I’m Dave Ek, and this is where I write about stuff. Most of my posts are about computers or ham radio (I’m NKØE), but sometimes I also risk playing the fool by ranting about politics or society–you know, serious stuff.

Or sometimes I write just because I need the practice.

My original excuse for starting this blog was so that it could supplement my other web pages. My main web page, eksfiles.net, has mostly ham radio stuff I’ve done over the years. My digital setting circles site describes how to build digital setting circles for your astronomical telescope. It’s a pretty popular project. And my ham radio field contest logging software for the Palm is described on my GOLog site. The chances are good that you found my blog by following a link from one of those sites, but if not, go on over and check them out.Part of the fun of having a blog is dorkin’ around with the layout and features, so things may change around here at random intervals. I use WordPress, and it has a ton of features, themes, and plugins to try out. Hopefully it won’t get too ridiculous here, like those web pages written by newbies where every header flashes in red and every bitmap dances and wiggles.

Yeah, you know what I’m talkin’ about.

Have a little fun while you’re here. Vote in the survey (you can vote as many times as you want, just in case you feel really strongly about something). Leave a comment telling me how much you liked something I wrote. Or tell me how big of a dork I am. Or point me to something that’s interesting.

I write this stuff for fun. Nobody’s writing me any checks or buying any ad space. It’s a lot more fun if someone actually reads this stuff. A few people actually do read it.

And you know who you are. Thanks for stopping by.

I finally got around to trying another installation of Hardy Heron now that it’s gone final. You might recall that I tried installing Hardy Heron beta a few months ago and I couldn’t get my Linksys WUSB54G wireless network adapter working with it. Hardy seemed to recognized the adapter just fine out of the box, and even detected my wireless network, but I was never able to connect to anything over the web using my browser. My suspicion is that WPA encryption is still not supported for my adapter using the native drivers.

Well, now I’m pleased to report that I have my Linksys adapter working with Hardy Heron using the same procedure that I followed for getting it to work with Gutsy Gibbon.

I followed these instructions once again (note that I have only tested these for v4 of the adapter in Hardy). Note that when I executed step 9 of the instructions (”sudo ndiswrapper -m”), I got the following output:

adding “alias wlan0 ndiswrapper” to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper …

****************************************************
*
* The update-modules command is deprecated and should not be used!
*
****************************************************

So, I ran “sudo depmod -a” after that, and then everything worked fine after I rebooted (in step 11). Note that I skipped step 10 and everything still seemed to work fine (either in roaming mode or with roaming mode disabled and a static IP specified). I have WPA Personal encryption enabled and it works fine.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this didn’t work when I tried it using Hardy Heron beta. Maybe I screwed it up the first time.

… to say the least.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that those “unlawful combatants” confined at Gitmo are not completely without constitutional rights. At about the same time, Physicians for Human Rights released a report contending that physical examinations of former Abu Ghraib and Gitmo detainees showed that those detainees had suffered extensive physical and mental torture and abuse. We already knew about waterboarding, of course. But now we hear reports of electric shock, sodomization, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and other physical and mental abuses. The Supreme Court ruling, and the reports of torture and abuses, leave me somewhat conflicted. My sympathy for those intent on destroying the USA is severely limited. Yet, the humanity and compassion expressed in our constitution through such concepts as innocence until proven guilty, the right to a speedy trial, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment leads me to a certain level of discomfort when I learn that my own country employs torture in the name of national security.

We’ve been told that waterboarding has saved lives. Even one of our Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia, wrote that, “the game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the nation’s commander in chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Opinions like this seem to say that the Constitution is getting in the way of national security. In this case, do the ends justify the means? Is protection of the nation a higher goal than adherence to the ideals expressed in our nation’s most important legal document? Deciding that our constitution is only important when it doesn’t get in the way of national security is a step down a very slippery slope. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court’s majority opinion that “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

Justice Kennedy also wrote, “Liberty and Security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law.” Our Constitution was borne out of the oppressions that we first suffered as colonists under British rule. Have we so easily forgotten?

If American soldiers were being captured and treated by our enemies the same way we’ve been treating Gitmo and Abu Ghraib detainees, we’d be screaming bloody murder. Yet our government is engaging in the very kinds of activities for which we as the American people would condemn other countries who were guilty of the same behavior. The Bush administration has made a practice of trampling the Constitution in the name of national security during our “war on terror.” Now the Supreme Court has begun to force our government to listen to the collective conscience of America as expressed in its constitutional ideals. If we do not embrace those ideals, regardless of the circumstances, our country reduces itself to nothing more than a gang of thugs with a lynch-mob mentality.

—–

Then last week was the decision that the death penalty amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in crimes that did not take the life of the victim. The case involved a man on death row because he’d been convicted of raping his young stepdaughter. Evidently, the legislators in Louisiana had decided that the rape of a child was an especially heinous crime (no argument from me there) for which the death penalty was justified. Once again, my sympathy for a man convicted of such a crime is limited, even if he lives on death row. I do find a couple of things disturbing, though. First, I was surprised that Democrats and Republicans alike (and apparently most of the American people) disagreed with the ruling of the court. It feels a little bit like an angry lynch mob has been told to go home and forget about today’s hanging. But the Supreme Court gets to do that. They are, by definition, correct in every ruling they make, because there is no higher court. I’m disappointed that Americans cannot accept that the court has told them that lynching for this crime would be an unconstitutional act.

The other part that disturbs me doesn’t have so much to do with the ruling of the court as it does the deficiencies in our penal system. Our system of laws and punishment uses incarceration (and other punishments) for the purposes of deterring criminal activity, punishing offenders, protecting the public from violent criminals, and rehabilitating offenders into law-abiding citizens. Does incarceration meet any of these goals? The prospect of jail time, or even the death penalty, appears to do little to deter criminals–nobody thinks they’re going to be caught. Is it punishment to go to jail? No doubt, it can be. But yet we hear stories about former convicts who commit crimes so they can go back to jail and have a bed and three squares a day. I suppose it partially succeeds in protecting society from violent criminals, but we still read about ex-cons going back to a life of violent crime when the leave jail. And how many convicts are rehabilitated and assimilated into society when they are released?

Here in Colorado, several years ago we increased the jail sentences for many types of crimes. Did it affect the crime rate? Hardly. What it did do, though (besides giving our elected officials cause to claim that they were “tough on crime”–probably the main reason the laws were passed to begin with), is result in skyrocketing costs and overcrowding in our prisons. How our elected representatives didn’t see that coming, I’ll never know. It, and the aforementioned law in Louisiana, are just glaring examples of how we continue to do the same things but expect different outcomes. Our penal system is completely broken. Maybe our punishments are too tough. Maybe they’re not tough enough. Perhaps we let people out of jail that should be kept forever. Perhaps we put some people in jail that really don’t need to be there. I don’t have a solution to this problem, but there’s no denying that the problem exists.

—–

Finally, there was the ruling by the Supreme Court that Americans have a right to possess guns in their homes for self-defense. The majority of justices agreed that the Second Amendment did not limit the right to bear arms to service in a militia, while the dissenting justices disagreed. I’ve expressed my own opinions on this topic in previous posts, so I won’t repeat them ad nauseum here. But I was certainly surprised that the justices were split 5-4 on this decision. I was further surprised that no one (to my knowledge, anyway) argued that our founding fathers used the Second Amendment to ensure that the government could never disarm and then oppress its citizens. An armed citizenry is a free citizenry, after all. I was really astonished that the dissenting justices would argue that, since DC citizens could possess rifles and shotguns, that they were not denied the ability by the handgun ban to protect their homes. They must have overlooked the fact that DC laws mandate that rifles and shotguns either be stored with trigger locks or be disassembled, rendering them useless unless one can anticipate the need to unlock or assemble them. It seems, too, that any defense of the DC handgun ban against the Second Amendment must include some evidence that the handgun ban has been effective in protecting the citizens of DC. Given that DC’s crime rates, including gun crimes, have only gone up in the thirty years or so of the ban, that evidence is nonexistent.

It’s remarkable that other cities, despite the evidence to the contrary, continue to expect that tight laws controlling gun ownership will make their streets safer. There is no denying that big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia have serious crime problems, but gan bans and restrictions serve only to put the law-abiding citizen at a disadvantage to criminals who have no regard for the law (once again, ignoring the obvious political gains for elected officials who can say they are “tough on crime”). Perhaps it’s time to focus on getting criminals, and not guns, off the streets. This is an equally difficult proposition (and encompasses social agendas as much as law enforcement), but at least it focuses on the real issue. Continuing to rely on gun controls but expecting results that are different from the past is delusional, at best.

—–

So there you have it. Three contentious Supreme Court cases, all decided by a 5-4 margin, sometimes crossing ideological lines. Republicans appeared to be happy only with the ruling on the handgun ban, while Democrats only embraced the ruling on Gitmo detainees, at best. It seems like only the court itself is interested in preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution these days.

Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a mapaholic.

Being an occasional backpacker, I use topographic maps both for planning hikes and camping trips, and for navigating on the trail. My map of choice, just like practically everyone else, is the 7.5-minute USGS quad. I obtained my first one of these back in the late 80’s, before the internet, and before it was feasible to store much map data electronically (can you say “40 MB hard drive”?). I think I ended up ordering it from someplace, and it came in the mail rolled up in a cardboard tube. I think I just about wet my pants when I first unrolled it. It was soooo cool! The level of detail on that map (1 inch = 2000 ft) was more than I’d ever experienced, and I could determine the latitude and longitude of anything on the map. It wasn’t long before I could smugly recite the coordinates of my house down to the arc second or so.

It wasn’t until around 1997 that I discovered that it was possible to actually purchase topographical maps in software packages on CD. My first (and so far still only) mapping package was Topo! by Wildflower Productions (now produced by National Geographic). I bought a package that gave me maps for most of western Colorado. I think I paid $70 or so, and I still use them today. The software does a nice job of stitching the maps together to make one more-or-less continuous map at high resolution. You can also use the software to transfer routes and waypoints to (or from) your GPS, and you can trace routes, examine elevation profiles, and do lots of fairly cool stuff. Nowadays you can buy numerous state editions of the software for about a hundred bucks.

Besides mapping packages like these (and there are others), the number of online mapping resources appears to be growing. Topozone has been around now for several years, and I believe even Google Maps can show you topographical features. There’s also the National Map, which makes a large amount of USGS map data available in a web-based viewer. My experience with web-based mapping is that it’s either not free (Topozone requires a subscription, for example) or it’s not the most convenient to use for creating maps that can be printed.

I kept wondering when the USGS would finally get around to making their existing raster maps available for download. They’d been available in digital form for a while through third parties for a fee, but I’m too cheap to pay for large quantities of them. So I’d check every so often to see if anything new was available. I checked again this morning (for the first time in a year, probably). Lo and behold, I discovered that you can now indeed download raster maps for free! Here’s the link:

http://store.usgs.gov/locator/

This link takes you to an interactive tool for finding the maps you are looking for. Selecting a location will show you what maps are available for that location. They have other maps besides the 7.5-minute quads. Once you find the map you’re looking for, you can simply download the map as a PDF file (in zipped form).

You can simply use Adobe Reader to view the map, or you can optionally download the free GeoPDF toolbar for Adobe Reader from TerraGo Techologies. This toolbar adds some interesting and useful capabilities to Adobe Reader for using these map files, including geosearch capabilities and some distance and direction measuring tools.

Although you can’t really print out these maps with a regular printer and have them come out in a usable form (because the maps are much bigger than an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper), Adobe Reader has a Snapshot Tool (under Select & Zoom on the Tools menu) that you can use to select and copy rectangular chunks of the map into an image editor (like MS Paint) for further annotation and printing. The Snapshot Tool will select and copy the selected region at whatever zoom factor is being displayed, so make sure to set the zoom to 100% (or whatever you desire) before doing the copy operation. The Snapshot Tool will scroll the document as you’re selecting the rectangular region, so you’re not limited only to those portions of the map that are visible. You can also select a region at a lower zoom level and then zoom in before copying it (technically, whenever you release the mouse button to finish selecting your region, Adobe Reader copies the selection at that resolution to the clipboard, but you can recopy the selection to the clipboard after zooming by right-clicking on the selection and choosing Copy Selected Graphic from the menu that pops up).

These free downloadable maps won’t replace the mapping software I already own, but I can easily see using these maps to augment the capabilities I already have. I’m going to like this.

I’ve been working over the past several weeks to update my ASCOM driver for my Digital Setting Circles project. My initial impetus for doing so was to make my existing driver fully compliant with the ASCOM standards, and also to add a “sync” capability that so many folks have requested. I also wanted to implement a “slewing” capability (basically just feedback as you push your telescope tube toward a target, like what you can do with my stand-alone DSC software) and make it easier to execute the alignment process. Finally, I’d like to make the driver compatible with other devices that use the BBox protocol, include the Orion Intelliscope.

Well, most of that work is now finished, although I haven’t yet released the new driver. Syncing and slewing are complete, but I’m still working on doing some testing, and I still need to do some work on the alignment process (I’m hoping to allow you to graphically select your alignment stars instead of having to select them from a text-based list). And I still need to add the BBox protocol support.

If you have any other ideas for features you’d like to see, please post them here as a comment on this article. Right now, the only other feature that I can recall being requested is a one-star alignment process for folks who have permanently-mounted telescopes, but I haven’t figured out how to do that one yet.

No, not me. My boy. He’s just about finished with college and ready to enter the working world as an English teacher. I still haven’t quite figured out how I, being an engineer-type, managed to father a teacher of English. Perhaps it was his mother’s genes. Whatever. He’s done well for himself, and I’m proud of him.

The boy’s a poet, too. Here is some of his work.

I decided to give the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta a whirl today, but really didn’t have much luck with it. First, I was having a hard time integrating it into my existing multiboot scheme on my computer (I use a separate GRUB partition for managing booting between Gutsy Gibbon and WinXP), but I ignored that for the moment. The real difficulty came when I tried to get my Linksys WUSB54G (ver. 4) wireless adapter working. I figured that I could simply follow the instructions that I wrote for doing so with Gutsy Gibbon, but alas, there was no joy. When I tried to manually configure the network settings, I found that I could not select the wireless network settings to modify them. Perhaps this will be fixed before it goes final, or someone else will solve this problem…

In the mean time, my experiment with the Hardy Heron beta has ended. I’ll pick it up again at a later time, perhaps when it’s released in final form.

I’m about to set up a new computer for myself, and it’s going to run both Windows XP Pro and one or more flavors of Linux. Obviously, it’s going to be a multi-boot system. So I’ve been boning up on a lot of the issues associated with setting up such a system, such as:

• What’s the best way to partition the system?
• Can I use a single /home partition and just share it with every Linux distro I install?
• How can I easily share files between WinXP and Linux?

There’s about a billion different ways to set up a system like that, and about a billion web sites that give snippets of information on what’s best and how to do it. After doing some reading for the past few days, I attempted to simulate a setup like this using my old notebook (that already dual-boots WinXP Home and Ubuntu 7.10).

Initially, my notebook had two primary partitions (one for WinXP and one for Ubuntu) and an extended partition containing a single logical partition (the swap partition). I wanted to change this to create two additional partitions. First, I wanted a separate NTFS partition that I could use for storing all my user-generated files (like the stuff that you’d store in My Documents in Windows, or in ~/Documents in Ubuntu). This was not a separate /home partition–just a separate partition for documents.

(Aside: Ubuntu 7.10 can read and write to NTFS partitions out-of-the-box. Earlier versions of Ubuntu cannot. If you’re running an earlier version, you’ll want to use FAT32 for your shared partition instead of NTFS.)

The other additional partition that I wanted to create was a small partition dedicated to GRUB, the boot loader used by Ubuntu (and many other flavors of Linux). It turns out that putting GRUB in its own partition makes it much easier to add and remove Linux distros on your system, if you’re in to that kind of thing.

There’s a nice overview of disk partitioning on the Illustrated Dual Boot HomePage, and there’s also a nice section on the hows and whys of creating and using a separate GRUB partition. In fact, I followed those instructions pretty-much verbatim to create my own GRUB partition.

WARNING: when you start dorking around with existing partitions, you run the risk of screwing things up and losing data. Do a backup before you embark on an experiment like this one.

I used the GParted Live CD in order to do all the partitioning work. You simply boot your system from that CD, and the GParted application is started for you. GParted allows you to create, delete, move, resize, and format partitions to your heart’s content. Rather than try to create a GParted tutorial here, I’ll let you discover one of the many sites that’ll walk you through using GParted. I’ll just say here that I used GParted to shrink the primary WinXP NTFS partition and the primary Ubuntu ext3 partition, to create a separate ext2 primary partition (only a few megabytes in size) for GRUB, and to expand the extended partition to fill the remaining space. I also created a new logical NTFS partition within the extended partition for holding my files to be shared between WinXP and Ubuntu.

Once I was finished with all the partitioning gymnastics, I rebooted. You really won’t notice many changes when you reboot, at least initially. In WinXP, you’ll see that there’s a new drive available (the logical NTFS partition I created for holding my documents), but that’s about it. The next step for me was to install GRUB to its newly-created partition, and I simply followed the instructions for doing so that I mentioned above.

A couple of test reboots later and I had convinced myself that the machine was indeed booting using the contents of the GRUB partition. Interestingly, you can set up the boot menu (menu.lst) a number of different ways. The coolest way, at least in my book, is to have the main GRUB menu.lst refer to the menu.lst files on the individual linux partitions. It’s all covered in the links I mentioned above.

The final step for me was to see if I could get WinXP and Ubuntu to both look at (and share) the same documents folder. The first thing to do was to boot WinXP and tell it to change the location of the My Documents special folder. You may know that the My Documents folder in Windows is actually a link to a folder under /Documents and Settings/username/My Documents. But you can tell Windows to change where the folder is physically located, simply by right-clicking on the My Documents folder that appears at the top of the Windows Explorer window and then clicking the Move button. I moved mine to the root of the second NTFS partition that I created (which Windows recognizes as the E: drive, in my case). In case my explanation isn’t clear, here’s the straight poop from Microsoft. My goal was simply to use the root of E: as the My Documents folder, so that (a) that’s where Windows would want to store things by default, and (b) I could then mount that partition in Linux as a folder under /home/dave named /home/dave/Documents.

Once I got the My Documents folder moved in Windows, it was back to Ubuntu and some learning about the mount command. It’s fairly simple to do. The partition that Windows calls E: is known on the Ubuntu side as /dev/sda6 (this, of course, will vary from system to system depending on how many partitions are present, what order they were created in, and what type of devices they are). I wanted /dev/sda6 to be mounted such that the contents would appear to be located in folder /home/dave/Documents (or simply ~/Documents, for short). So here’s the basic mount command (in Ubuntu 7.10) to do that:

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda6 /home/dave/Documents/

After I typed that, I was able to access files on that partition. Cool.

But I noticed a couple of things. First, I wasn’t the owner of the files. Second, files that shouldn’t have been executable were being considered by Linux as executable. Both of these issues can be solved by specifying additional parameters for the mount command. I’ll get to that in a second.

The other issue to deal with was to figure out how to get the partition to be mounted automatically when I booted. That turned out to be reasonably easy–you simply edit the /etc/fstab file and add an entry that causes the partition to be mounted where you want it. In my case, I ended up adding a line to the end of that file that looks like this:

/dev/sda6 /home/dave/Documents/ ntfs users, auto,rw,uid=1000,gid=0,dmask=000,fmask=111

You can see exactly what all this means by looking at the man page for mount, but here are some highlights.

/dev/sda6 is the device we’re mounting, of course. The location that it’s being mounted to is /home/dave/Documents. It’s an ntfs volume and we want it to be mountable by all users, and auto mounted at boot time. The rw option means that we want the partition to be readable and writeable. The uid and gid options set the user and group who own the partition. In this case, the ID for my username (dave) is 1000 (I saw this by opening the Users and Groups manager in Ubuntu–the ID is shown for each user and group). Finally, dmask and fmask set the permissions for directories and files, respectively. They do it with a mask that’s the inverse of what you’d type for chmod, though. A dmask of 000 is the same as chmod 777, and an fmask of 111 is the same as a chmod of 666, if that makes any sense. The final result is that the partition gets mounted automatically at boot time to /home/dave/Documents as an ntfs volume with me as the owner and permissions that allow me to read and write the files but not execute them.

The upshot is that everything that appears in My Documents in WinXP also appears in ~/Documents in Ubuntu.

So there you have it (albeit in a nutshell). This was simply a proof-of-principle exercise for me, as I’ll be doing this again once my new hard drive arrives for the system my son gave me as a hand-me-d0wn. I’ll try to provide a more detailed blow-by-blow when I do this for keeps.

It’s makin’ me wait…

Sorry–couldn’t resist.

I’m anticipating a lot of things right now. Mostly, I’m longing for warmer temperatures and longer days. For a lot of reasons. Many things are on the workbench, waiting for meteorological conditions to be more favorable.

QRP to the Field is just a month and a half away, and that’s my first real excuse for getting out of the house, onto the trail, and into my sleeping bag for a weekend of fun in the woods.  My anticipation of backpacking season usually starts on the first nice day in January, and I’ve been working on finding the perfect soda can stove all winter (I think I’ve finally settled on a pressurized sideburner). If you’re a backpacker and you haven’t tried one of these, you really ought to check them out. For a weekend of backpacking, my stove and cookpot together weigh less than a half pound, and I’ll use only four ounces of denatured alcohol. It’s a heckuvalot lighter than my Gaz stove and canister, and it’s more fun to use (okay, that may be the latent pyro tendencies talking…).

The total lunar eclipse we had a couple of weeks ago also has me longing for warmer weather so I can set up my 8″ Newtonian telescope on its equatorial mount and try some things. You may have seen my digital setting circles project for astronomical telescopes. I spent a ton of time developing that, and I continue to spend a fair amount of time answering questions about it and helping people who build it to get it working correctly. Yet I bet I’ve only spent a couple of hours actually using the one I built for myself. In fact, up until last weekend, I hadn’t even bothered putting my bare circuit board into an enclosure, but I finally stuck it in a box that I can screw to the telescope mount, so it’s more amenable to actual use. So maybe I’ll start experiencing the joy of observing that others have told me they’ve experienced after building my interface project.

The lunar eclipse also got me thinking again about doing some astrophotography. I tried this many years ago with film and my 35-mm SLR, but these days amateurs are all going digital. In fact, many folks are using converted webcams quite successfully for astro imaging. I recently found myself a Logitech QuickCam 3000 on Ebay for precisely that purpose, so that’s one of my projects for this spring and summer. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Another reason I long for warmer weather is that I’m ready to start biking to work again. Last year I logged around 800 miles just by riding my bike to work a few times a week. It’s only about 13.5 miles round trip. It’s downhill to the office and (obviously) uphill back, with an elevation change of about 500 feet. For an old fart like me, it makes a good workout. Most of my route from home to work is off-road, on the decent trail system that we have here in Colorado Springs. I’ve outfitted myself with a Kenwood TH-F6A and an ear mic I found on Ebay (in case the Ebay link dies, it’s like this one), so I can listen to the local repeaters or my favorite FM station while I pedal. Right now, the radio just clips to the waistbelt of my backpack, but I have a handlebar mount for it that I’ll probably press into service once I find a dual-band antenna that I can mount on my rear rack. Then I’ll really look like a pedaling geek. Pictures to follow, if I get that far.

(You may have noticed that I find a lot of my stuff on Ebay. I always try to buy specialty cables, like GPS and ham radio programming cables, on Ebay because they’re a fraction of the price of the cables that are sold by manufacturers or retailers here in the U.S. I’ve had excellent luck with the cables I’ve bought from sellers on Ebay, but I only buy from sellers with excellent feedback ratings. Lately I’ve bought from GadgetInfinity and qMall and have been happy with the products they sold me. )

Warmer weather and longer days will also allow my wife and I to go out jogging a little more often. I use the term jogging loosely, because right now (we’re just getting started) we jog a little and then walk a little (mid-forties, in case you’re wondering). We’ve even taken my twelve-year-old Aussie dog Cookie,  and she loves to run, but she’s pretty pooped for the next couple of days. So her jogging days are numbered.

Finally, I’m anticipating the arrival in a couple of days of a new hard drive and CD drive so that I can finish putting a hand-me-down computer back into service. Or maybe it’s a hand-me-up–my soon-to-be-a-college-graduate son gave it to me after he upgraded to a faster system. At any rate, it’ll be faster and have more storage than my current 1.5GHz Athlon that has a 40GB hard drive and 750 MB RAM. This new machine will have a 2 GHz processor, 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB RAM, and a DVD burner. I’m going to try to set it up so that it multiboots to Windows XP, Ubuntu, and possibly other linux distros. I’m also going to experiment to see if Windows and the linux distros can share the same Documents folder (that is, the My Documents folder in Windows is also the ~/Documents folder in linux). Details to follow.

For quite a while I’ve been keeping my eye out for some kind of case for my Garmin eTrex GPS. Most of the cases I’d seen thus far would attach to your belt just fine, but I wanted one that I could hook onto my backpack so that it would be exposed to the sky while I hiked (so it could make a track of my hiking route). I finally found this one, made by Gilsson Technologies. It’s a black neoprene zip-up case with clear plastic windows for the display and the buttons on either side. In addition, it has a loop for slipping it onto your belt, but it also has a plastic clip for fastening it to just about anything on your pack. I actually bought one on Ebay from FIS4HER COM GPS Gear (their price and shipping time were fantastic), and mine has a metal ring an a carabiner instead of the plastic clip. This case looks like a great little case that’ll work perfectly for backpacking, and the price is right.