I have been inspired to undertake a personal experiment. I am going to attempt the possible and give up the internet for 5 days. From the morning of Wednesday September 3rd, 2008 until Monday the 8th my laptop will be internet free.

Why, you might ask, am I doing this? A more cromulent question might revolve around why I’m telling you this. Never the less I shall only attempt to answer the first question.

1. I want to see if I can get more done if I’m not chained to my laptop. Twitter and Google Reader seem to occupy all my free time lately.
2. I want to prove to myself that I can do it. I don’t think I’m over dependent on the web, but it would be nice to know for sure.
3. I’m tired of it. The internet, at least in the circles I’ve been traveling lately, seems to be a deafening cacophony that frankly is giving me a headache.
4. I’m hoping my desire to read, dead since college, will return to me. I’ve got a stack of books that have gone unread thanks, at least in part, to my time online.
5. By starting now this will be over by the time my preorder of Spore arrives.
6. I couldn’t sleep tonight and in my daze this seems like a good idea.

For various reasons I am going to have to make three exceptions that will wholey invalidate this as an experiment at least from a scientific standpoint. Two of these are unavoidable and the 3rd is just… because.

1. Work
   There’s no way to escape this one. I work building a web application, I have to be able to use the internet to do that. I will, however, not be using the internet for anything recreational while working. I figure the timing for this is good since all of the shows I watch on hulu are currently on hiatus.
2. Email
   Over the years email has become my primary form of remote communication. Me giving up email would cut me off from most of my friends and family.
3. Buzz Out Loud
   This is that just because I mentioned previously. Firstly, this podcast is probably my current favorite thing in all of media. Secondly, I would go a little mad without any access to tech news. A half hour a day should be enough to keep me from going completely nuts.

I thought about keeping a journal like a civil war solder. Sadly I very much doubt that this experiment will produce any results that could be called interesting no matter how bored historians get in the future. I predict I’ll get some more chores done than usual and I’ll finish reading Watchman. Other than that it will probably just be business as usual. I will post the results here on Monday at the experiment’s conclusion… or shortly there after.

After thought: There are going to be over 1,000 unread items in my Google Reader by Monday morning. That is a little freightening.

Bonnie noticed this when we were watching Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog last night. Here’s a picture of Neil Patrick Harris as Dr Horrible.

And this is a photo from my 2007 Halloween cosume.

These are a creap pair of welding goggles that Bonnie found on eBay and I modified for my cyberpunk costume. I painted mine differently than they did and I added to optics from a very old digital camera. I also added the LEDs which blinked. Still if you look closely they are very similar.

Today I learned the magic formula that makes any valid credit card number evenly divisible by 10. There are plenty of other sources of this information on the web, but many are confusing or potentially wrong. This, among other things, is used to validate numbers before sending them off to be processed.

I have verified this works with visa, mastercard, amex and it should work with discover and jcp too.

I did some searching for a fake credit card numbers that validate which probably put on some goverment watch lists somewhere. Via a blog post by the Rimm-Kaufman Group I found this Amex number which should demonstrate this method.

371449635398431

Step 1. Reverse the number
3 7 1 4 4 9 6 3 5 3 9 8 4 3 1 becomes
1 3 4 8 9 3 5 3 6 9 4 4 1 7 3

Step 2. Double every second number
1 3 4 8 9 3 5 3 6 9 4 4 1 7 3 becomes
1 6 4 16 9 6 5 6 6 18 4 8 1 14 3

Step 3. Any 2 digit sums from step 2 have their component number added together. In other words 14 is 1 + 4 = 5
1 6 4 16 9 6 5 6 6 18 4 8 1 14 3 becomes
1 6 4 7 9 6 5 6 6 9 4 8 1 5 3

Step 4. Add all the numbers together
1 6 4 7 9 6 5 6 6 9 4 8 1 5 3 becomes
1+6+4+7+9+6+5+6+6+9+4+8+1+5+3 which is
80

Step 5. Is the sum evenly divisible by 10? If so then you can be 1 step closer to sure that the credit card number is valid. There are also other things you have to check that are card provider specific. For example, all visa number start with 4 and are either 13 or 16 digits long.

Thanks to shawnzlea for the image

As a mentioned in my previous post I spent a little time last night installing PCLINUXOS on my laptop. Other than my machine at work most of my computer time is spent on this laptop and dealing with Ubuntu Hardy Heron was starting to take its toll on me.

I installed the MiniMe version of the distro, the Live CD of which weighs in at just over 200MB. It’s meant to be just enough to get get everything up and running so you can then, through ATP or Synaptic, install just the software you want. This was one of the major appeals of this Distro to me. The reason I gave up on Window, while I doubt I’ll ever run OSX, and why I’m moving away from Ubuntu is that I don’t so much extra crap built into the OS from the start. I want my operating system to operate my system, I’ll take care of the rest.

First Impressions

The first thing I noticed what that PCLINUXOS was able to start using the broadcom wifi in my laptop right out out of the gate. I opened up the network configuration tool and it asked me if I wanted to use the windows driver for via ndiswrapper for the card since there is no linux driver. I said yes and was done. In Ubuntu I had to use the wired ethernet to search Ubuntu’s forums for the right driver to use and instructions on how to set up ndiswapper.
PSLINUXOS time: 30 seconds
Ubuntu time: 45 minutes

My graphics card installed and worked correctly right from the get go. In Ubuntu I had to install the driver from Intel which was a hassle. Though the hassle was more Intel’s fault that Ubuntu’s.
PSLINUXOS time: 0
Ubuntu time: 20 minutes

Either MiniMe doesn’t come with klaptop or the install didn’t figure out that I was running a laptop because the utility wasn’t installed. But since I already had a working eithernet connection all I needed to do was install the utility via Synaptic and I was able to get all my power managment working just fine. I had to tweek the sleep settings a bit to get the machine to return from being suspended properly, but I’ve had to do this with every linux distro I’ve installed on it.
PCLINUXOS time: 2 minutes
Ubuntu time: 0

In the file /etc/acpi/events/sleep I changed:
action=/usr/sbin/pmsuspend memory
to
action=klaptop_acpi_helper --suspend

I then installed firefox3, thunderbird, openoffice, cd burning software, vlc, flash, and ksudoku. These packages represent about 99% of what I do on my laptop. Getting all the files downloaded and installed from Synaptic took about half an hour. I wouldn’t have to have installed these packages in Ubuntu, but I would have spent a lot of time uninstalling others.
PCLINUXOS time: 30 minutes
Ubuntu time: 1 hour

I lost all ability to connect to my Windows desktop via samba when I upgraded to Hardy Heron. From what I have gathered this is a problem with the Nautilus file manager. I tried changing the Thundar, but I never could get things working. Ubuntu would hang and hang while trying to connect then finally say it didn’t have an application to open a smb connection. In PCLINUXOS it connect right away. No hangs, no problems.
PCLINUXOS time: 0
Ubuntu time: weeks without success

Still to Do

I need to get Photoshop running, but I’m confident that the instructions I posted previously on the subject will work fine in PCLINUXOS. I also need to get the media buttons on the front of my laptop to work. I haven’t even attempted that yet so I’m not sure what it will take. It’s a minor thing, but they come in handy for changing volume.

So far I’m very happy with this Distro.