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Another post...

14 09 06 - 18:38 Ok, so, we had something unfortunate happen to the Pismo. Atheros card, with a bent PCMCIA connector. PCMCIA slot. Bent pins in PCMCIA slot.

So, we took the pismo right apart, disassembled the cardcage, and put it all back together again. And what do you know? It doesn't boot!

We got a startup chime out of it later, but the screen never started. After many hours of fruitless searching, and repeated assembly/disassembly cycles, with Nat, Simon and I trying over and over again, we found nothing...

I gave up hope on whether it was still alive.

But there was one thing that annoyed us. The CPU card was very hard to pull up the first time, but now comes up very easily.

... turns out it just needed a good push. A very good one - almost what would seem to break it. Out of what was probably annoyance, Simon decided to give it a good push, and it locked into place!

We re-assembled the rest of the Pismo, and it booted. Only to have no mouse button!

Disassemble over again! Simon found the problem again. The power board that has the mouse button on it was slightly too high, and the mouse was permanently stuck down.

Putting it back together, and the mouse works. But the battery won't go in the right bay properly. Pushing it in at a slightly different angle got it... but why? The bottom right hand corner of the keyboard wasn't properly in place.

To see what we had to go through (3 times!), look at:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/6.0.0.html

Anyway, the Pismo is back to working again. In fact I am on it now, typing this post. And the PCMCIA slot pins got unbent, and the slot works again. I'm connected to the internet through a wireless card in that slot. (Motorola G card that gets recognised as an AirPort Extreme)

And that pin-bending Atheros card met with an unfortunate "accident" involving a flight across the room, a collison with a table leg, and four pairs of feet. I kind-of regret that, it was actually a good card, it was the only one we had that could do channel 14. But still, it caused all this trouble. And will never do so again.

Maybe when I go to Japan I'll pick up another one, of the non pin-bending variant. Or if we are feeling insane, we could mod the firmware on the Senao card to enable it. It's not hard, but if you screw up, you end up with a nice brick of a card. Well, Senao saved us the trouble with the prism3 variant, even when that thing works, it still is a brick.

Except I tried it on my MA111 a while ago, and failed, rendering the adaptor unable to be used with KisMac. Strangely, it still works with the driver as a . I'll try unbricking it when I get Ubuntu 6.06 going on the Pismo - the Windows utility BSODded during the firmware flashing. How nice of it! I'll try the Linux ones next. Maybe we will manage to get this thing going on channel 14.

Either that, or we just find the Japanese version of the senao card. Or we just make do with the ETSI variant. Although the Senao is sensitive enough to actually pick up networks on other channels to the one it's on, at fairly low signal levels. That's either good or bad... Still, scanning from channel 1-11 found a few nets on 12, and 13.

And my WiGLE ranking took a jump: http://wigle.net/gps/gps/main/stats/?pagestart=300&sort=discovered

I'm on 304! Let's hope I get above 300 soon :P

Oh, and I've been doing some more Python coding. A script to grab large areas of WiGLE's map. I made a KisMac map of WiGLE's map, so we can see which areas already have a lot of APs, and avoid those areas, for obvious reasons :)

And finally, KisMac users, the GPS status pane is about to get even better.

Oh, and I think I might learn to code in another programming language - Java. I'd like to be able to program some J2ME apps for my phone, and my Palm. For my phone, it's the only option, and for my Palm, it's got to beat C.

Anyway, I guess this is a long enough blog post. I'll post some pictures in the next post of various things.