I have been running a VyOS-based router at home for years. VyOS is incredibly powerful: VLANs, WireGuard tunnels, DNS forwarding, firewall rules, DHCP, BGP if you are into that, and pretty much anything else you can think of. But it...

Updated: 2026-02-26

Again, mostly a note to myself explaining how and why I set this up the way I did.

This is mostly a note to myself explaining how and why I set this up the way I did.

Last time around I was looking for a large dedicated VPS in the $100/month price range. Since then I have started deploying a lot more tiny cloud instances that cost less than $10/month to run just one or two apps....

I am trying to see if I should move from my own hardware sitting in a data center in Milpitas to a VPS. My main criteria is that I need at least 4 decently fast cores and at least 8G...

Like most of my posts here, this is mostly a note to myself so I don’t forget how I did it.

After nearly 7 years of service I retired my Asus RT-16 router, which wasn’t really a router, but a re-purposed wifi access point running AdvancedTomato. In its place I got a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It is Debian-based and has a...

The HTPC box and various computers around the house use a mix of internal drives, external USB and eSATA drives. It is quite a mess, and backups are sporadic at best. The HTPC especially has grown organically with USB and...

While waiting for a connection in Frankfurt I had a quick look at what it would take to make ZeroMQ and libevent co-exist in PHP and it was actually quite easy. Well, easy after Mikko Koppanen added a way to...

I have pieced together two Sandy Bridge machines. This entry contains my notes on the two machines. Mostly for myself to refer back to later, but it might come in handy for others along the way.

Last year I showed how to use pecl/oauth to write a Twitter OAuth Consumer. But what about writing the other end of that? What if you need to provide OAuth access to an API for your site? How do you...

Facebook released a new PHP extension today that supports inlining XML. This is a feature known as XML Literals in Visual Basic. Go read their description here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/xhp-a-new-way-to-write-php/294003943919 It adds an extra parsing step which maps inlined XML elements to...

In a response to a question from ReadWriteWeb, among other things, I wrote:

Not sure why it took me so long to figure out what I am sure is obvious to most other people who have thought about this, but it never clicked for me how to get anywhere near useful SQL Injection...

This was written in September 2009 when the current version of Gearman was 0.9. Thanks to Eric Day for answering my dumb questions along the way. To get started, install Gearman. I am on Debian, so this is what I...

I have seen a lot of questions about OAuth and specifically how to do OAuth from PHP. We have a new pecl oauth extension written by John Jawed which does a really good job simplifying OAuth. I added Twitter support...

I have been having a lot of fun with two Yahoo! technologies that have been evolving quickly. YQL and GeoPlanet. The first, YQL, puts an SQL-like interface on top of all the data on the Internet. And the second, GeoPlanet,...

One of the things I have been playing with lately is Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey project. It appeals to me on many different levels. The geeky name is a play on GreaseMonkey. But instead of writing plugins that run locally in the...

This server is well over 5 years old and really starting to show its age. It’s a 2.66GHz P4 with a Gig of ram and mirrored 80G drives. I am constantly running out of disk space and spamd chews up...

A couple of early Christmas presents for the new house. A new iMac for the kitchen nook and a Sonos system. I guess I haven’t bought ram in a while because it was under $100 to upgrade the iMac to...

http://pipes.yahoo.com is a cool toy, and by toy I mean it in the useful and cant-stop-playing-with-it sense. My first impression when I saw an early version a couple of months ago was, “How the heck did they do that?” I...

Want to work on some of the busiest and coolest web apps in the world? Do you like Flickr, and want to work downtown San Francisco? Or perhaps you are into music, movies or TV and want to work out...

My previous entry way back on Aug.18 talked about the Nike+ipod widget I had picked up along with a first gen Nano. I figure it is time for an update. I still use it 5 or 6 times a week...

On a whim I picked up the Nike+iPod doodad the other day and this morning did my first decent run with it and I am quite impressed. I’m not much of an Apple nor Nike fan. I do have a...

About 18 months ago I had a very nice perfectly configured Debian T42p Thinkpad stolen at a conference. I had less than two weeks before the next conference and I didn’t have time to fiddle with my OS to get...

PHP 5, JSON from pecl cvs, Map Tile API and the Yui Connection Manager. Toss them in a bag and shake and you get something like this. Enter a city name, or even a pseudo-name like Philly or SFO and...

March 1, 2006 - Disclaimer: Since a lot of people seem to me misunderstanding this article. It isn’t about OOP vs. Procedural programming styles. I happen to lean more towards procedural, but could easily have gone more OOP. I simplified...

Debian’s Apache1 package doesn’t quite do what I need. I have been building my own and overwriting the files from the Debian package, but that can get annoying. So I hacked my changes into the Debian source package and built...

My wife works for APC, so APC stuff is readily available. Here are a few things that I am looking at for my road warrior kit. I’d like to get to the point where I just have 1 plug and...

I spent a few hours with the Javascript-Flash Yahoo! Maps API today. The result is here:       http://lerdorf.com/map

Web 2.0 and the programmable web that I and others have been talking about for a while has mostly been vapourware so far. There are a few generic components that are useful, but it is somewhat limited what you can...

I like stuff I can pick up and do something useful with in an hour or two. Perhaps my attention span is too short, but if I have to read a 300 page spec before I get to Hello World,...

March 22. Update: And here is the Flickr version: flickr.progphp.com

This isn’t a very high-tech toy, but it makes the best chocolate ice cream in the world. It’s a relatively inexpensive Cuisinart ICE device which has a fancy bowl with some sort of liquid jelly inside that freezes and holds...

I put in my request weeks ago to get onto the priority list to get the new TivoToGo-enabled software on my Tivos. It finally arrived a couple of days ago. I wanted to write something up on it as soon...

I have an XP box that acts mostly as a uPNP media server for the Philips Streamium and also serves as the server for digital cameras and the other mp3 players. However, since getting the Powerbook and now the iShuffle...

A 1G iShuffle showed up today. Carl instantly took to it and at one point declared, “I like it.” So if nothing else, Apple has managed to design something that appeals to a 2-year old. Much has been written about...

After the rather abrupt loss of my T42p I needed a new laptop quickly. The delay in getting the Thinkpad originally combined with the headache of getting Linux working on it nicely and also to some extent IBM dumping their...

I seem to have this magic $200 pricepoint barrier below which I buy anything that I can give an IP address on my LAN. A $50 Philips discount plus a corporate partnership discount brought it under $200 for me. It...

A negative toy posting… My nice new T42p was stolen by some loser at a PHP conference in Paris. It is amazingly inconvenient to lose a laptop like this. It was from inside the conference hall and there was virtually...

The Coral Distribution Network (CDN) is a very nice shiny toy for all of us who sometimes struggle with limited bandwidth. Let the NSF pay for it! My photo album is what chews up the most bandwidth from my site,...

This should be a fun toy when it shows up. I ordered a T42p today with the 15” 1600x1200 screen and a Dothan 1.8GHz CPU. Kept the RAM and HD low and will just add more later. Crucial doesn’t list...

Carl managed to break our old Sony DVD player which of course meant I got to buy a new toy. I was very tempted by the Gateway Networked DVD Player and the new LiteOn LVD-2010 which is also a networked...

The little Linksys WRT54G box is a terrific generic Linux platform to run just about any networking code on. I have found that the radio on it when cranked up to its full 84mw is better than any of my...

My home network has 3 annoying problems: #1 - The house has an odd shape and Christine’s office is a long way from the spot the cable comes into the house and where the wireless gateway is. The signal strength...

…is normally a very good toy. I use it extensively with Razor2 and Bayes hooked into it, it catches nearly everything. Today, however, I was suddenly inundated with Viagra spam. Odd, since any such spam usually sets off all sorts...

This XS-Drive toy looks useful. I noticed Compgeeks has them for $89.99 without a drive. Then it is just a matter of picking up any 9.5mm laptop drive and slapping it in there. DPReview of it On the other hand,...

[update] As Sean Lincolne pointed out, squishguava, the boot image this thing loads over the network when it boots, is just a simple cramfs image. The “COMPRESSED ROMFS” in my earlier ‘strings’ is a dead give-away on this. I finally...

I’ve given up on the idea of a PCI 802.11g card for the Linux server. Driver issues are too annoying and an 802.11g bridge isn’t much more expensive anyway. So now the problem becomes finding a good bridge. The Netgear...

Finally a digital SLR we can afford. Called the Digital Rebel in the US and EOS 300D elsewhere. They left out a few things, but still a very impressive camera. DPReview

I picked up a cheap Netgear WG511 the other day. Got it for $35, probably because they have recently released the WG511T which uses the Atheros super-G chipset. The older WG511 uses the Prism Duette chipset which isn’t officially supported...

Sophie asked me about getting a Tivo. Basically if you don’t do DirecTV, a series 1 Tivo is all you really need. I have had an original Phillips 14-hour series 1 Tivo for years. Stuck a 120G drive in it...

Another Linksys gadget. A motion-sensitive wireless video camera that can alert you via email when it sees motion and it streams out 320x240 video. Could use it to bring CarlCam back, although my outbound bandwidth on this Comcast cable connection...

There is something cool about being able to store 256M of stuff in your watch. I don’t have one, and I doubt I would use it much if I did. I am not that keen on watches. Being somewhat useless...

Buffalo WLI-PCI-G54 uses the Broadcom chipset and has a cool-looking external antenna. At this point I think the only hope of getting this to work with Linux would be through Linuxant’s driverloader.

I am not a huge fan of PDA’s and cellphones. But this new Treo is pretty cool. When it comes down in price a little bit I will probably pick one up. Being able to ssh and irc anywhere from...

I like this little iRiver 256M flash player. Small and light and great for running. Not very hackable though. The latest firmware does let you manage it like normal removable flash storage so you can use it easily from Linux...

I was in Japan recently and this little guy had everyone excited. With its swivel screen and full qwerty keyboard it is an interesting little Linux box. Although at $800 currently I am not rushing out to buy one at...

This is my current wireless router. Not because I love all things Linksys, because really I don’t, but because this is a neat little 125 MHz MIPS box running Linux. And because of an oversight by Linksys in the Ping...

I have this Dell LCD and I highly recommend it. It’s rather bulky and not nearly as slick looking as many others, but the image quality is great. Wait for a Dell Small Business sale and you can pick it...

People are always asking me which PHP applications I prefer. It is obviously a very subjective thing, but here is a list of ones I have worked with and liked: FUDForum is a very nice forum package written by Ilia....

If you look around a bit, you can find this Netgear MR814 wireless gateway for next to nothing. $35 on Amazon right now, for example, but often even cheaper. I bought one a while ago but didn’t use it because...

A nice E-TTL compatible flash which works perfectly with our G3 and it will work nicely with the Digital Rebel when/if we pick that up. It can also act as a slave flash for the much more expensive 550EX. I...