Crimmus

Well, we had another good holiday weekend at our complex. So nice to be among
friends so far away from home. Or perhaps misery just loves company! Hah.
We played a nice game of whiffle ball first thing Christmas morning. That’s
Chris about to miss the ball. Err, I mean smack it halfway to Saipan.

And Pablo up to bat.

We started drinking about 3pm and then we had to deep fry a turkey.

At which time, Chris decided it would be best to rock out Uke-style while the
bird absorbed 2 gallons of peanut oil goodness.

We then had a marvelous feast at Sean and Julie’s! Emily then drafted each of us at different times to play.

Wait for it…

Hungry-Hungry Hippos®! (Vince took one for the team and went
first.)

Then Pablo caved.

Then Zoe got to open all her presents!

Mr. Alligator there was manufactured of the highest quality ballistic nylon
and kevlar. He was to last for at least months, perhaps years. He will be laid to rest as all
others have been, in the trash can of victory. He is survived by The Mystery
Man, The Vet (pictured above), Mister Puffins, and several other nondescript doggie
toys missing various appendages.

–dan

It’s Alive (It’s Alive)

So I’ve finally made some time to geek around with some miscellaneous projects
I had haunting me. This one is a Linksys WRT54G. This is a wireless (802.11b/g)
access point / router that had some public code associated with it. Suffice to
say, the box was developed with a Linux kernel and some nice folks have developed
a new firmware for the device that allows one to do all kinds of neat stuff, including
cranking the power from 25mW to 250mW. ‘Course if you want to do that, you’ll
need to cool that chip down, cuz it gets EXTREMELY hot, even at 25mW. You may
start a fire if you dont have a heat sink on there.

If you’re interested in doing this, just stay away from the version 5 routers
(those with "CDFB…" on the model number on the outside of the box).
Most of the others that are still available are CDFB’s or CDFA’s. The CDFA is
the version 4 that is pictured here.

Before…

After heatsink mod…

…and the finished product with cooler…

The firmware I chose was DD-WRT - http://www.dd-wrt.com/.
They have a Wiki
set up, and I encourage all would-be modders to RTFM, lest you have a $60 doorstop
on your hands :-).