Aatomik The new and improved blog for emptiness

Change your mac-address

Sometimes you might need to change (fake) your wireless interface mac-address, for example when testing your AP's security settings. This can be easily done using a package called macchanger.

# macchanger -s wlan0 - shows the current mac-address for wlan0

# macchanger -r wlan0 - changes the mac-address to random

The old (real) mac-address will be restored after reboot.

Recording gibberish

I know that I talk while asleep, I have heard it from several different and reliable sources. At first I thought it might be something temporary and did not pay much attention to it, but now as time passes, I'm beginning to wonder...

I have wild dreams while I'm asleep and see many interesting and totally unrelated things. I wish I could learn more about the meaning of what I see and one of the best ways that I can think of is to record my own talk during the night. I'm not certain that I could translate that gibberish into anything meaningful, but I think I could link the text to the images I saw.

Anyway, to make my life easier and not waste 7 hours of my time on listening through the gathered audio file, I will need a more intelligent system that would record only when the level of noise reaches some predetermined value. I know that there probably are tools that do this already, I might just make it my own small project. Heck, I'll make it run on multi-core machines while I'm at it and get the points I need for my PhD course.

Time management

I recently had a long discussion about time management with my supervisor. It seems that even though I have short and long term plans well defined, I still don't use my time effectively enough. I just don't have the skill of dropping a subject when I have spent too much time on it, even if the result is not as good as I hoped. We agreed that it is better to quit and loose quality on short term goals, than to sacrifice time for completion of long term objectives.

To be able to plan my time more effectively, I have been looking for a project management tool that would fit my needs. It has basically come down to 2 possible candidates:

1) KPlato for KDE
2) Planner for Gnome

Planner's interface is a bit more intuitive and I'm leaning towards using it, but it is still not the perfect solution. It is meant for bigger projects than a one man show. I briefly tried Tracks and it is great, but I would rather not set up a web server just to get my planning fixed. Although since planet.ee supports MySQL, I just might give it another try.

First let's save the world by fixing some issues with passive safety reliability assessment

Testing WordPress picture quality

Just to see what a "normal" picture taken with my nokia 5800 would look like when uploaded through WordPress without any configuration.

Iceland 200903xx

Changing format

The old blogger option did not really play nice any more. Sure it was handy, had a lot of cool options and looked nice, but that did not help when the blogger team decided not to support FTP uploads any more - http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html

I took my chances and ran WordPress ftw!

This place will probably remain just a place for me to upload random stuff. The old blog is still accessible at aatomik.planet.ee/old, the pictures are missing due to the change of directories. If I have time, I will correct that mistake. (pictures are now shown as intended)