• Reboot the computer and hold down the trackpad button while booting. Disk will eject.

That didn’t work. This is what did work (somehow) and it’s scarcely mentioned online:

• Reboot the computer and hold down the ‘D’ key while booting. Disk will eject. You will be overjoyed.

The D key is normally used to tell the computer to read the install disk in the DVD drive and boot into hardware test mode. System profiler says that the Macbook doesn’t have an optical drive which is why I assume the first method doesn’t work. I hope this helps you.

1. Unlocked the stock bootloader
2. Rooted it
3. Flashed the Amon_RA recovery image
4. Flashed the Froyo radio image
5. Flashed the FRF50 test ROM
6. Flashed the FRF72 update
7. Updated the kernel (to fix wifi)

In my repeater post, I mentioned that I had a La Fonera I was planning on flashing next. Fon routers can be tricky; they phone home to determine if there’s new firmware to be installed and then upgrade automatically. If you’re not careful, it’ll patch all of its security holes before you get a chance to hack it.

I had two La Foneras on hand. One was new-in-box and, from my memory, quite a few years old. The other I snagged from the donor gear table at Crash Space last week. I figured if I was putting in the effort to flash one I might as well do two (and then return it new and improved). I followed DD-WRT’s flashing guide and ran into a few different hurdles along the way.

I plugged in the Crash Space La Fonera first and connected. By default, Foneras have an SSID of MyPlace with the WPA password set to the serial number. The status page said the firmware version was 0.7.1 r2. The first step in flashing is getting the SSH daemon started. For a firmware this new, you have to make the router connect to your spoofed RADIUS server in order to launch SSHD. Luckily, the folks at datenbruch.de developed the kolofonium method. I pointed my router at their DNS, 188.40.206.43 at time of writing. When the Fonera attempted to connect to Fon it used the datenbruch RADIUS server instead and launched SSHD. The rest of the flashing process went ahead normally. The last thing I had to do was update the boot script since it has changed in v24 RC7 and later.

The new-in-box router had firmware 0.7.0 r4. Older Fon firmware like this only require a simple script injection in the admin interface to start SSHD. The rest of the flashing procedure was the same.

I’m glad I’ve got these two devices flashed to DD-WRT, a much more fun firmware than stock. The only disappointment was discovering that this version of DD-WRT doesn’t support repeater mode, just client.

I received my DSO Nano from Seeed Studio a couple days ago. It’s a digital storage oscilloscope with the form factor of a cheap media player. Justblair has an excellent review of the device. Blair had a beta version of the device though so I wanted to document the very few changes present in the production version.

The packaging for the device is excellent. It’s a clear knockoff of iPhone style packaging and although the quality isn’t quite Apple good it’s refreshing to see an open source device with such a nice box!

The battery still requires user installation, but it now has a plug so soldering is no longer required.

Blair’s unit didn’t have the on/off slider; this one does.

The provided probes are round hook style and not the tweezers that came with the beta. Ian discussed the two different styles in his Bus Pirate cable How-to. The DSO also comes with a pair of loose alligator clips.

Finally, they’ve added a nice embossed storage bag for keeping everything together.

The Linksys WRT54G has always been one of my favorite hacking targets. It’s a wireless 802.11b/g router that originally ran Linux as its OS. Later in life this was switched to non-open VxWorks. Linksys continued to produce a Linux compatible version of the router called the WRT54GL. I believe the one pictured above was originally a Fon purchased during the transition. When I first started playing with the WRT, it was to steal internet in a new apartment while I waited for my actual connection to be installed. I was using it in client bridge mode which means it would connect via WiFi to the remote access point and serve the connection to anything on the wired ports (one of which was another WRT).

I recently dug the router out because a friend is in a similar situation. I installed the latest version of DD-WRT and discovered that it has learned a new trick. In addition to ‘client’ and ‘client bridge’ mode—bridge means the connection isn’t NAT’d—DD-WRT now has ‘repeater’ and ‘repeater bridge’ mode. The router will attach to the access point of your choice and then rebroadcast the signal as the SSID of your choosing. You do this by setting up a virtual wireless interface. I followed these instructions for setting up a universal wireless repeater. The only problem I ran into was connecting to my Airport Extreme which uses WPA2… and AES (not TKIP) by default. It has been very hard to verify that fact though. Once I figured that out, it worked just as expected. I haven’t tested it outside of my apartment yet. Next up is putting DD-WRT on a new-in-box La Fonera; it’s slightly more involved than uploading new firmware to a web interface. I’ve done it before, but it’s just no fun.

The last few Tuesdays a few people from Hacker Drinkup have been coming by my apartment to work on projects. The first Tuesday, Scott and Wil assembled some Freeduino SBs. The Freeduino is HVW Technologies’ Arduino compatible development board. I first came across it at Maker Faire a couple years ago and purchased one for Hack a Day to review. It’s got some nice features, but my current favorite Arduino clone is the Seeeduino.

The next week, Scott brought over a couple power line communication devices. The Netgear XE104 is 4-port switch and the XE102 has a single port. The PLC devices connect to each other over your home’s wiring to create a network. By the very nature of home wiring, this network behaves like a layer 2 hub. It’s unswitched allowing you to sniff all traffic on the network. Circuit breakers don’t necessarily filter the signal either which means anyone else in the building will be able to join your network. The HomePlug AV spec supports encryption, but all devices come from factory with the same key for interoperability. I first learned about PLC hacking at CCC where the FAIFA suite was introduced. It will help you configure Intellon based devices (the XE104 has an Intellon 5500 chip).

I first saw this video via Twitter and wanted to know more. Hack a Day had posted about it the same day, but didn’t have any additional information. I asked my friend Fabienne to take a look since I don’t speak German. She was able to dig up some more details.

Peter Ablinger composed the piece “Deus, cantando” (God, singing) for the World Venice Forum 2009. There isn’t much detail on the installation, but the composer used this automatic piano for an earlier piece. The “display-window piece” used the piano to reproduce street sounds captured outside of a display window. The piano was designed by Winfried Ritsch (who does DSP research) and constructed with the help of Peter Pessas. The software was developed by IEM Graz, Thomas Musil. From the video id appears to be Pd. It samples the waveform and then reconstructs it using the piano.

Astera has transcribed the video and provided a translated version:

Got it? Probably not – but we can easily change that.

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. ‘Wien Modern’ was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, it’s partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously aren’t normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrom of the child’s voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something – the voice, in this case -, in individual ‘pixels’, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

Things have been going pretty well:

I ended up eating with three different friends of mine over the course of the weekend. I don’t see any of them nearly enough; it was good to catch up.

Hack a Day’s owner, Mahalo, launched their new Mahalo Answers product. It’s similar to other answer services, but allows you to offer real money tips and embed content. I’ve really enjoyed participating in the service. I’m actually #1 for tips received… and most of those were legitimate. I hung out Sunday night at the office to catch the launch.

My Android Dev Phone 1 arrived Monday morning. I lost my precious N95 a week earlier during SantaCon LA. This phone was announced the following day. Scott also loaned me a first-gen iPhone to play with.

The joints on my Sony MDR-V500DJ headphones have given out. I was considering purchasing some high-quality in-ear headphones and after reading Ryan Block’s review of the new ones from Apple, I decided that was the way to go. They are in very short supply though. I ended up calling the Apple store every morning for three days in a row to see if they had any in-stock. The headphones showed up Tuesday morning so I picked them up as a final errand before heading to the airport. I also picked up my power converters from the Tosche Station Mahalo office. The most important piece of electronics and the only one I overlooked.

I found $40.

Still wondering what it does? It does some sort of electro-hippie entrainment crap that forces your brain into certain brain wave states. I guess you can use it for relaxation, meditation, etc. All I know is you put the goggles on and your brain starts showing you light patterns that aren’t actually there. It’s a neat trick.