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

the day started with heavy rain and no network, first we thought the power cable hub got wet and the fuse blew but somebody just unplugged us. We went to listen to two talks which were quite ok. Especially fun was Frank and Fefes FNORD news as known from the CCC congresses.

All together is was a very very nice and cool event. We had a stable and fast Internet connection, working IPv6 (used it every day). The wireless network worked (for me) only on day -1 and 0 but I saw many people using it so maybe this was a local issue.

Anyway the whole thing was a big success!

The slides from my talk on PocketPC exploits at What The Hack! can be downloaded from my PocketPC section.

nothing happened on day 2 ... no not really but I was too lazy :)

Today I held my talk at 12:00am, first I had some ugly X problems which took my first 15 minutes of my time. After that it went quite well. The tent was packed with people (but I guess not all the 1000 seats where taken).

Later Martin and I will we interviewed by Deutschlandfunk. This should be broadcasted somewhere between 16:30 and 18:00 today (live).

day one was really nice, a lot of sun with only one big rain shower at around 21:00. I saw one talk (Symbian Security) which was quite interesting. Pictures are at Simon's blog.

So we arrived at the campsite yesterday. Haven't done much but installing a webcam.

More to come...

Yesterday I found this thing in a computer hardware store and just had to buy it. If you wonder what this thing is, it is a massage ball. It's for your neck, shoulder or feet. It is quite nice and 10 Euro is cheep enough for a use once gadget. Here is the link to it at USBGEEK. I also connected it to the PMA400 but it turns off every few minutes because the PMA goes into standby because the device only get power from USB and doesn't register with the host controller.

Anyway, lets see how fast it breaks...

is a other cool Linux device I found today - ok it was brought to my attention by Slashdot. The Zipit is a low end Linux device for instant messaging, chatting etc. Something I can all ready do with my PDAs, but it seems that you can easily modify the firmware aka hack it! LinuxDevices has a nice article about it.

This could be a damn cheep ($99) piece of ARM hardware to play with. Maybe I will get one when I'm back in the US.

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based cellphone (something I all ways wanted to have). I just found a nice article on Symlink.ch which has some very interesting details about the device. I especially like the telnet server without root password and the SAMBA server which shares / (root directory).

Will this be the next big thing for Linux hackers?

I guess the phone is as secure as any other embedded Linux device, where everything runs as root.

I recently got my hands on an Archos PMA400 (Pocket Media Assistant), a Linux based portable media player. The hardware of this device is really cool check it out: 30GB harddisk, WiFi, USB client, USB host and infrared (IrDA). The whole thing is powered by a Ti-OMAP processor and 64MB ram.

In my opinion the device really qualifies to be a true hacker Linux device, the USB host controller especially pushes this point! In general it allows one to connect any kind of USB device to the PMA, which is totally cool (I never saw something like this on any other mobile device). Just for fun I connected a keyboard and it worked immediately (makes life easer when examining the device through a console). Also my Bluetooth adapter got recognized, but the userspace applications are missing (which you can install your self with little hassle).

The device runs a 2.4.19 kernel and Qtopia 1.7 for the UI. Qtopia also provides a whole PIM suite which makes the device much more then a media player.

Archos also released an SDK and the source for the device, but as far as I know the boot loader only loads the original preinstalled and singed kernel image, so running your own kernel takes a little more then just replacing the kernel image.

Quite a few people all ready ported OpenZaurus software packages to the PMA400 (need to change the filesystem layout inside the packages). Just Google.

As soon as I have some valuable output I will post the results.