I’ll keep the speil to a minimum, but a $35 ARM SoC with ethernet, USB and enough hardware onboard to decode 1080p video on 1 watt.. you can see why I’m pretty stoked.

Recently, there was a call for mirrors and psych0tik raised our hands, we’re mirroring any and all content (presently, debian 6 iso’s) needed to get your pi up and running, though unfortunately only for those of you with ipv6 access at this stage.

Point your (ip6 capable) browser at alura.psych0tik.net/rpi to get the images!

EDIT: For anyone having issues with their system giving preference to A records, I have removed the A record from alura.psych0.tk

Generally, stashing occurs when I’m working on something that’s not ready for production or even feature complete enough to warrant publishing, and I need to rebase or start on something else. Nearly always I stash it and forget about it (even though my prompt yells at me when I have stashes)

The alternative is to check it into a wip/ or trash/ branch (depending on how confident I feel about the change in question being a Good Idea). This is useful for a stack of reasons:

1. It preserves some history about the idea (what else I was doing at the same time)
2. It makes tracking what you’re doing a lot simpler (because the stash stack is a pain at the best of times)
3. Most importantly, you can keep branching

The last one is the most relevant, a stash isn’t rooted to any particular point on the tree which means if you make an invasive change you’re going to struggle (which is a pain when the patch in question alters some core behaviour and was only barely working to start with)

If I know it’s going to be a problem that I take a lot of stabs at I’ll generally make it a branch like wip/ideas/short_description_of_approach for simplicity to begin with; and this will only get better in git 1.7.9 which adds a description attribute for branches.

Stashes are awesome for getting a clean tree so you can rebase or do some non-trivial merging, but for keeping ideas straight it’s a pain; to the point where I’m considering a hook to delete my stashes after a week so that I can just be rid of them.

Not wanting to go back to OSX after finally getting my encryption key back and being back in linux, I set about converting it to RGB values that urxvt can understand.

I realised two things while doing this-

1. plists are flaming piles of horror. Someone at Apple took bad acid.
2. Ruby is cool for bashing up quick scripts.

The results are up on github as itermcolors2xdefaults and it seems to work reasonably well.

The scheme in question was very feint so I added an option to multiply all the colors, but by and large it does what it says on the tin.

This gets worse if you already have config you like and goes totally sideways if you actually depend upon some of it to get a clean checkout.

The solutions isn’t complex- but isn’t obvious either. Most solutions I’ve seen involved invoking svn, then trying to throw it in the background after it creates metadata but BEFORE it begins creating files, and then nuke the files. Kludgy at best- I much prefer this approach.

#!/bin/sh
cd ~
mv .subversion _subversion
svn --config-dir _subversion up
echo "You must now merge _subversion into .subversion"

Initially, psych0.tk was configured as a mirror domain for psych0tik.net; as it is controlled outside the US it is further seperated from their draconian infrastructure and policy making, and in the event of things going sour should allow us to stay reachable while we sort things out and keep you posted.

The second change is moving registrars. Previously we had been with godaddy, but in light of godaddy’s support of SOPA (Good explanation here) we have migrated to gandi.net. I recommend that any of you with domains registered at godaddy do the same.

The final point is that while the domain transfer should be seemless, there could potentially be a hickup. In that event that this happens, we’ll keep our twitter account @psych0tiknet updated.

In my frustration while attempting to create and manage CAs for some of the above mentioned purposes I decided to fork and enhance the CA.sh script that openSSL ships with. I am currently working on fixing bugs, adding better error checking, extra features, and better usability. I have dubbed the CA.sh fork psyCA and has no dependencies except for OpenSSL and a POSIX shell.

Installation: installing the script consists of cloning the git repository

git clone git://github.com/psych0tik/psyCA.git
chmod +x psyCA/CA.sh

If you would like to contribute changes to the script or the default openssl.cnf please fork our repository and send us pull requests if you’re a GitHub user or email your patches to me or the psych0tik-list mailing list if you’re not a GitHub user.

I was lucky enough to be given the majority of the hardware by a coworker who had recently upgraded.  This started me out with the case and motherboard, along with 6 Gigs of ram, a Core2Duo @3.00Ghz, and dual nVidia GeForce 9500 GTs. I had to ditch the IDE CD/DVD drive and use a SATA device, as I’ve only got 1 IDE bus to work with.  The motherboard has 7 SATA slots, so I’ve been stuffing as much SATA into the machine as I could.

For storage, I went a little overboard.  As the primary drive, Juggernaut uses a 40G IDE drive.  On top of that he’s got another 41G IDE (a slave to the former), a 500G internal SATA drive (salvaged from a laptop), a 3T external USB drive, a 300G external firewire drive, a 80G external USB drive and finally a 3.5″ floppy drive.  I’m still looking at getting something to support SD cards, so that this box can interface with pretty much any media around.  The 41G IDE slave also contains a Windows ME install that will try to boot, but fails horribly.

On top of the usual compute-y  things, I’ve also added a few unique input sources in the form of a USB attached tempurature, humidity and pressure sensor (USB-THB) and a RS232 attached (via a USB converter) 270 degree dome security camera.  Both of these were designed by Z.Monkey.

Finally hooked this all up to my KVM to run through my old CRT and purchased a new router (Buffalo makes a nice one that comes stock with ddwrt.)  I’ve installed the AMD64 build of Gentoo and have all the peripherals (minus the security camera) working.

Straight down into the case.

One of the graphics cards

Both graphics cards attached

Side view with camera

Side view of the external storage cluster

Front view.  The small SATA drive is mounted to the DVD drive with duct tape.  You can also see the floppy drive and one of the internal IDE drives.

Security camera mounted to the control board (courtesy of Z.Monkey)

Close up on the control circuit

USBTHB, also courtesy of Z.Monkey

Finished setup, with the security camera on top and the USBTHB on the wall

Routers, including the new Buffalo router with ddwrt

KVM, as well as Storm and the UPS

First, make a socket

# This is redundant with the new implementation
mkfifo /tmp/socks_proxy.fifo

Then bind a listening socket (Your netcat implementation may need -p before the port), tee the data back to your terminal and to the endpoint, which in turn talks back to the original netcat instance via the fifo.

while true; do
    mkfifo /tmp/socks_proxy.fifo
    #                                                         vv host to proxy to goes here
    nc -l 8085 < /tmp/socks_proxy.fifo | tee /dev/stderr | nc google.com 80 | tee /tmp/socks_proxy.fifo
    rm /tmp/socks_proxy.fifo
done

To this end, I’ve rebuilt nearly everything (the metenvironment suite, my openbox fork, my urxvt fork, vimpc) for powerpc and uploaded the resulting binaries to the psych0tik apt repo.

The same lines apply as before.

Another feature of the new API is to allow us to distribute the proxy scanning workload across multiple hosts.  Currently, this only involves scanning for new IP addresses, but other pieces of proxyElite will be added.  We’ve seen great results replacing our old “acquire new proxies” code with the pE-API driven proxy scanner and have added nearly 200 new proxies in the last few weeks.  These new additions are now keeping our lists well over 20 proxies, and a re-vamp of the pE-core has allowed for faster, more thorough proxy checks via the basicChecker.

If you’re keen on playing with the new features, we’ve got a bit of documentation and sample code (in python) available here.  The sample code includes basic examples of parts of the API that require no key as well as a very alpha version of the autotumbler python library for HTTP proxy tumbling, which uses the pE-API to automatically generate proxy lists.