It might be possible to move the router so that the fuse box is not interfering that much with the signal and it might even be some tweaks I can activate in the dd-wrt firmware that will help.

Since I struggled for so long to get it to work, the remainder of this post will contain a guide of sorts on how you can set up a wireless repeater bridge yourself. Yes, it’s going to be technical. Continue reading "Victory!"

Living.

It’s been an interesting week. Well, perhaps not as much interesting as exhausting. We had a major release for a client today - how anyone want to have a release on a Friday is beyond me, but what do I know - and unfortunately for me it turned out to be a little bit more work than we were expecting. So I pulled 60+ hours this week, way too much for my liking.

Because of that, I have not been able to run at all since Tuesday, meaning that I have to run four days in a row now to make up for lost time. It’s probably not very efficient exercise since it won’t allow any days off for restitution, but I still feel I have to do it to keep my promise to myself to run every other day.

This weekend I have to get the Linksys mess in order or both VBOX and the Xbox 360 goes offline. Good luck to me. If i fail again, perhaps I’ll just have to put the money on the counter for a D-Link setup instead. I certainly hope not, because the Linksys equipment set me back enough.

Bridge.

I’m still struggling with the crappy Linksys equipment I bought. Even with dd-wrt installed, I’m unable to get the WAP54G to work as a repeater bridge for the WRT54GL. I do get frustrated some times and when I have to wrestle with stuff this much to get it to work I get really frustrated. I only have a week left to get it to work, next Monday the internet connection in the living room is shut down and replaced by a connection in the hallway.

If I’m still unable to get the repeater bridge to work properly, I’m stuck with a lousy wireless signal in the living room and both the Xbox 360 and VBOX without an internet connection.

Crap.

Another frustrating thing these days is work. This weekend I have constantly been interrupted by work related stuff and I’m getting really tired of this 24/7 availability bullshit. I also suspect that next week will see some inhumane work load, and that doesn’t help either.