tech.nocr.at » boost

DIY: Boost Your Laptop’s WiFi

Frank — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:43:11 +0000

Even with the hardware of today you can still experience horrible wireless reception. Dead spots have become all too common and if your wifi access point happens to be on another floor, you know how much of a pain it can be to stream media when your signal sucks.

Sure you could go out and buy some massive transmitter that could cook bacon, but not only is it dangerous it’s also really expensive. By using some velcro, an MC card connector and a Dremel, you can create this Frankenstein of signal boosters for your laptop. You can easily ~~steal~~ borrow the wifi signal from your neighbours place.

If your not crazy about building something like this and want something easier then check out the wifi wok.

[Link to Hook Up]

DIY: Boost Your Laptop’s WiFi originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/02/10. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Boost USB Port Voltage

Frank — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:49:16 +0000

Most larger gadgets that recharge via USB require at least 10 watts of power like Apple’s iPad. The iXP1-500 dongle claims it will allow devices to recharge from underpowered USB ports.

I’m not quite sure how they accomplish this for $5, but I assume it must have some sort of capacitor inside that stores juice from these underpowered ports and then sends it down the USB port.

XMultiple Technologies (the makers of the iXP1-500) say that its “100% guaranteed to work”. Hocus pocus or simple electronics? I’m not sure, but if anyone out there gets one be sure to let us know.

Boost USB Port Voltage originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/08/20. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Phaser Boasts 300mW Laser

Frank — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:15:23 +0000

Since you can’t walk into to your favorite weapons store and pick up a phaser just yet, hacker Luke decided to build his own. He picked up a toy phaser from Amazon for about $20 ripped out the internals only choosing to reuse the trigger, top switch and battery pack.

The phaser contains two laser diodes which were pulled from a 6x BD-R burner. I sure hope that the burner was broken since purchasing a unit just for the sake of pulling the diodes out to put in a toy gun is very expensive. The two diodes are mounted on a swiveling carriage which can be turned 180 degrees to switch between the diodes. A boost driver is used to bump up the 3v that the batteries provide to 7v to drive the diodes.

Although you won’t be killing Kingons with this unit it does make one cool looking toy. Remember, don’t go firing it in peoples eyes, that will hurt. Check out the video after the break.

Phaser Boasts 300mW Laser originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/26. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

DIY: Wifi Wok

Frank — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:24:53 +0000

What happens when you put a Wi-Fi dongle and a Wok together? The Wok-Fi of course. My favorite how-to site Instructables has a write up on mashing up a dumpling strainer and a Wi-Fi dongle. The writer claims to have gotten a boost of 60% when using this. Plus, everyone can whip out a cantena. Imagine driving around with a Wok out your window. Imaging the geek-cred you’d get with this at the next Hope conference.

[Link to Wok-Fi]

DIY: Wifi Wok originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/09/29. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Better Cell Service With Cell Rangers

Frank — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:49:21 +0000

We have all suffered it, bad call quality, poor reception, limited or no service. Fear no more (we hope that is), Cell Ranger to the rescue. Cell Ranger is a company that focuses on enhancing your wireless service (once again, we hope). The company just released two cell signal boosters called Cell Ranger Stix and Cell Ranger Port for computer and automobile users.

Both units feature a microprocessor that receives then analyzes cellular signals. It then selectively amplifies the wireless signal based on real time signals conditions to provide the best reception. It claims that this will offer users a more constant signal, fewer dropped calls, and faster data access, all this within a 6 foot radius to the unit.

The units are compatible with any wireless carrier in both the U.S. and Canada except for iDEN networks (sorry Nextel). The units will work with any car’s cigarette lighter or on any computer’s USB port.

Each unit will run for $150.

Better Cell Service With Cell Rangers originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/22. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache

Frank — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:43:16 +0000

Edit: Fixes suggested in the comments have been applied to this howto

We recently moved tech.nocr.at over to a bunch of VPSs in order to achieve some decent load balancing and speed. Even though SliceHost isn’t a sponsor, I’d like to give them a quick plug. SliceHost is easily the greatest VPS provider bar none. You pick the Distro you want, you tweak it, you set it up, all ports are available, you do as you wish. If you setup multiple VPS with them you can even have private IP’s between them in order to load balance or cluster. Prices start as low as $20/month. If you use them, click this link so that I can get some referral love. Now on to the article..

WordPress can be a blessing and a pain at the same time. It’s great for displaying dynamic content yet it’s displaying that exact dynamic content that can put a massive stress load on your system. WordPress’s query routines aren’t exactly the best. Let’s not even go into how much of a hog Apache can be, but for running dynamic content and prettying up your url’s, mod_rewrite can’t be beat. By using WP Super Cache to help reduce the load on your SQL queries and by placing Nginx in front of Apache as a reverse proxy, you’d be amazed and how quickly your site will load and respond, even enough to withstand a digg of slashdot effect.

Here’s what you are going to need.

This how-to system assumes that you have your Webserver running under a debian style distro like Ubuntu, but It can easily be modified for other distros like Fedora or CentOS.

Assuming that you already have WordPress running under Apache the first thing we are going to do is install the Wp-Super-Cache plugin and active it under your plugin folder of your WordPress installation. Pay close attention to the installation steps in the included readme.txt file, you have to follow each step properly in order to ensure proper caching.

Wp-Super-Cache creates static html files of your pages lessening the load on your SQL queries. Once you have it running and working let’s move on to our next step, reconfiguring Apache.

Apache can be a resource hog, especially when it has to span multiple child processes in order to serve up content. We are going to have to do some tweaking to apache’s conf file so that it will work behind Nginx.

Open up your /etc/apache2/ports.conf file

sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

We need to change Apache from port 80 to 8080 as Nginx will be server content to the real world via port 80.

Listen 8080

Next we are going to turn KeepAlives off on Apache since Nginx will be dealing with all of the actual browser connections. This will ensure that all of the child processes in Apache die quickly and don’t hang around chewing up memory

Find the KeepAlive entry in your /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file and set it to off

KeepAlive Off

Now that we have made the needed changes in apache we need to restart it so that they take effect.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Next we are going to install Nginx which is a powerful and extremely lightweight http server that is perfect for reverse proxying or load balancing to backend servers like Apache.

sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get install nginx

Once nginx is installed we are going to need to modify it’s config file located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Your conf file should look like this.

user www-data;
worker_processes  2;
 
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
 
events {
	worker_connections  1024;
}
 
http {
	include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
	default_type  application/octet-stream;
	access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
	sendfile        on;
	tcp_nopush     on;
	keepalive_timeout  3;
	tcp_nodelay        on;
	gzip  on;
	include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Now we need to move on to the actual site config file for our Nginx setup

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Your file should look something like this (replace domain.com of course)

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/domain.com.error.log;
        access_log  /var/log/nginx/domain.com.access.log;
 
# Main location (path to you blog, relative to your domain root)
        location / {
            proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
            proxy_redirect     off;
 
            proxy_set_header   Host             $http_host;
            proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 
            client_max_body_size       10m;
            client_body_buffer_size    128k;
 
            proxy_connect_timeout      90;
            proxy_send_timeout         90;
            proxy_read_timeout         90;
 
            proxy_buffer_size          4k;
            proxy_buffers              4 32k;
            proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
            proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
        }
 
    # Static files location
        location ~* ^.+\.(htm|html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
            root   /;
        }
	# if the requested file exists, return it immediately
	if (-f $request_filename) {
	break;
	}
 
	set $supercache_file '';
	set $supercache_uri $request_uri;
 
	if ($request_method = POST) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# Using pretty permalinks, so bypass the cache for any query string
	if ($query_string) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_" ) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# if we haven't bypassed the cache, specify our supercache file
	if ($supercache_uri ~ ^(.+)$) {
	set $supercache_file /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$1index.html;
	}
 
	# only rewrite to the supercache file if it actually exists
	if (-f $document_root$supercache_file) {
	rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break;
	}
}

The above (especially the if statements) help Ngnix pass the static html files that are created by WP Super Cache directly to the users thus freeing up Apache to do nothing more than handle the dynamic requests.

Now it’s time to restart Ngnix and get the whole ball of wax working

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

What we have essentially done is taken the load of serving static files like images, css, and js files off of apache and passed it on to Ngnix which runs a lot faster and leaner than apache for serving static content. All requests for any dynamic content like php still gets passed on to apache. Clean and simple.

In closing let me mention that this is just what works for me, i’m sure that there might be a better way to use WP Super Cache and Ngnix to speed up WordPress, but what you see above has really helped with the load on both of the tech.nocr.at front-end web servers.

How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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PS2 Hack Simulates Fatigue

Frank — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:20:44 +0000

I’ve sure seen my fair share of console game controller hacks, but never one like this. The guys at Near Future Laboratory have been working on a hack for a PS2 controller that will making gaming more “realistic” by simulating fatigue. By wiring in the ever versatile Arduino platform to the PS2 controller’s DualShock 2 analog stick and some crafty code they were able to tweak the output signal ever so slightly so that the longer you play, the slower your character moves.

Crazy, yes I know, but if they could only cause you fatigue the longer you play … What am I thinking, maybe they should give all of us bigger boosts of energy so that we can play longer!

Link – Near Future Laboratory

PS2 Hack Simulates Fatigue originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/02. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

$10 Super Duper WiFi Antenna

Frank — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:55:10 +0000

There are sometimes that a single bar of WiFi service isnâ€™t going to cut it. You can see the access points near you, but the signal is just too weak to get you any access. Before you go out and spend $100â€™s for pringle can like antennas give this $10 alternative a spin.

Items needed: some 35-mm foam (like the kind desktop and laptop PCs usually come with), some solid-core copper wire, a small brass plate, and multiple BNC connectors. Then follow the directions in the video and youâ€™ll have a super powerful directional antenna that should get you better gain that that external antenna your card came with.

Remember, this works as a directional antenna so you need to have it pointed in the right direction to get a strong signal. Just sweep it around slowly until you can lock down a super signal then surf away!

$10 Super Duper WiFi Antenna originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/24. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Boost Your Cell Service For Cheap

Frank — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 02:20:22 +0000

Many a times I have cursed my cell phone and provider because of the ridiculously bad reception one can get. You know what I am referring to, youâ€™re walking in the middle of the street (okay, maybe on a sidewalk) on a bright and sunny day with no massive steel structures anywhere to be seen yet you can only manage to get a single bar or service.

Well, this little neat trick is going to help you get some boost out of your phone. Unfortunately you iPhone and Blackberry users arenâ€™t going to benefit from it. You need a cellphone that has an external antenna connector on the back of it. Itâ€™s the little connector on the back thatâ€™s covered with a rubber plug, yes that one. Check the video after the break.

[Via CrunchGear]

Boost Your Cell Service For Cheap originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/20. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Hack your remote control

Frank — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Have you even been sitting on your couch and had to stretch your arm out until your tendons creaked? Ever lean forward in your armchair and fallen off because you were trying to get your remote control to work? Ever have to arm the remote at the TV and wave it around like an aerosol paint can?

Do I ever have the hack for you (Video at the end). This little quick hack will let you boost the range of your remote control. If works so well that I can now use my remote as a lightsaber and slice cheese, okay maybe not cheese, but I can aim my remote at the TV with clear line of sight and change the channel from across the house! Awesome.

Hack your remote control originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2007/08/15. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.