PTHSD
How to make a great dd-wrt router easily.
1. Go to Amazon and buy a Belkin N300 router. They have crappy OEM code on them but great hardware specs. 8mb of flash and 64mb of ram makes this thing a power house that can run the big dd-wrt packages with all the bells and whistles. Not bad for $25 and under (at time of this writing).
2. Download the latest firmware. As of this post I was using these two:
-http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/others/eko/V24-K26/svn18946/dd-wrt.v24-18946_NEWD-2_K2.6_mini_f7d7302.bin (this is for the first initial flash).
-http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/others/eko/V24-K26/svn18946/dd-wrt.v24-18946_NEWD-2_K2.6_big.bin (this is the final version we’ll end up on, you can use mega instead if you want all depends on what advanced features you want. If you are going to just do basic stuff doesn’t matter which you use).
3. Unpack our router, hook it up to a computer with the above files on it and then do a 30-30-30. That’s the real nice part of this router…it’s almost impossible to brick. Trust me on that and also trust me on never accidentally setting an interface with 127.x.x.x you won’t be able to get back in to fix it. After you do the 30-30-30 you’ll see a little screen that says “CFE mini server” once you type in “192.168.1.1″ and you just need to select your “mini” file we downloaded above. Some people tell you that you have to statically assign an ip to your laptop to get to the CFE mini server page but I didn’t need to. The Belkin auto assigned me 192.168.1.124.
4. Router will upload the file, reboot and come up on the mini firmware. Now the next step is to go to the Administration tab and then select Firmware Upgrade. This is where we upload the “big” version of the firmware. At this point after the reload you pretty much have an enterprise level router that can do a variety of amazing things OEM software would never let you.
5. That’s it your done. Change your LAN DHCP if you want, make sure you enable the wireless, SSID and the Wireless security (WPA2 personal is a good choice) and your pretty much done. There are a lot of other fancy things you can do if you want but these are the basic steps.
Fun things you can do:
- QoS
- Mac filtering
- Website blocking by URL
- Set the radio to turn on and off automatically (ie the “go to bed kids” feature)
- Http redirect for people logging on for first time.
- Use the USB port to attach a LAN shared Hard Drive.
If you still feel nervous about doing this here is a outlining the same steps I did above.
How to tell if Christopher Dorner is in a vehicle
Is it a car? Yes? He’s not in it.
Is it a truck? Yes? SHOOT THE F*CKING THING FULL OF HOLES!!!!!!
But is it the right make of truck? IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!! SHOOT THE F*CKING THING FULL OF HOLES!!!!!!
But is it the right color truck? DO YOU UNDERSTAND ENGLISH??? IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!! SHOOT THE F*CKING THING FULL OF HOLES!!!!!!
But is it a white guy or women in it instead of a black guy? DO YOU WANT TO DIE??? SHOOT THE F*CKING THING FULL OF HOLES!!!!!!
What to do with an old intel iMac?
Apparently five years is an eternity in Apple-land because that is when we originally purchased our “used” Intel based dual core iMac. At the time we were excited to get an iMac and use OSX 10.5 and I even ended up using it for my work to replicate an Apple specific issue with the TCP/IP stack so life was great. The real driver was the form factor though because it was going to be placed in our kitchen since Jen was out of the office to keep an eye on the kids. Point was we needed a “family” computer that could fit up on a kitchen counter and at the time the iMac fit the bill.
Fast forward about 5 years. Since Apple stopped supporting 10.5 and the highest the iMac could upgrade is 10.6 we had nothing but issues with Chrome and Firefox dealing with flash. Plus despite my attempts to mitigate it the machine was just getting slower and slower. It literally became just painful to use. Thankfully since then PC makers have decided to make more “all-in-ones” that are similar to Apple’s patent on rectangular shapes and rounded corners (sarcasim) so we were able to go with a Dell Inspiron 2020 with Win 8 that so far has been working great. Bigger screen, tilts a little higher, and Win8 isn’t really that hard to get used to. So life is great there but now I have an iMac sitting around that is pretty much been rendered obsolete. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it for a while because I doubt it has much resale value and I’m sure 10.6 support would be ended soon anyways so why throw more money at it? Then I remembered something, what made this iMac special was that it was Intel based. Intel based means I can install windows on it.
Well to be specific a 32bit variant of windows but windows none the less. I wanted Win 7 but I don’t have a 32 bit copy. I was going to use XP but that’s end of life now (although Flash still works on that) so I ended up using a copy of Vista Ultimate I had lying around (although I had to jump through a few hoops to get it activated a second time since I had used it already). Everything is setup now but there are few pitfalls you have to watch out for.
1. You can only use 32bit OS’s if your old iMac is 32bit.
2. You must first create a partition using Boot Camp. Here is a pretty good walk-through of the whole process.
3. Following the walk-through there are only a few things to highlight.
-Partition size for Windows, don’t be stingy.
-When installing windows you might have to reformat the new bootcamp partition as NTFS.
-After you are done installing windows you need your original apple DVD to install bootcamp and some drivers into windows (no matter the flavor).
In regards to that last part, I had a hell of a time getting my superdrive to read my Vista disk or my OSX disk. Maybe it’s dying or something I don’t really care I just wanted it to work. So what I did was take the OSX disk, pop into a windows disk and copy everything to a 4gb flash drive I had lying around (only needed like 500mb). That method worked just fine. After all is said and done and after a hundred billion updates I gotta say the computer is pretty snappy. You might be tempted to tweak services or something but I don’t really recommend it.
Here is a screen shot of it running after all is said and done. Of course the feature of boot camp is I can bounce between OSX and Vista but I don’t really plan on doing that too much. 
