Living

I love hacking electronics, or at least thinking about it. I’ve had this particular thought before, but I never realized the beauty of it in action until now. Go to about 1:30 and watch from there if you’re impatient. The video is lengthy but shows just what a little Microchip PIC and some tinkering can pull off. Can you say “Machine Pistol?”

Via Hack a Day.

Does your cable modem suck? Do you randomly get booted from World of Warcraft, suffer from being knif…err “LAG!!!” in games like counter strike or team fortress 2? It could be your ISP sucks, or it could be your cable modem. But how do you know? Don’t call the company, use your modem’s built-in diagnostic webserver — http://192.168.100.1 — to troubleshoot a few things. This works on ALL DOCSIS compliant cable modems - it’s part of the standard as far as I know. Armed with the knowledge contained in this diagnostic website, you can tackle the big 4 suspects in flaky cable internet access: Signal, Splitters, Cabling and Connectors.

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I suppose it’s not too often that I’m going to link something as banal as a screen saver. But this screen saver is special. You see, I’ve got a predisposition to this particular style of graph, data visualization, or whatever technical or mathematical moniker you want to give it. And it’s cool enough to support dual monitors and draw two instances. Rock on!

I give you The Polar Clock

But what’s this? You want to hear about the preexisting fetish? Perhaps you expect to see llamas stacked in outlandish geometric fashion, each one wielding an exquisitely decorated placard bearing similar data to the above clock? You’ll have to keep reading to find out.

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So I’d just gotten out of the tub, watching CSI, having a libation or two and relaxing post-chiropractor appointment. I go to turn on the TV and notice that strangely enough, it’s stuck on PBS-HD. While entertaining, this is not terribly useful when what I want to do is catch up on heroes. So I power toggle the box at the plug, shortly after the box goes through it’s usual boot process. Good, so far. It hits the screen first screen OCAP Middleware load screen, the progress bar fills, then the box goes to PBS-HD again (utoh) and finally to the Mystro countdown screen. It hits L-13… and stops dead, turns to E-13. I sat for a moment and thought: I could say screw it, and go play WoW — and I nearly did. But against my true nature to leave anything broken alone… I had to fix it.

I call up time warner cable and after about 5 minutes of wading my way through various voice menus and having my phone number read back to me after I’d input it… The CSR answers the phone and I told her what was going on. The box is stuck on E-13. She’s never heard of that error. She says did I leave it off for a minute… I think not but of course I say yes… That couldn’t possibly be it (it was in the end.) The box came back up just fine and I’m watching PBS-HD (Nature) now as I write this.

So what the hell is OCAP? And what do Mystro and OCAP have to do with the fact that my cable box (and possibly yours) lock up? Well, here’s the gist of what the CSR and I discussed on the phone while the torturously long proccess of an Explorer 8300 HDC damned boot sequence trundles along like an overweight crippled oompaloompa. Remember that description, it’s important for later.

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