In response to my recent blog entry I was contacted by Ryan Woodings, president of MetaGeek, LLC – the company producing the Wi-Spy device. He kindly offered to provide me with a free Wi-Spy device, and naturally I am very grateful. Stay tuned for more information about the device – and of course an ebuild for wispy-tools.

I would also like to thank Jonah Benton, Greg Kroah-Hartman and Aaron Kulbe (SuperLag) for their kind and generous offers in this matter.

Just stumbled across a new low cost ($99) USB 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer called Wi-Spy. Mike Kershaw, the author of Kismet, is developing a set of opensource tools for this device called wispy-tools. A spectrum analyzer would greatly help me in debugging the various IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN drivers I maintain in Gentoo Linux (ipw2100, ipw2200, hostap-driver, madwifi-driver, …).

Unfortunately, the company accepts U.S. orders only, which makes it impossible for me to buy one, since I live in Denmark. So… if you live in the U.S. and feel like donating me such a device, please drop me an e-mail at brix@gentoo.org.

Update: Ryan Woodings, president of MetaGeek, LLC, has donated a free Wi-Spy device to me :)

Since I have a notoriously bad short-term memory, and since I’ve switched from using my Motorola A920 mobile phone slash PDA to the much lighter Motorola E1000 (which unfortunately has a rather sucky calender function) I recently set out on a quest to find a calender application for *nix which doesn’t suck.

In my terms “doesn’t suck” means “must be able to run in a console” and “mimics cal(1)”, which I use on a daily basis. Much to my surprise, I actually found one that fit those demands: GNU Cal, alsa known as app-misc/gcal. It looks like cal(1) but it is much(!) more feature rich. 324 page manual for a cal(1) replacement, anyone?

Anyways, after reading through the fine manual and setting it all up I’m very happy with it. Must be the first non-sucky calendar application I’ve used on *nix, apart from cal(1) of course. GNU Cal manages my day-to-day appointments, the national and international holidays, birthdays, recurring appointments, moon phases – you name it.

If you haven’t already tried gcal, I highly recommend that you do. After setting $GCAL=”-x -K -s1 -e -d” you can just call `gcal` to get normal cal(1) output, `gcal .+` to get the calendar sheets for the next three months, `gcal -m+` to list the rest of your appointments for the month, `gcal -M+` to include non-occupied days as well, `gcal -w+` for the rest of the week, and so on… You can even set up a cron job to run `gcal -w+ –mail` and read a list of this weeks appointments in your morning e-mail. Great stuff.

Since I’ve always used GIMP CVS HEAD for all my gimping needs (a legacy from my time as a GIMP developer), I have created an unofficial GIMP CVS ebuild, cleverly disguised as media-gfx/gimp-9999. The ebuild is available in my portage overlay.

The upstream ChangeLog and NEWS files from CVS HEAD are available online at developer.gimp.org.

Update: media-gfx/gimp-9999 is now available in Gentoo Portage! A big thank you to latexer for helping test it :)

Yay :) Thanks to rane in bug #118179, my previously unofficial Gentoo Linux LiveUSB HOWTO has just been made part of the official documentation.

I hope it may be of use to someone besides me.