deep darc

I participated in the Give-1 Get-1 program last month, and a few weeks ago I got my shiny new OLPC XO-1 laptop. I took a picture of myself using the built-in camera. As you can see, my cat Zahki never misses a photo-op.

After playing around with it for a few days, I have come to a few conclusions about the device. And, for my own amusement, I'm making this post entirely from my XO-1.

When I first started messing around with Teredo tunneling, I was really impressed with how it allowed me to get access to the IPv6 internet from just about anywhere. In fact, it excited me so much that I wrote a teredo client for MacOS X based on Miredo.

But lately teredo hasn't been all it's cracked up to be, and I think I know why: BGP routes to broken teredo relays. Whichever teredo relay which happens to be covering most of North America is really busted. I can connect to Japan (kame.net) just fine. I've been having problems like this for months but it only recently got really bad, because I no longer have a teredo relay set up at my home. Even though most of the IPv6 internet has been unavailable thru teredo for months, I didn't really notice—because at least I could access my home network. Now I can't even do that.

This is a damn shame. What was once a very promising transition path from IPv4 to IPv6 has fallen into such a state of disrepair that it has become useless.

The BBC ran an article on Monday about the effects of sensory deprivation. Several individuals consented to be locked individually in a fall-out bunker, without light or sound, for 48 hours. The results were both insightful and terrifying.

I realize that recently a lot of my friends have had a lot of trouble trying to contact me thru Google Talk. If you end up seeing me online, trying to send me a message, and getting an error in response, then try sending me an email or something. When I get some time over the next few days I'll try to debug the issue.

All of these problems seemed to crop up when my router died an untimely death a week or two ago. Probably related.

I finally got the finished PCB for the ybox2 in the mail yesterday. I populated it last night, but I ended up running out of parts. A quick run to Fry's combined with some early-morning soldering, and behold...

It works! Woo-hoo! Now comes the hard part: the Propeller TCP/IP stack.

This past weekend, Mike, Nathan, and myself had a road trip to Los Angeles for the weekend to hang out with Sophia. Lots of pictures after the jump.

By popular demand, I've made a video of the ambient color lamp in action. This version may look a little different than the previous pictures, as I am still experimenting with what works best.

I got the finished printed circuit boards for the mystery device in the mail the other day. After putting all of the parts on the board, this is what I now have:

Keep in mind that this is just a prototype. The next version will be cooler.