A small tool to generate a new wireless passphrase.

I was getting sick of my old wireless passphrase which took truly random to an extreme and made it nearly impossible to enter the WPA2 AES shared key correctly on a computer, let alone any of today's plethora of mobile devices. Who can successfully enter tons of quads like "A/eE uFDr 8#rw" on a phone or squeezebox without going insane?

So I broken down wrote my own silly tool to generate a random passphrase composed of words from a dictionary file. Nothing new, this has been done 10000 times before.

This one requires Python 3 and a /usr/share/dict/words file (apt-cache search /usr/dict/words for a bunch of those on Ubuntu or Debian).

Bored and want to see it?
You can download generate_word_key.py here.
License: Apache License, Version 2.0.

I really should redo it and put it up on appspot. Maybe later.

What would a blog post be without some silly samples using various entropy and maximum word length settings? Enjoy:

ocelot Walter Biko's soils tarry wader
Ann D Pele inane taper sons
Er v M Lu E ow Cm me as N q He
nearness's bogeymen lops disordered inclination Jeanne

I really do not recommend a maximum word length of two.

Suggested apps for Android phone owners

Friends are starting to get Android phones and are asking me what apps they should go get first. Rather than try and rattle off a random list to each one each time they ask in some less convenient setting I figured I'd put my current list of handy apps in one place for everyone.

The hyperlinks below are intended to be used on an Android device, they link directly to searches in the android market. Click them while reading this on your phone and it should show you the app in question.

Search and shopping related:

• Barcode Scanner - Scans bar codes, QR codes, etc with links to appropriate actions based on what they contain.
  
• Shopper - A handy shopping tool, can search for items by images.
  
• ShopSavvy - Another nice bar code based shopping tool.
  
• Amazon - A handy interface to Amazon.
  

Worthy of a home screen icon:

• Gesture Search - Search your phone using quick scribbles on the screen. Very handy.
  
• Google Voice - An absolute must have. Sign up for a Google Voice account first to see what it is all about. Send and receive SMS for free, get automatic transcripts of your voicemails, make cheap international calls, control which phone(s) ring when people call you, report spammy callers, etc. Replying to SMS and voicemails by email, quoting the original is fun when you've told people they should email rather than call.
  

Calculators (pick one):

• RealCalc - A nice RPN calculator.
  
• Droid48 - An emulator running HP48 roms, the awesome RPN calculator.
  

Mapping & Geography related:

• Google Maps - Install the version from the Market for a more up to date maps app than what came preinstalled on your phone.
  
• My Tracks - Records and save your tracks using the GPS, export to data files or upload them to Google Maps.
  
• Google Earth - If you don't already know what this is you probably don't care.
  
• Google Sky Map - Oh my god. Its full of stars.
  
• CardioTrainer - Similar to My Tracks, it records your movements but with a focus on exercise rather than mapping. Does calorie counting, can share workouts on fb, etc.
  

Finding places near you:

• Places Directory - Find places that are near you of any type, see ratings, get directions.
  
• Urbanspoon - Want to find a near by place to eat? Shake your phone.
  
• Layar - A 3D display of what is around you.
  

Social:

• Google Buzz widget - A nice home screen widget to post to buzz. The Maps app also supports Buzz.
  
• Facebook - Widget and app interface to FB.
  
• Foursquare - Strive to become the mayor of your favorite haunts.
  
• Google Latitude - This is built into the Google Maps app. If you turn it on, you can have your phone auto-share your location periodically with anyone you want. Its a nice way to see trusted family and friends.
  

Music & Audio:

• Listen - Subscribe to "pod"casts and auto download and manage them on your phone.
  
• Pandora Radio - Streaming radio of all types of music.
  
• Advanced Audio Manager - Auto-adjusts audio settings.
  

Utilities to install and configure once and forget about until you need them:

• Bubble - A bubble level using your phones sensors. Handy. Don't forget to Calibrate it from the menu against a real level.
  
• Pintail - Let your phone respond with its precise GPS location when it receives a text message containing a configurable PIN.
  
• Shazam - Listens to music and identifies the track & album. Most useful for popular music.
  
• Google Translate - Translate between languages, including voice recognition and spoken translations.
  
• Google Finance - If you want easy market updates.
  

Geek tools:

• ConnectBot - The canonical SSH client for android. Wifi Analyzer -
  
• Tricorder - Display all sensor data.
  
• SqueezeControl - If you have a squeezebox and run a slimserver (err.. squeezecenter) use this to control your music at home.
  
• Earth Live Wallpaper - Live wallpaper for your home screen of a spinning earth that displays live weather satellite images on the globe.
  

If you want to leave comments on this post, please do so over in the discussion in my Google Buzz stream.

Consumer Router & IPv6 == Firewall FAIL

I'm using a Linksys wrt610n router (lets call it Eve) at home at the moment and noticed upon upgrading that my home server suddenly had IPv6 connectivity to the world. Apparently Eve supports IPv6, neat! Nowhere in its admin interface are there any settings to control IPv6 behavior.

What does this mean?

Eve has handed out a 6to4 IPv6 address to my internal hosts and is routing IPv6 traffic encapsulated to the IPv4 6to4 anycast 192.88.99.1 address. My current ISP, Comcast, is happily routing this to a 6to4 router. So I have IPv6 connectivity at home. yay... but wait.

Big Trouble In Little Router

Realizing that I had an IPv6 address visible to the world it dawned on me to ask, "hey, what happens to inbound connections? Is there a firewall?".

So I tested it from an IPv6 enabled host at work. Turns out there was no firewall. The entire world (err, the entire 0.01% of it that speaks IPv6 anyways) could connect to my internal file and print servers (samba and cups) among other things. Eek. I solved that by altering the configuration of those servers for now. I really should also configure a firewall on the system to limit what is allowed in.

Cisco (Linksys): The default configuration for any router claiming to be a firewall should be to block inbound connections on IPv6 since the router supports IPv6. Second, the IPv6 firewall should obey the existing port forwarding settings using the associated 6to4 address to allow port forwarding to work the same regardless of IPv4 or IPv6.

Stupid Network Admins In Giant ISP

Comcast is routing the 6to4 anycast 192.88.99.1 traffic to a 6to4 tunnel exit node in Amsterdam. Yes, thats right. My IPv6 traffic on comcast in California is taking an additional 150ms round trip across the Atlantic Ocean to go to a local data center (he.net), wasting transatlantic bandwidth and making the user experience (ie: latency) of most things on IPv6 painful.

Comcast: Stop routing around the world! There are local IPv6 6to4 gateways all around the world. Better yet, setup your own. I realize native IPv6 on cable modem service is a long ways off, likely waiting for DOCSIS 3.0 deployment, but thats no reason to make the experience of IPv6 users suck by default. End users should not need to know anything about IPv6, it should just work. Adding 150ms latency is horrible and will make customers hate you and your customer support will not have a clue how to fix their problems.


P.S. I do not recommend the Linksys wrt610n. It has horrible signal strength compared to anything with external antennas.

Green consumer ethernet switch? D-Link DGS-2208

I just replaced an old Netgear GS105 5 port Gig-E switch with a D-Link DGS-2208 from newegg (on sale for $45 plus a $10 rebate this month). The D-Link touts itself as a "green" ethernet switch which just begs to be measured... So I pulled out the kill-a-watt to measure it.

On the D-Link box is a label stating, "Up to 80% Power savings(*)," with fine print of, "Maximum power savings when compared to a D-Link conventional switch. Uses up to 80% electricity when connected devices are powered down and up to 40% less energy when connected devices are used 10 hours and powered down 14 hours over a 24-hour period, when connected via 20 meter Ethernet cables."

Thats some pretty sad fine print so I lowered my expectations...

But measuring showed otherwise. With nothing plugged into the switch it was too low to register any power draw at all and showed up as 0 watts. With 5 active devices plugged in (a mix of gigabit and 100mbit) it went up to 4 watts. Unplug one device and it went down to 3 watts.

Compared that to my 4+ year old Netgear GS105 with its much larger power brick that drew 8 watts with 5 devices plugged in or 4 watts with no devices plugged in and the D-Link measures up to its claim. Nice.

But is it really anything special? I'd need samplings of other current model switches to find out. The real savings comes from the D-Links ability to save power for switch ports with no link. A live port is going to consume some level of power no matter what as required to maintain ethernet signaling.

For an added bonus the D-Link's 5V 2A wall wart is much smaller than the old netgear's huge 12 1A one and is oriented such that you can plug it into a power strip without covering adjacent outlets. Always a nice touch (tough i'd prefer not to have a wall wart or brick at all).

How the world works

1. Call something a religion.
2. Stuff happens.
3. PROPHET.

Mmm.. efficient power supplies

..geeky entry alert..

Feeling green or just want to lose some computer noise and extra room heat?

I just upgraded an old ATX power supply in Karen's computer to an 80PLUS rated one. Using a kill-a-watt watt meter this dropped the computers power consumption from 104W down to 86W when idle in win2k and from 121W down to 101W when under heavy disk+cpu load. ~20% better efficiency. very nice! highly recommended. Most generic power supplies are in the 50-70% efficiency range. 80+ ones are >= 80% efficient at 20, 50 and 100% load.

I used an Enhance ENP-5140GH but just search google for "80plus power supply" or see 80plus.org and you'll turn up other models (the SeaSonics are also popular among my friends). Its a very quiet PS as well; the fan is the large 120mm variety mounted on the bottom inside of the unit rather than the 80 or 92mm ones commonly mounted on the back.

I've got an ENP-5150GH to install in my server next week which should make an ever greater difference.

[copied from my other blog, written+posted there on 2006-09-28]

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