Lee.org

I just signed up for an Alaska Airlines Bank of America credit card. I looked over the literature I got about fees and only after a third look was I able to find the annual fee because of this evil page break:

That is uncool, Bank of America.

You see, about 2 years ago, new consumer protection laws went into effect, making it so that credit card companies were required to inform customers very clearly as to what fees they would be charged. This is the first I’ve seen of credit cards trying to chip away at that law.

Short form: I changed from the excellent Tomato firmware on my Linksys WRT54GL to Toastman Tomato in order to get IP based bandwidth monitoring. It works great!

Long form:
I’ve been using the excellent Tomato firmware on my Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 router since 2009. It was easy to install and has worked flawlessly. My router now provides service for about 30 devices, many are not under my direct control. I wanted to get IP bandwidth stats so I could tell, on those infrequent occasions when the internet was running slow, who was sucking up all the bandwidth.

I looked around a lot, comparing the open source router firmware: DD-WRT, OpenWRT, TomatoUSB, EasyTomato, Shibby, Toastman, pfsense,

I bought a new router, a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND v 1.10. I installed OpenWRT (version: Attitude Adjustment 12.09-beta2). I had a little trouble with it. I tried installing the bandwidthd mod and I had a little trouble with the wifi on the router locking up every few minutes.

How I installed OpenWRT

After spending an hour reading the manuals, installation was way simple
* fetch the firmware mentioned in the hardware-specific documentation
* install the firmware by “upgrading” the router from Tomato. 3 clicks total
* tada, the router mostly “just works”
* enable wifi (the documentation clearly mentions that wifi is turned off by default), 3 clicks “enable wifi on the LAN, on the WAN, Submit!)
* tada, the router is totally working

To install Bandwidthd
* I tried using the web interface something wasn’t working right. I tried to jump-start Bandwidthd from within the ssh interfce but nuthun doin. So I uninstalled it from the web interface and the couple commands mentioned at the top of the Bandwidthd documentation from the ssh interface
* I then went to http://192.168.1.1/bandwidthd and darn if stats weren’t magically showing up!
* I noticed there was trouble with my wifi dying unexpectedly. I uninstalled bandwidthd and the wifi seemed more stable. I got bored trying to fiddle with it and switched to trying to install another router firmware. I’m glad I now had a backup router in the TP-Link, just in case.

Having given up on OpenWRT, I looked to mods of the Tomato firmware. Here’s what I found:
* Tomato hasn’t been updated since around 2009
* TomatoUSB hasn’t been updated since around 2011. And it doesn’t have the bandwidth monitoring I wanted anyway
* pfsense is far too complex to install and run
* Toastman Tomato looked good so I gave it a go

Having Temporarily Given Up On OpenWRT, I Tried Toastman Tomato

Toastman Tomato has the built in IP bandwidth stats I was looking for. It was confusing trying to find the right firmware to download. But I found Toastman answering my exact question online, “I have a WRT54GL v1.1, what version do I want to install?” His answer, “You have a Linksys WRT54GL which does not have a USB port. It is a MIPSR1 router. You should load 1.28.7626.1 BETA. Use the std build. 7628.1 is also good, but has a more complex interface for setting up VLAN’s, which you probably don’t need.” I took that and went to Toastman’s 4shared.com site and downloaded tomato-WRT54G_WRT54GL-1.28.7634Toastman-IPT-ND-Std.bin. I upgraded my router with that firmware and BAM!! It all just worked! It even imported all my old Tomato settings!

Here is a local copy of the Toastman Tomato that I use.
http://lee.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tomato-WRT54G_WRT54GL-1.28.7634Toastman-IPT-ND-Std.bin

The Crucible has the chance to win a $25,000 grant from State Farm for our Bike Program, and you can help. All you have to do is vote on Facebook every day between today and April 22.

Click here to vote  on State Farm’s Facebook App. (You’ll have to give the application permissions, but only the first time.) After that, all you have to do is click “vote” to lend your support for Bikes for West Oakland, and it’s super easy to click 10 times in a row.

The Crucible’s Bike Program serves our West Oakland community with Bike Fix-a-Thons, Earn-a-Bike, Art Bike, and a drop-in repair times. This year six Bike Fix-a-Thons will enable at least 300 of our neighbors to access free repairs. 20 students in Earn-a-Bike will learn how to weld and explore other industrial arts in order to fabricate two bicycles and keep one — bikes are donated to community organizations and toy drives or sold to support the program. And Art Bike participants conceive and create unique artworks from frame to finished project.

The Crucible’s Bike Program was one of 200 causes (from over 3,000 entries) selected, which is a huge honor, and we only get funded if we reach the top 40. So please take a second to vote (or 10 seconds to vote 10 times), share with your friends, and check out The Crucible’s Bike Program in person soon — there’s something here for everybody.

Thanks!

If you want to join me at to a free weekly yoga session each Wednesday morning at The Crucible in Oakland (conveniently 2 blocks from West Oakland BART), send me an email. This isn’t open to the public but if you’re a friend, you’re welcome.

A little bit about the sessions:
Run by Roxanna Shohadaee, doing Vinyasa Yoga, there is music and the room is lightly heated. I’ve been twice and quite enjoyed it.

I was introduced to one of the flame effects designers of the Festa del Fuoco di Stromboli through the Crucible. This is a yearly fire arts festival held on an Europe’s most active volcano! Nicholas and I talked shop a bit and now he’s shown me some videos and stills of the festival. They gave me a big smile!

Let me show you:

Festa del Fuoco di Stromboli Facebook page

Me being a fire and machine nerd, I liked watching the clock (it really works!) in the background starting at 2:20. And the flaming stars work nicely!

More pix on their website

The Feedly RSS Reader for Chrome should not be trusted. Since they are cheating to get signups, it’s impossible to say what other bad things they are doing behind the scenes with your data.

——————

The face of spam keeps changing. It used to be email, then blog comments, now it’s comment stuffing (as in “ballot stuffing”). Look at this screenshot and tell me what you think looks fishy:

Let me give you a hint, the exact same comment was repeated word-for-word by over 40 different people in the review section of this Chrome Extension.

I know it’s a near impossible task, but you should always be on the lookout for fake people (AKA Sockpuppets) recommending products. I reported this incident to Google but it’s happened a lot before and it will happen a lot in the future.

An Obituary for CELLspace (via) Go to the original site for pix and other good writings!

CELLspace, community arts center, closed its doors at the end of 2012.

During the late 90s and early aughts, there was no better place to see the Mission District’s artistic, multicultural vibe than CELLspace. San Francisco prankster Chicken John was known to decorate the 10,000 square foot warehouse as a Las Vegas casino; the Flaming Lotus Girls created their first large scale fire installations in the CELLspace Metal Shop, and during Carnaval, the space would burst at the seams from the ritual drumming, colorful rattling costumes and sheer number of teenagers involved in groups like Loco Bloco and Danza Azteca.

Michael Sturtz was so impressed by CELLspace that he named his industrial arts school, The Crucible, after their art gallery.

“The name was inspired by the Crucible Steel Gallery, which was the CELLspace gallery at the time,” he said.
Continue reading ‘RIP CELLSpace’ »

This is completely amazing, my good friend Molly Carocci has received the highest honor possible for a civilian, she has been appointed Poet Laureate of Cheese Weasel Day by the esteemed Cheese Weasel committee!

Visit CheeseWeaselDay.com to read the whole story!

I’m honored to see that the esteemed committee discovered Molly’s poetic talents from my own blog!

Over the last 4 months or so, I have gotten about 2 comment spams total on my blog. This is down from about 5 per day with Akismet and a number of other anti-spam measures. I am very happy with this solution. Here is how:

1. I installed NoSpamNX
2. I set NoSpamNX to Match Substrings “http://” and “https://”
3. I put a note in my comment file telling users “Do not write “http://” in your comment, it will be blocked.”

Done!

Real users figure out that they can write things like “lee.org” instead of “http://lee.org”. When comments come in, I go in and manually edit valid links. I’m fine with that because I want to review any links anyway before allowing it on my site.

Join me for the Crucible’s spring open house, it’s free! 10a-4p this Saturday April 6th.
Email me! Check out the online flyer.