netboot.me is a service that allows you to boot nearly any operating system or utility on any computer with a wired internet connection – without having to know ahead of time what you’ll want to boot.

netboot.me works through the magic of netbooting over http. There are a number of ways to boot a computer with netboot.me. The simplest is to download a bootable image, which is 626Kb and burn it to a CD or put it on a USB memory stick, or floppy disk. Boot off it on any networked computer, and it will automatically fetch the latest boot options from netboot.me and let you choose from dozens of installation, recovery, testing, portable desktop and other tools. You can also start netboot.me from any computer running gPXE, or from any netbootable computer with some simple tweaks to your DHCP server.

Here’s a screenshot:

I just tested it and it works beautifully. It seems to update it’s menu system from it’s website each time it boots, so it’s always fresh. Currently in the menu, the following are available:

Installers
FreeBSD 7.2 (x86 or amd64)
Debian Lenny (5.0)
Debian Testing (x86 / amd64)
Fedora 11(x86/amd64)
OpenSUSE 11.1 (x86/amd64)
Ubuntu Jaunty & Karmic (x86/amd64)
Live  Linux
Tiny Core Linux 2.2
Micro Core Linux 2.2
Tools
Diagnostics -> (Memtest86 & 86+, HDT 0.3.4)
Disk Tools -> (Gparted LIve 0.4.5-2, Parted Magic 4.4)
Rescue -> (Ubuntu Jaunty / Karmic in rescue mode)

Anyway, I grabbed Micro Core and on my 1024kbps connection, it was booting in about 30 seconds and I had a runnning linux distribution.

Technorati Tags: netboot.me, pxe, linux, liveboot, netboot

TonidoPlug is a tiny, low power, low cost home server based on the 1.2 GHz Sheeva processor that allows you to access your applications, files, photos, music and media from anywhere (Powered by Tonido).

TonidoPlug comes pre-installed with powerful Tonido Applications – Photos, Jukebox, Webshare, Workspace, Thots, Explorer, Torrent and Search – all running on top of embedded Ubuntu Jaunty Linux OS. Additionally, TonidoPlug can be extended by installing new applications from Tonido App store.

Not sure if we are going to see them in Australia anytime soon, and if any adapters will be needed

Here’s a Youtube review of the TonidoPlug:

Technorati Tags: sheeva, tonidoplug, p2p, Torrent, Jaunty, Ubuntu, Embedded

Where do I start? Let’s start with the fact Peru had a large earthquake on the 16th August near the cities of Chincha (The Afroperuvian epicentre), Ica and Pisco. These places are approximately 140kms south of Lima, where my wife is from (and her family are living).

I subscribe to Treehugger RSS feeds and the same day as the Earthquake comes a post with Vinay Gupta, the brainchild of the Hexayurt project, an open source disaster relief shelter, to put it simply. I suggest Treehugger subscribers pitch in some funds to send Vinay to Peru to kick something off and Vinay responded with this post, to which I also responded. When Vinay was discussing the Hexayurt, he mentioned “wood gas fire” as seen in this clip

I happen to work with a guy who is right into his steam engines.. now, I don’t really discuss my “treehugger” leanings with him, as they burn coal in those things but the above wood burner did lead me to think about how a closed system steam engine might possibly be able to fit with the goals of yet another open source project called worldbike, which is a group of bicycle designers who make open source bicycle designs to build or modify an existing bike to be more suited to our brothers and sisters in Africa.

I would like to think that the goals of Open Source Green Vehicle are somewhat similar, in brief – a group of people who come together in like mindedness to share some of their skills for the betterment of humanity. People may not realise just how much Google has it’s hand in all this. Google is almost like the glue of all knowledge. Google has shown us to realise how powerful open business models can be and helps reward people for sharing their knowledge. Staying with the our OSGV project, for the moment. I came across this group of videos on youtube (now owned by google) that discusses in depth two big interests of mine. How to convert an engine to hydrogen and use it for both automotive use and / or when used in housing (whether emergency or not) it can provide a source of electricity, heating and clean water. Now, with the amount of instructional video content on youtube, it’s really a knowledge sharing platform just as powerful (if not more so) than Sourceforge or Wikipedia.

Vinay also linked to this Microcredit system being used in India, another area which I am interested in and I am not bullshitting about this, you can view my Amazon wishlist on this. I am currently on three weeks holiday. The first week (right now) I am in Canberra, the Capital of Australia doing my Vmware Virtual Infrastructure course. The following two weeks, I will be starting to code the beginnings of a Microfinance System that I will be writing in Django. I have been really working hard teaching myself Python (and Spanish) using my own modified version of the “Seinfieldian” system.

Now, it’s also worth mentioning that through Vinay’s posts, I ended up finding “The Open Business Guide” and Open Source Ecology that Vinay offered up to me, which I haven’t yet had time to have a good read of as yet.

I could write a lot longer of the “bizaare” sequence of events but I have some reading to do.

Richard Stallman may yet become the modern day Marx, the way things are going..

The simplest example of open source that I use as an analogy is

“imagine eating in a restaurant where you loved the food and the chef was willing to share the whole recipe with you – you may go home and make it yourself but if he is a good chef, you will no doubt return for ‘his way’ of preparing the dish” – this is the nature of open source, to give something to humanity and yet you lose nothing.

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Update May 2009: If you made it here trying to find how to write Django apps for Facebook, probably the best resource I have seen to get started is How to build a facebook app in Django

Interesting links of the day:

Python, Django and Facebook with pyfacebook.

Jerry Seinfield’s GTD method on Lifehacker

Came across www.opensourcefood.com and Open Source House

Recipes are a perfect example of how open source works and yet can still be profitable / financially sustaining.

Imagine, my Open Source House that utilises Open Source Automation that I can control with my Open Source Phone that I can design new covers for using my Open Source Fabricator which synchronises, monitors, tunes my open source car or maybe even tracks my daily travel on my open source bike.

I am currently writing a full article about this.. stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: open source, django, facebook, home automation, home fabrication, openmoko

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The number 1 hold back factors are “materials” – ie: the types or range of materials that are available for home fabrication is rather limited at the moment. Home fabrication has it’s foundations in Rapid Prototyping, which is essentially a three-dimensional dot-matrix printer.

So let’s get to it, and see firstly, what’s now available and then look at the future of home fabrication.

Fab@home

Conceived by Prof. Hod Lipson and designed by Evan Malone, the Fab@home project allows people to begin to produce three dimensional objects right on their desk.

The two main drawbacks of the system in it’s current state are resolutions (3dpi) and suitable materials.

The resolution can be related to the digital photography. That is, when you zoom in on a low-resolution image, you see pixelation. The current 3D printers are much the same, in that you see the general shape but there is kind of “pixelation” in the edges of the shape.

Materials –

For example, you are currently not able to print an object in steel, alloy etc. – though you may be able to print a shape in another substance, that you can then make a mould of, that you could then pour steel into, but you cannot print directly into steel. There is no doubt though, that give 2-10 years and there will be materials that when set will have similar properties to steel, in heat resistance, strength etc.

Reprap
The idea was originally though out by Adrian Bowyer a  Seniour Lecturer at the Univeristy of Bath in this article. The reprap project uses a process called fused deposition modeling.

Reprap is based around:

Linux operating system for PC’s 
Java programming language for PC programming 
Art of Illusion 3D modeling system 
Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) for firmware programming 
KiCAD circuit design system

The budgetary estimate for building a Reprap is $300-400

http://www.3dreplicators.com

3dreplicators.com is the home of the Tommelisa,  a spinoff of the reprap project. It varies a little in that it uses a Windows-based Visual Basic Software rather than Linux and Java, it also uses a different microcontroller that uses a basic compiler rather than the C compiler used in the Reprap.

Additionally, it also has a lower budgetary entry point, estimated to be approx. $125-175.

Technorati Tags: reprap, fab@home, Tommelisa, home fabrication, diy

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Until I had time to research which heatsink, cooler combo I needed (wanted), I thought I would try a little Arctic Silver on it, to see if it would have any effect. So, I whip out the CPU at about 11pm and dab a little (a little too much) on it and put it all together again. The end result = no difference.

Bummer, I have to spend some money on a Heatsink/Fan combo.

So I search around and me being me Mr. Senor Scrooge, when it comes to spending money on gadgetry (because of it’s high depreciation), I came across the GlacialTech Igloo 7300 Light and while it didn’t offer massive cooling capabilities, it’s claim to fame was being quiet. Another restriction I had was the height because my power supply sits vertical rather than horizontal (ie: Open the case and the PSU covers the CPU) and there’s about 50mm gap there, so I had to stick with something of a similar height to the standard AMD fan. So it was between a Zalman (AUD $38) and the Glacialtech ($22) so the Glacial won.

Got it home and when I pulled out the CPU, the Arctic Silver was all over the bloody thing (late night smear campaign) and as I was cleaning it up I got a tiny bit from my finger on the base between 2 cpu pins (this was discovered later). I put the CPU in and the thing doesn’t post. Aagh.. turn it off, back on again and it boots this time.

Oh it is (was) a beautiful thing to not hear the PC again. Temps are a little higher but not too bad – 48C – So I put it all back together and the thing runs fine for a day and a half until Sunday night, black screen. Try to reboot, no post. Try again, posts and begins to boot but gets to fsck resiser partitions and some really weird stuff goes down. Try to boot to CD (pclinuxos) it begins to boot and resets itself during hardware detection. Start disconnecting everything to boot as bare as possible and it boots up on one drive (out of the raid). Try the other drive and it gets caught in a big loop. I run memtest86 on the pclinuxos disk and it freezes during it. Grab the PSU and Ram from another PC I have and try them one by one. Same thing kind of occurences.

God, this is getting awry. It seems like a motherboard or cpu by now right? But the problem is, which? I neither want to go another day without my PC nor do I want to spend big money on trying each solution. So I opt. for a 3200+ Athlon 939 and an Asus A8S-X, got home and realised that while looking at other M/B’s with AGP, I totally missed that this Mobo used PCI-E instead of AGP – Cursed myself. But the 3200+ was there anyway – part of me wanting it to be the answer (problem solved) part of me not (forgoing a 3800 dual core for a 3200+ single :( )

So, wack in the 3200+ “carefully” of course. The thing boots, runs fine. I start working away leaving the whole case open. Everything’s great – a mixed emotion comes over me – I lost my dual core but pc works.

Fit the PC together and it runs for about 3 hours and then locks up. Reboot, another fsck (and the Virtual Machine inside it) It seems to run better (longer) if I leave the case open and the PSU on the floor next to it but still, it runs for a few hours or up to 20hours and then dies. – Shit.. yeah, so whats the deal now? Motherboard right? but the Asus only takes PCI-E and I really don’t want to go out and buy another Motherboard without REALLY knowing whether that’s the issue.

Taking about 50 steps backward, which only ever seems to really occur after you have tried every other avenue, I ask the question “What changed?” – Let me just try the old AMD CPU Cooler again. Put it under the most duress conditions. Closed the box up, watched a documentary on it, had MythTV index all my MP3′s and 40 hours later now it’s still chugging along – so far, it has been flawless. Could it really be heatsink yet NOT heat related?

My theory (actually hypothesis) is that due to the GlacialTech CPU Cooler having a large taper on it from the CPU socket up to the 120mm FAN. This taper means it comes pretty close to some capacitors on the board. Could it be causing some kind of interference? The other possibility – strange as it may seem is that the 120mm fan is drawing more power than the AMD’s 80mm fan – but seriously, this current draw is so tiny that it shouldn’t really matter. For example, I have tried to run with only 1 hard drive, and a hard drive draws a lot more current than a CPU fan – albeit directly from the PSU rather than the Motherboard.

The PC with the Glacialtech was much more stable with the 3200+ Single Core than the 3800+ dual core. It would barely post with the 3800+, whereas with the Glacialtech CPU Fan the 3200+ would at least run for a few hours.

Tonight, I will be testing the 3800+ X2 with the stock AMD fan if I get a chance, something I haven’t yet tried from the beginning. Good luck to me. Once I sort out this whole saga, I will try and get some photos posted.

======UPDATE 21.01.2007=========

Ok, I have this whole saga completely worked out now and have taken the pics. The CPU cooler is fine, the CPU is fine, the Motherboard is unique but fine. The problem ended up being that the stock AMD cpu cooler pulls the cpu down quite hard and slightly bows the motherboard. The new Glacialtech didn’t put the bow in the board and for some reason my ASRock is addicted to it’s little bowing technique for whatever reason. I spliced the outer casing of an old PS2 mouse and used the rubber as a space between the heatsink and the bracket, which made the bracket sit higher and put more pressure on the motherboard “emulating” the bow that the stock AMD CPU was creating.

I have seen a similar but opposite problem to this on an Abit motherboard where tightening the CPU would causing the center of the memory modules to lose contact because of the bow in the motherboard. They are just something you would never think of.

Technorati Tags: glacialtech, cpu cooler, amd64, dual core