...stuff I do and things I like...

at the Cast Workshop SmartCards und Bezahlsysteme here in Darmstadt. Looking forward to visit my employer of my undergrad days (Fraunhofer IGD).

...now it fully supports the Huawai E220.

Finally CradlePoint updated the firmware for their mobile access point PHS300 that bridges your GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA USB device to wireless lan. The PHS300 supported the E220 already but it was not as nice as it could have been. Now it works like a charm. I can have my E220 plugged into the PHS and just need to flick the switch to have Internet access a couple of seconds later. Some other features they added are: support for a SIM pin and display of the GSM signal strength.

After this firmware upgrade the PHS300 is a really good piece of hardware that was totally worth the money.

I was at Media Markt (in Weiterstadt) this morning to buy some stuff and not only they have a Apple shop now they even had an iPhone 3G for everyone to play with (black version). I had 5 minutes with the device and I must say I kind of like it. Maybe I really buy one with out contract and sim lock from Belgium.

I just came back from Aldi (Darmstadt) without a new netbook and I even got there before 8am. They only had about 10 pieces of hardware and almost everybody in line before me got a black version. When it was my turn there was only one sliver version left. So I left. I probably just buy a real MSI Wind. Just 3-4 weeks of waiting.

This is so funny, I never had the Aldi computer/laptop buying experience before. I especially enjoyed the upset people behind me in line.

so heute war es endlich so weit, ich wurde beim Fahren mit dem RMV Handy Ticket kontrolliert. Das lustige daran war aber eher die Tatsache das das Ticket nicht kontrolliert wurde. Der Kontrolleur sagte nur er sehe das Handy Ticket heute zum ersten Mal und es waehre schon OK. Er wollte nicht mal sehen was das Display anzeigt, ich hab es ihm dann trotzdem unter die Nase gehalten. Ich warte ja seit zwei Monaten drauf mal kontrolliert zu werden und jetzt das. Joe wurde wohl in Frankfurt schon oefter kontrolliert mit dem Handy Ticket. Von ihm weiss ich das es wohl eine optisches Lesegeraet gibt mit dem der Kontrolleur den 2D-Barcode von dem Handy Display ablesen kann und so das Ticket zu verifizieren. Laut Joe hat das bis jetzt noch nie geklappt. Das hat ihm der Kontrolleur wohl jedesmal auch gesagt das das mit dem ablesen nicht klappt. Aber meistens haben die Kontrolleure wohl kein Lesegeraet dabei.

Echt ne super Sache dieses RMV Handy Ticket.

Over the last weekend I finally managed to setup my RaidSonic NAS-4220B. Now it runs OpenWRT ported by this guy. I only added a few kernel options (cryptoloop, md, and raid1) and added the mdadm utility (raid config utility). You probably ask why I use cryptoloop and not dm_crypt. The box has hardware acceleration for AES but this is only implemented for IPSEC and LOOPAES. So now I run LOOPAES on top of RAID1. The performance is not very good but this is due to my tests using scp to copy files to and from the NAS. I only get 1.1MB/s. CPU is maxed out on the NAS while the copy process is running. Since the box will be doing automated backups over a DSL line this is fast enough (faster than the downstream of the DSL line).

Some notes: I have two 500GB disks in the box, when I tryed to create a ext2 file system on the disk I got an out of memory error from mke2fs. This is due to the fact that the NAS-4220 really runs low on memory (10M free). The easiest fix was to hook up a USB disk and use that for swap space just until the file system is created :-)

I'm not completely done yet with the setup lets see what other surprises there are for me.

I was kind of excited when the OpenMoko was originally announced so I thought I would of course buy one but somehow the OpenMoko can't compete with current phones. Especially the fact that it only has GPRS is really sad/stupid. I would pay up to 50 Euro more for UMTS and maybe even 100 Euro more for HSDPA. This is because the phone (voice) functionality for me is secondary only. I want data connectivity like I have with my Nokia N810 but just with one device. I'm carrying multiple devices now to have good connectivity and there is no reason to switch out the phone part. I know having a completely open source mobile phone is really cool but people are not willing to make sacrifices the FreeRunner is big and bulky and has bad phone connectivity.

Actually I'm really thinking about moving to Apple hardware maybe even an iPhone 3G.

OpenMoko FreeRunner shop.