My router is running linux

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, linux, software

tomato_linux_router.jpg

Its no secret, I like to install Linux on things that should be running Linux, like my iPod.

My friend at work, Stephen, recently told me about installing Linux on a linksys router. To be honest, I looked into my router in the past, but it was years ago, and required soldering wires and things inside of it. I don’t have the best luck when it comes to hardware mods, so I didn’t do it.

Stephen turned me on to a new Linux based firmware for older linksys routers called “Tomato”.

Tomato is a 3rd party firmware that voids the warranty on your router, but lets you do some awesome stuff you weren’t able to do with the original firmware.

It took all of about 5 minutes to download the firmware and reflash my router with it. You can get a copy of it at http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

The interface is ajax based and really clean. Because its all powered with ajax, there is some really cool monitoring features, like real time bandwidth monitoring (flash movie)

If you have a weak wifi signal from your router, you can use the tomato firmware to crank up the output of the signal.

All in all you turn your $50 router into a $500 router with this open source firmware.

You have to have a Linksys WRT54G, version v1-v4. Newer ones are v5, so before upgrading be sure to check yours.

If you aren’t a big geek, this mod is kind of useless, but how awesome is it to say that you are running Linux in your router.

Who is listening to your iTunes?

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

sharing_itunes.gif

If you use iTunes while your computer is hooked to a network (work, dorms, and coffee shops are good examples), you can share your iTunes with other people. This feature has been around for a long time in iTunes. Something that isn’t included is the ability to see how many, and who is listening to your music.

I did a little bit of searching an found that iTunes uses port 3689 to share music on. Reaching back into my DOS days, I came up with this:

press the windows key + r
enter “cmd” and press enter
at the prompt type:
netstat | find “:3689”

you will get a listing of all the computers connected to your iTunes. A useless but interesting trick.

If you are running a mac, I’m sure you can do the same thing but with grep.

cfdump in php!

By Josh Highland in coldfusion, internet, php, software, tutorials, web 2.0

At work, I write ColdFusion, at home I write PHP. I bounce back and forth between worlds. Jack of all trades, master of none I guess.

One thing that I have always loved about ColdFusion is the cfdump tag. You feed it any variable, and it will spit out whats in it. Struct, String, Array, Query, Object, XML, it doesnt matter, it just works. I would go as far to say that its one of the best native debugging resources I have ever seen in a web development language.

In PHP, you can do a print_r() and look at the source, but that is no where as cool as cfdump. I have longed for a cfdump style resource to be available in PHP. Today I got my wish when I stumbled upon “dBug”. http://dbug.ospinto.com

dBug is a small PHP class that duplicates the cfdump tag from ColdFusion

look how simple it is to use:

include_once("dBug.php");
new dBug($myVariable);

The output looks like this:
phpdump.gif

dBug will handle anything you throw at it, just like cfdump does. This is going to help me so much in the future. If you develop in PHP, I think that this class is a must have in your tool kit.

dBug is free! get it today from http://dbug.ospinto.com

Free notpopular.com blogs

By Josh Highland in web 2.0

I have been really happy with this new blog software. So happy that I want to give you your very own blog account on the notpop network.

If you’re interested, please send me an email to joshhighland {at} gmail {dot} com and we can make it happen for you.

You blog account would be in the form of notpopular.com/blogs/YOUR_NAME_HERE

Its free, what do you have to lose?

gmail, the spam fighter

By Josh Highland in web 2.0

spam.jpg

Some people fear google and their awesome power over the internet. I however, love Google and praise them for what they are going.

I have had a gmail account for some time, but before that I had a personal email address associated with my domain name. Over the last 5 years, my personal email has become useless due to spam. Spam is the price of running a popular (or in this case, a notPopular) website.

I dont know how many times people have sent me something and it just gets lost in the flood of spam.
enter gmail

gmail has an awesome feature that allows you to check you existing email through the gmail service. As an added bonus (the part that excites me the most), they have an awesome spam filter.

From my tests, google catches 90% of the spam that gets sent to me. 20-30 pieces of spam a day is much better then 200-300. On top of that I can check my gmail from my phone or any computer I want.

I highly suggest you filter your pop3 based emails through gmail. Sorry AOL users, AOL doesnt offer pop3 access, so no gmail for you 🙁