A few months back I posted that I would be building my own DIY Talk Box. I have finally gotten around to doing it. I managed to pickup a PylePro PDS772 for $20 and it was still in the box. The thing has a great frequency range (500Hz to 16KHz) and is very powerful at a whopping 300W RMS with a peak of 600W. I managed to pickup all the parts I needed from Fry’s Electronics and Home Depot and cobbled it together earlier in the week. Boy, does it sound good. I am making a HowTo video to show all the steps and explain some of the gotcha’s I expierenced on the project. So that video is coming very soon. I also had a Crown D-75 reference amp tucked away that I decided to drive the Talk Box with but I wanted to switch it to Bridge Mono and the service shop said it would cost $125 to get done so I sent an email to crown asking for the service manual and within a day I had all the schematics (including all the older revisions) emailed back to me. Upon looking at the schematics I found that it was a single jumper that needed to be changed and so it took me a total of 5 minutes to switch to bridge mono. There is a HowTo video for that coming as well.
Posted in Music.
By mike
February 13, 2009
Over the weekend I was playing around with my media server, bigsur. I use HellaNZB as my downloader and I really wanted a way to know when things are finished downloading. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to have my mediaserver ping me somehow when it is done downloading and processing an nzb? I then went on a search for such an application and could not find it. Could I be the first in need of such an application? Surely someone has built it… no? I couldn’t find a thing. So I decided to build my own notifier using twitter. That’s right… a twitter feed for my media server. I call it HellaTweet and you can download it from hellatweet.mikeheijmans.com.
Posted in Tech, Web.
Here is the problem. You are at work or visiting your mom back in your home state and you want to get access to your home network. You could:
- spend hours/days/years making a vpn work using a consumer grade vpn router which, lets face it, is a cheapo unreliable piece of hardware.
- buy a $500+ commercial grade vpn appliance
- spend hours/days/years building your own router using linux and add a vpn server to that
OR
You can use ssh to create a socks proxy.
What is a socks proxy? Socks is an internet protocol that facilitates the routing of network packets between client-server applications via a proxy server.
The first requirement is an open ssh server. You can use ssh on your router (if it has the feature – look at OpenWRT if not) or you can forward the ssh port from a server inside your network using the router. Most routers have port forwarding so this is the easiest solution. Make sure you set up something like dyndns so that you don’t have to remember your ip address. Plus most isp’s use dynamic ip addresses so your ip will change from time to time and dyndns will allow that to happen without you needing to do a thing.
Now that you can ssh to your home network you want to setup the tunnel. In the terminal you want to use the -D command to set the local socks port. Here is an example:
ssh -D 1080 -p 22 username@homenetwork.net
In the example 1080 is the port for your socks proxy to accept connections and 22 is ssh port that you are connecting to. Lastly is your username and host to connect to. Once you have logged in to the machine you can minimize the window.
Next, in firefox’s Preferrences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings Window or your computer’s network proxy settings. You configure the socks proxy as 127.0.0.1 port 1080.
That’s it. Now when you browse the internet the packet is going to the machine you connected to via ssh first. This means that you are browsing as if you were at that machine. You can then browse to local ip addresses in your home network and access those pages. For example, if your router’s status page is at 192.168.1.1/status you can type that in the url and get that page. Try it.
Posted in Tech.
I have never made an official New Year’s Resolution in my life but I really have some stuff I need to do this year and I am hoping that if I write some stuff down, I can do it. So here it goes.
This year I resolve to:
- Exercise 3 times a week.
- Resume morning meditation
- Pay off my credit cards
- Finish at least one personal project that I have started
- Write more things down so I don’t forget as much
- Take better care of myself
That’s it. Lets see how that works…
Posted in General.
If you are one of my regular readers, I am sure that you have noticed that I changed my blog’s look. I felt it was time for a change for 2009. (Plus my old theme had a bug that pissed me off) This new theme is a tweaked version of the carrington theme featured on the wordpress theme site. I tweaked the layout to match my style as you can see from the darker body background with the white content box and the full width footer. The problem is that the theme doesn’t seem to render properly in Internet Exploder. Stoopid microsoft :=/ I don’t support that browser anyway and if you are reading my blog with Internet Explorer… you should switch to Firefox, It is far superior! I have verified that it works great in Firefox and Safari. So enjoy the new look.
Posted in Web.
