I just needed some emergency scanning done and realised I don’t have my digital camera or all-in-one printer with me, so dug my ancient Mustek 1200 UB Plus scanner out of the loft. With a quick bit of Googling I found the firmware on this website, copied it to /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ then uncommented this override line in /etc/sane.d/gt68xx.conf # Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus: override "mustek-scanexpress-1200-ub-plus" And now I’m scanning using SANE via the GIMP at 1200dpi colour on Linux!

With a bit of prodding by Alexander from openwall (aka Solar Designer) I finally announced my JtR RPM’s on the john-users mailing list. I’ve also listed them on the custom-builds part of the wiki. I updated them to Jumbo-11 which merges in the mscash2 patch and enables some OpenMP (not for DES, that still requires opm-des-7). Downloads.

I tested my Asus EeePC 1001P battery today – I turned off the screensaver and fully charged the battery and then left it running with the screen on and downloading a website. It got to just over 7 hours before the battery had 5mins left in it, so I’d say the realistic battery life is 7.5 hours of average use not 11 – still its better than I thought. There are a few powersaving features in Fedora – the screen dims when the keyboard/trackpad are not in use, the wireless card has a powersaving mode when there are no packets going through, the CPU underclocks to 1GHz, the webcam is disabled when not in use, the harddisk spins down and the screen can turn off instead of just going to screensaver, or you can even set it to sleep the PC entirely.

I’ve been experimenting with free WiFi today! It seems as a BT business broadband customer, I’m entitled to 6,000 Openzone minutes over 2 years, and I don’t even have to enable Openzone on my business hub. So I went wardriving with my netbook and connected to both Openzone and Fon hotspots from the car at 512kbps! I just connected to the wireless router using NetworkManager and entered my Openzone (not Total/FON) login details at http://www.

I got my PowerlineHD equipment today – its certainly not Gigabit, but iperf reports around 90mbps and NFS transfers go at about 6MBytes/sec, so faster than 54G wifi can manage, and fast enough to stream SD video for sure (not tried HD yet). The one downside is that it seems to be interfering with the radio in the kitchen, although the wireless keyboards and Bluetooth headset and phones are fine.