Blog Title: MaddHat

Twitter Weather Forecasts Using Linux

Twitter’s feature to allow updates from terminal allows for a lot of creative ways to use twitter. I used some already written scripts and commands and put it all together to receive weather forecasts for my area at 9am every day on my phone.  Example of SMS message sent to my phone “Forecast for: DES read more..

Testing Network Performance Using Iperf

Just a quick post on a great tool for testing network performance. Iperf is a very slim tool that will measure TCP/UDP bandwidth performance. It is an available ubuntu package “iperf ” and also has Windows/OSX binaries available. I found a working mirror here. What makes Iperf a good test versus read more..

New WD Media Player Reviewed, Stripped Naked

Over the weekend, Western Digital silently introduced their WD TV HD Media Player. It is an extremely small device (think two WD Passport drives stacked on top of each other) which packs an extreme amount of processing power. And best of all: I picked one up on sale at Best Buy for $99.99. The read more..

Setup DNS Cache Server Using Dnsmasq and Ubuntu

I’m always looking for ways to improve on my LAN, especially when it’s free. A friend suggested DNS caching to speed up browsing. I gave it a shot and was impressed with the results. I’m now saving at least 70ms for every DNS query (after it’s been cached the first time of course.) read more..

Create Your Own Syslinux Bootloader Logo

SYSLINUX looks for the logo.16 image when booting. The following are my steps for creating mine: To get started you will need a bootable USB drive with your OS of choice as long as it has SYSLINUX as the boot loader. You can edit this for a CD too but you will need to create a read more..

MIT Siftables

I generally do not like to simply re-post links because it brings no new content to the net and makes the site a copy cat off others. However, this video struck me as very inspiring and I would like to make an exception to share it. It is from the labs at MIT and it read more..

Unboxing the new MacBook Pro

0 Day release - unboxing pictures and comparison pictures of the new MacBook Pro released Feb. 26, 2008. My roommate has been anxiously awaiting the release of the new MacBook Pros and today we were greeted by the pretty new pictures on apple’s site. He rushed to the Des Moines Apple store and picked one read more..

Creating Backtrack 3 Live USB Drive

Booting to live CDs seems to be sluggishly slow when compared to booting from a USB drive. I previously posted about creating a Live BackTrack 2 USB drive, and here is the instructions for the new BackTrack 3 Beta. They have a special release specifically for USB drives this time around so it’s read more..

Creating NAS In 10 Minutes

Network Attached Storage has become increasingly popular the last couple of months. Interest has only grown more since apple’s release of Time Capsule which is a NAS device that also has the capabilities to create incremental backups of computers on the network. NAS can be very useful for any home network with a read more..

Network Camera Viewing From Google

This is an old trick I thought was a good time waster. Everyday businesses install video servers and network cameras so that they can view the business remotely. They want to have them monitor key points of the business that may include valuable equipment or a lot of customer traffic. Both of read more..