Creative Commons Listening

The Creative Commons Listening posts will contain music recommendations. All of the music recommended in these posts will be licensed under creative commons and I will provide links to the music or musicians websites. As always, I recommend you donate to the artists whatever you feel their music is worth after giving it a listen so that they can continue producing more of what you like.

Today I downloaded some music for my office playlist by the artist MoShang. The album is "Asian Variations". The recommendation came from Thomas Gideon, the host of The Command Line podcast. If you're interested in taking a listen check them out at http://asianvariations.com/. The music is under a Creative Commons license and while there are several download mirrors.

Rescuing Old Laptops

It's recently become a hobby of mine to surf Craigslist for people trying to get rid of old laptops. I generally search in the < $50 range when looking for a new project as it's likely that the machine will be donated, either to a friend or otherwise if I don't need a new laptop for anything. I recently found a lady selling an IBM T40 that she claimed did not work during one such search a few weeks ago. I picked it up for $25 and quickly found that it definitely had some issues. A few days later a coworker, after seeing my post on G+ regarding the previously mentioned laptop, informed me that there were two T42s in his garage which he believed were also broken and asked me if I could try to get them working for him. I got the laptops from him and both of them were completely dead as well. The interesting thing about the IBM laptops, however, is that a lot of parts were shared among the model families. Since all three laptops I now had were T4x series laptops I was finally able to, after several hours of trouble shooting and testing out each part, able to piece together a working T40/42 hybrid laptop utilizing the screen from one of the T42s and the body and keyboard from the T40. I've since installed Slackware 13.37 and ordered a new battery and charger on Amazon for it (oh how I love you Amazon Prime) and am using it on a regular basis as my new primary laptop. A few minor issues with Slackware aside and I would say I'm really pretty happy with it too. I do wish it had a slightly higher resolution but I can certainly live with 1024x768 for $25.

Random OpenWRT Musing

This evening I was logging in to blogger to try and think about something to post. When I opened Firefox, somehow I ended up pulling my personal domain up in the location bar. It took me to the LuCI control panel for my router... I could have sworn I had a firewall rule in my router that forwarded this to the machine running my Apache server, but then why was the domain redirecting me to my router management page. As it turns out, and I still have not confirmed this, I think I only set up the firewall rule to apply to connections inbound from the WAN port on my router. I can't really test it from inside my network but I plan on testing it out tomorrow at the office. I could have sworn that the last time I tried hitting my domain from the outside it went to a 404 page since my website isn't fully up yet.