The IBM/Lenovo X60s has two Mini-PCI-Express slots: One for a WLAN and the other for WWAN-device.
IBM/Lenovo whitelists some device according to their PCI IDs in the BIOS. So if you want to use a WLAN or WWAN card that has not been "blessed" by IBM/Lenovo you will see the error "1802" or "1804", the BIOS will disable the device and it can not be used by the operating system.

"Zender" did a lot of work and published information on how to bypass that errors. If you want the direct URL to the BIOS modifications contact me as Zender does not want the URL to be publicly available.

Using his BIOS modification and the instructions on thinkwiki I put together a BIOS update CDROM-ISO to upgrade the BIOS from an external USB-CDROM which I tested on my X60s but it should also work on X60. Two notes: If you already have the latest BIOS version, you have to downgrade the BIOS first and if you have a custom logo you have to remove that (and than apply it again).

“Building an auditory and visual stimulation device with EEG feedback loop. An open source software and hardware approach for controllable brainwave entrainment.” is the title of my bachelor thesis.

More populistic I could say this is about finding out if it is possible to build a device which lets a human sleep and wake up again purposely.

Sounds interesting? Do not hesitate to read the thesis and/or leave a comment!

So far I had three different TOR setups:

• A browser (Firefox) using a local HTTP proxy (Privoxy) which uses a local TOR client through SOCKS.
• tsocks/torify to make non-SOCKS-aware-applications work through TOR.
• A virtual machine (VM) where some applications are configured to use the local HTTP proxy and/or TOR client.

Each of these setups has different disadvantages and neither fits my requirements:

• In the browser approach I had to turn off all plugins (Java, Flash, ..) and Javascript so they can not leak information about the local system. Unfortunately this breaks many websites nowadays.
• The tsocks/torify approach works for most applications but they may leak information about the local system themselves. Anyway there is a small risk of just forgetting to type the “torify” in front of the command I want to execute which I really do not want to happen.
• The VM approach is like putting the two previous approaches into a VM. So the risk of leaking local information is reduced to the VM. Anyway I have to make applications running within the VM explicitely use the TOR network. Besides I want to take care that no other traffic but TOR is going out of the VM which means I have to set up a packet filter on the host.

One solution might be to transparently route a VM through the TOR network so that a VM does not need to be modified in any way. It is quite simple and should work on all OS although I just tried it on a Linux host. As already said, the VM can run any OS!

The host must to redirect all TCP packets to a transparent SOCKS proxy which itself forwards the packets to a TOR client. UDP packets with destination port 53 are redirected to a small script which puts the payload into a TCP packet and forwards it to a TOR client. This is necessary because TOR itself can only handle TCP packets. The host must drop all other packets coming from the VM.

How this works under a Linux host:

• Create an unprivileged user “torbob” that runs the VMs.
• Choose a virtualization software. I decided to go for qemu/kvm since I am already familiar with it. Using Virtualbox or VMware should also work.
• Install, configure and run a transparent SOCKS proxy. I use redsocks but there are also others around. Remember the port it is listening on (31337 in this case). Update: This is not necessary anymore, because Tor has an inbuilt SOCKS proxy since version 0.2.0.1-alpha. Just add “TransListenAddress 127.0.0.1″ and “TransPort 31337″ to your torrc.
• Configure and run the tor-dns-proxy.py script from dsocks which does the UDP->TCP packet DNS conversion and remember the port it is listening on (1253 in this case). Update: This is not necessary anymore, because Tor has this inbuilt since version 0.2.0.1-alpha. Just add ” DNSListenAddress 127.0.0.1″ and “DNSPort 1253″ to your torrc. If you want to be able to resolve .onion domains, you also have to add “VirtualAddrNetwork 10.192.0.0/10″ to your torrc.
• Redirect the packets from the VM to the local daemons:

iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -p tcp -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j REDIRECT –to-ports 31337
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -p udp –dport 53 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j REDIRECT –to-ports 1253

• Make sure that packets to that daemons are accepted and all other packets from that user are dropped/logged:

iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 31337 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p udp -m udp –dport 1253 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j LOG
iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j DROP

• If you want to share files through SMB between the host and the VM you have to add a few more rules *before* the rules above:

iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 445 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j RETURN
iptables -A OUTPUT -t nat -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 139 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j RETURN
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p udp -m udp –dport 137 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 445 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 127.0.0.1/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 139 -m owner –uid-owner torbob -j ACCEPT

• Thats it. Now starting a VM (or running any other program) as user “torbob” will either route its traffic through the TOR network (or drop the packets if they use an unsupported protocol).

Eine sehr nette Mindfuck-Installation entdeckt vor ca 2 Wochen vor dem Eingang zum Freihaus:

A few days ago I wanted to quickly send a file through my instant messaging client which neither worked through xmpp nor icq. It came to my mind that I keep having this problem for years now and having to send files through email sucks.

So I decided to write a small script which is executed from the context menu of konqueror or dolphin (kde file browsers). It compresses a file or directory, sets a password and uploads it to filefactory.com .

project site on kde-apps.org

Eine meines Erachtens begrüßenswerte Petition.

If you are concered about your privacy while browsing you probably know about cookies and handle them properly (delete them automatically when closing a browser session, block all cookies except whitelisted ones, ..).

Macromedia/Adobe introduced something similar to cookies called “Local Shared Object” in Flash6. Unfortunately browsers (at least Firefox) currently do not handle Flash cookies easily. If you tell your browser to clear its cookies they simply persist.

I was very surprised by the vast amount of flash cookies located on my system. Take a look yourself “~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/” for Linux, “~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/” for Mac OS X or “%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\” for Windows XP/Vista.

Two Flash cookies on my system are related to a browser game all others were not needed and I deleted them. You can configure your flash preferences at Adobe. If you want to deny all Flash cookies you need to set the amount of disk space that can be used to “None” at the “Global Storage Settings”. You will then be asked everytime a Flash object wants to set a cookies unless you also enable “Never ask again”.

Some more information about Flash cookies.

Zuerst wird der Animationsfilm “Goldschmied Fabian – Gib mir die Welt +5%” gezeigt und danach hält Nicolas Hofer seinen Vortrag “Die Evolution des Geldbilds”.

Für mich bisher die beste Erklärung zu unserem Geldsystem in einem Video. Auch wenn es insgesamt recht lange dauert (2:18h), kann ich es jedem Interessiertem empfehlen.

URL für den Download.

Einfach bei arte-magazin.de bestellen. (:

These are the firefox extensions I use today. I hope some of them are as useful for you as they are for me. If you know any extensions I should not have left out or think that one of the below is outdated just leave a comment..

• adblock plus: ad blocker
• cookiesafe: control cookie persmissions from within the statusbar.
• customizegoogle: enhance google search results by adding extra information and remove ads and spam.
• download statusbar: nice download manager
• tagsifter: tag your bookmarks. finally bookmarks become useable..
• update scanner: monitors webpages for updates which still don’t provide rss feeds
• mitm me: bypass the very annoying ssl errors introduced in firefox3 with a single click.
• gtranslate: translates the selected text via google translate
• keyconfig: nice key configuration. Personally I use it to configure the forward and back keys.
• noscript: allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by web sites of your choice.
• fasterfox: performance and network tweaks for firefox
• unplug: download flash movies easily (for firefox3 there is no “official” but a “modded” version which just alters the version check).
• add n edit cookies: cookie editor that allows you add and edit session and saved cookies
• bugmenot: bypass annoying web registrations with the context menu (input from ).
• refcontrol: control what gets sent as http referer on per-site basis.
• tab mix plus: has a very rich (not to say bloated) feature set. Currently I use the multi row tab feature and the closed tabs icon (which is way better than the default one).
• firebug: edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live
• safecache: defends against cache-based tracking techniques but is currently only available for firefox2.
• safehistory: defends against visited-link-based tracking techniques but is also only available for firefox2.
  

I just figured out how to automatically add addresses I wrote an email to to my addressbook in kmail. Christian Schaarschmidt wrote a small patch which adds a filter you can define for your outgoing mails. Unfortunately it’s not available in vanilla kmail (yet?). I added an updated ebuild+patch to my gentoo repository so one can easily use it.

I think got used to that feature with the previous mail client I used: thunderbird and I am wondering if the mail client I used before thunderbird (mutt) has a similar feature.

I just created a new tumblelog/soup in which I will document the progress of creating a Sound&Light-Machine with EEG feedback loop (aka Mindmachine). The soup is currently empty but I will feed it within the next weeks with the current status of the project.

Some time ago I had the idea to write a google proxy which implements the features of the customizegoogle extension for firefox but should be browser and operating system independent. Today I stumbled across scroogle which apparently does implement some of the features (and uses ssl).
If you want to use it as default search engine in firefox, enter “about:config” in the location bar, search for “keyword.url” and change the value to “https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi?Gw=”.
There are also search engine plugins available.

I finally put my local ebuilds online. Browse my Gentoo overlay.

Update:
New URL: git://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay.git
Browse online: http://github.com/ra–/ra-gentoo-overlay/tree/master

Since I use the libraries of universities quite heavily I wrote a small perl script “alephrenew.pl” about two years ago which does the renewing of books for me.

The reason for writing it was that I gain an advantage (to other people using the library) when I renew every day (if there are reservations on the book one with the oldest renewing date has to bring it back – at least as far as I understand the behaviour of the Aleph software).

The help should be self explaining:

Usage: ./alephrenew.pl [-h] [-q] -b <baseurl> -u <username> -p <password> [-r <seconds>]

-h    : this help message
-q    : quiet (suppress success message)
-b    : baseurl without trailing slash (eg. http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at)
-u    : username (eg. $E123456) – you will probably need to escape the “$”
-p    : password – your date of birth in the form of YYYYMMDD (eg. 19730425)
if you did not change it
-r    : wait random time between 1 and “seconds” seconds (before starting and
1 to 30 seconds between the requests – so it does not look like a script)

Examples:
./alephrenew.pl -q -b http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at -u \$E123456 -p 19730425 -r 3600
./alephrenew.pl -b http://aleph.univie.ac.at -u \$E098765 -p 19851224

A crontab entry may look like this:
0 0 * * 2-6 /path/to/alephrenew.pl -q -b http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at -u \$E3862419 -p 0wN4g3 -r 7200

It’s tested with the libraries of the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna but should work with any other library using the Aleph software.

It is released under the terms of the GPLv2.

I do appreciate your feedback!

I experienced Google Earth being really slow after updating it to version 4.3. Disabling atmosphere in the view menu made it work again.

A few days ago I figured out that the NetworkManager applet for Gnome is also working in KDE. I use it because it has less bugs, compiles against the current svn of NetworkManager and works more reliable in general then the KNetworkManager. Someone should have told me before that this works. (:

The last months I more and more used a tumble blogging platform with social features called “soup“. It’s easy to create content very fast, but one disadvantage compared to a wordpress blog is the lack of good editor. I use it quite heavily anyway.

Here is my soup ra.soup.io and its RSS feed.

I already tried the new driver for the intel 3945 wlan chip (iwl3945) a couple of times, but it always ran more unsatisfying than the old driver (ipw3945) – even though the old driver has many problems (needs a daemon running, sometimes problems when resuming from suspend/hibernate, ..).

The new version in the 2.6.25 linux kernel works quite well for me (the one in 2.6.24 did not), but the wlan led is not working. This patch makes it work (I removed the support for the 4965 chip since I don’t need it. If you need it: this is the source to the patch).

Videos explaining monetary theory for layman/non-economists.

Eine lobenswerte Aktion der Grünen.

Jetzt unterschreiben auf ueberwachungsstaat.at (ein wenig Hintergrundinformation ist dort ebenfalls vorhanden).

Die Einleitung (erste Minute) ist vielleicht nicht so sehenswert. Den Text allerdings empfinde ich als unheimlich beeindruckend und tief berührend. *ohne weitere Worte*

I took a patch which implements the suspend/hibernate buttons within the shutdown dialog in kde from the kubuntu guys and made it work on gentoo.

If you have no clue what this is all about here are two screenshots [1] [2] (actually these do not represent the patch exactly, but you should get the idea).

The kde split ebuild for ksmserver: ebuild (I will do the update to the kde-all-in-one ebuild on request).

To make use of the feature emerge with USE=”dbus hal”. If you don’t see any icons next to the suspend/hibernate buttons, make sure you use an icon set that provides the files “suspend.png” and “hibernate.png”.

I updated some kernel patches:

• disk-protection patch for hdaps which is used for hard disk head parking on ibm/lenovo notebooks if acceleration is measured: disk-protect-2623-rc8.patch
  Source patch: 2.6.20
• aggressive link power management (ALPM is a technique where the SATA AHCI controller will put the SATA link to the disk into a very low power mode when there’s no IO going on for some time)
  aggressive_link_power_management-2622.patch
  aggressive_link_power_management-2623-rc8.patch
  Some more information on lesswatts.org
  Source patches on kernel.org
• e1000 fix on x60s which fixes the initialization of e1000 on ibm/lenovo thinkpad x60s if no cable is connected.

Den Freunden der guten Küche kann ich Seitan nur ans Herz legen. Er ist gesund und ausgesprochen lecker.
Informationen:

• Wikipedia (deutsch)
• Wikipedia (englisch, aber weit ausführlicher)
• Seitan.at

Mittlerweile ist Seitan auch in diversen Großmärkten erhältlich (Rewe und andere, für die man keine Werbung machen sollte). Empfehlenswert ist allerdings Reinberger Naturküche für Seitan in Österreich.

A few weeks ago I stumbled accross konq-pdf which offers various PDF related service (“right click”) menus for konqueror. These menus contain joining/adding files, changing pages per sheet, rotating, converting to other formats, extracting images, .. in a few words: it’s very handy if you don’t want to remember all the command line parameters for pdftk/pdfjam you just need once in a while. (:

There are just two things I found in the software:
The kde submenu text in pdfnup.desktop “X-KDE-Submenu=Paginate” is not
very clear. “X-KDE-Submenu=Pages per sheet” would be better imho.

A small bug in pdfjoin.desktop makes it always display the italian kde
submenu: “X-KDE-Submenu=Unisci o aggiungi” should be replaced by
“X-KDE-Submenu[it]=Unisci o aggiungi”.

I just wrote the author Giuseppe Benigno an email, so these “bugs” probably get fixed soon.

As you are reading this you probably already know: this blog moved away from twoday to wordpress and is now reachable under a new url http://ra.fnord.at/ on my own server. Update the feed url. Everything will be much better.. (:

The firefox extension for bugmenot is still working (at least for firefox 2.0.0.6)

Source: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/02/07/bugmenot/
Direct installation link: http://extensions.roachfiend.com/bugmenot.xpi

Even more linux power saving information from intel on LessWatts.org.

Source: http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Power_Saving_Projects

Ich habe eigentlich die letzten Jahre auf suspend2/tuxonice gesetzt, nun aber uswsusp ausprobiert, da hier mittlerweile auch compression und splash funktioniert, und bin begeistert: selbe Funktionalität und stabiler. (: