Aiming a satellite dish with Google Earth.

Lookup the azimuth for your zip code. Use the ruler tool in Google Earth to draw a line in the direction needed. Find an object on the line to use for aiming. I used the corner of a building.

I found a small piece of pipe and placed it on the mounting bracket. Then I looked through the pipe to view the corner of the building. I have 90% signal and it works great.

USB to serial adapter with OSX

I have a hawking USB to Serial converter I need to use with my MacBook. There is always a console port calling my name.

First I installed the Prolific driver from this page, Prolific. Now I just open terminal and type the command below.

screen /dev/tty.usbserial

I had to search for the command to close screen when I was done.

Ctrl-a k

iPhone camera + magnifying glass

Try this out for some cool shots.

554 5.3.5 Local configuration error

I spent a few hours tonight trying to get rid of this error from sendmail on Linux. I added the new domain to the file below and all is good.

/etc/mail/local-host-names

This was a BlueQuartz server that should do everything for you from the web interface. Once in a while, it gets confused. The domain was listed in the file as www.example.com. I added example.com

How to use a Voice Memo as a ringtone on the iPhone

You need to use terminal or SSH.

The voice memos are located in this folder as .m4a files.
/private/var/mobile/Media/Recordings

My ringtones are located in this folder as .m4r files. (Is this folder different for everyone?)
/private/var/stash/Ringtones.z8OJCu

Copy the m4a files to the ringtone folder and rename them as m4r. It worked but I might look for a GUI file manager next time.

iPhone + T-Mobile + Google Voice

(first photo with my iPhone)

I just wanted to jot this down in case I need it again soon.

• Purchased an iPhone 3G from Ebay.
• Plugged in an old AT&T sim card with no service to get to the home screen.
• Used iTunes to upgrade the phone to 3.0.
• With instructions from iphone-hacks.com, I ran Redsn0w to jailbreak and ultrasn0w to unlock.
  
• Installed Google Voice with Cydia and it works!

You can not get 3G with T-Mobile but Edge works. Email works great, Safari is a little slow, Youtube is very slow.

Free AIS message decoder.

This will decode AIVDM and AIVDO messages from the command line. I was inspired by the Joe Petrix decoder in Basic and tried to do the same thing in c++.

Source code

Windows Binary

Linux Binary(Ubuntu)
OSX Binary

Sample program output:

c:\>ais-decode

Enter AIS string. (Example !AIVDM,1,1,,A,1000vV@P00Idw98ATMk00?wj0<0n div="div" f="f">

AIS string: !AIVDM,1,1,,A,15LWgHpP00qdupBATUBbk?v00H0p,0*2E

ais_string= !AIVDM,1,1,,A,15LWgHpP00qdupBATUBbk?v00H0p,0*2E

message type = 1

repeat indicator = 0

MMSI = 365555555

navagation status = 8

rate of turn = 128

speed over ground = 0

position accuracy = 1

longitude = -88.043930

latitude = 30.708603

course over ground = 2764

true heading = 511

c:\>

Update: 2012
I just added an OSX binary.