http://biot.com/blog Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:48:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I read a review of a new book called Ultimatum. It seems interesting -- it's an eco-thriller set in the future -- so I thought I'd buy it. Now I switched to ebooks some time ago; I don't read books on dead trees anymore. I use an ebook reader I bought ... http://biot.com/blog/ultimatum I live in Belgium, where internet access is sadly very expensive (around €45 per month), and always limited by volume, generally around 25GB per month. If you transfer more, you get charged €1 per GB extra. That may sound insane, and it is -- such limits simply can't exist in ... http://biot.com/blog/belgacoms-attack-on-the-belgian-broadband-market ...to the sound of a webserver in trouble. I run an update service for a software company. They need to distribute software and data updates to their existing customers, and were tired of endlessly burning and mailing out DVDs. So I set up a web service and made a nice ... http://biot.com/blog/woke-up-this-morning My current media center settop box is the Popcorn Hour A-110. It's a very small box, and it's mostly empty at that: 2/3 of the box is space where you can plug in a SATA hard disk. I bought it because my previous media center, an original Xbox running XBMC, ... http://biot.com/blog/the-problem-with-current-hd-media-centers My car has a built-in navigation system with a couple of really annoying nanny features. It wants me to read an inane legal disclaimer and hit "I Agree" on the touch screen every time the car starts, and it won't let me select new destinations, or dial a phone number, ... http://biot.com/blog/navigation-dvd-hacking The linux kernel has a facility called "usbmon" which can be used to sniff the USB bus. It's been in there for ages, and the output is really easy to collect, even from the command line shell. Simply mount debugfs and insmod the usbmon module: mount -t debugfs none_debugs /sys/kernel/debug modprobe usbmon Then ... http://biot.com/blog/usb-sniffing-on-linux