Yonder thoughts

For some time now i have been searching for a way to use the GPS on my Windows Mobile HTC Touch Diamond on Linux.

I tried several solutions to make it communicate and send raw NMEA output to the Linux gps-daemon.
Even wrote some small programs to read directly from the raw serial port on the HTC, but that was just crashing.
Then i found gps2blue which is a small program running under Windows Mobile and reading raw data from the GPS, and sending the data either over TCP/IP or Bluetooth.
Since my main laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth i use the TCP/IP options. Here, there are several choices how to connect the phone to your computer. Either by using RNDIS and a USB cable, or WIFI network.
You can even create a AD HOC network on Linux and have the phone and computer communicate where there are no other available WIFI network.

But then again i had the problem of getting gpsd to read that data, since gpsd mainlyread its data from a serial device.
I searched a bit around and found a tool called socat
Description: multipurpose relay for bidirectional data transfer
Socat (for SOcket CAT) establishes two bidirectional byte streams
and transfers data between them. Data channels may be files, pipes,
devices (terminal or modem, etc.), or sockets (Unix, IPv4, IPv6, raw,
UDP, TCP, SSL). It provides forking, logging and tracing, different
modes for interprocess communication and many more options.
.
It can be used, for example, as a TCP relay (one-shot or daemon),
as an external socksifier, as a shell interface to Unix sockets,
as an IPv6 relay, as a netcat and rinetd replacement, to redirect
TCP-oriented programs to a serial line, or to establish a relatively
secure environment (su and chroot) for running client or server shell
scripts inside network connections.


So to use this with gps2blue i ran the following command socat tcp4-listen:31873 pty This will create a new device in /dev/pts/.
Atleast with my udev enabled ubuntu.

Then i could fine run gpsd /dev/pts/3 and use what client i wanted.

The same principle also works on Windows, but there you need to use HW VSP instead of socat.

I have for a long time now been thinking about upgrading my HTC Touch Diamond to Windows Mobile 6.5, and have been watching several custom cooked rooms over at XDA.
I am currently using this This build, but already looking at some newer ones.

Windows Mobile 6.5

The upgrade went flawlessly, and rolling back the backup made from Sprite Backup also worked flawlessly. Yay!

As you see from the picture above the new main Today plugin is quite more organized than Manilla3D. You get a nice, clear overview over new messages, the time, emails, appointments, the calendar and more.

I have to say that my home network is quite overkill as it is right now. Ill try to explain how it is set up here, and also talk about some of the quirks and pains about setting it up.

Some time a go, my student association got some Cisco Catalyst 2900XLs donated from a company. As the association dont have any immediate use for them im borrowing one at home to play and learn a bit Cisco/IOS.
At first i only created two VLANs and using a router between the two VLANs for managing client traffic.
But now, after reading a bit up on creating a wifi hot spot ive begun to learn much more about VLANs, trunking and VLAN tagging.

So now things look like this;
VLAN3: (Internet< ->catalyst)
FBSD: (TRUNK VLAN 2,3,4 Bridge VLAN2 and 3, NAT VLAN 4)
VLAN2: Desktop and File server
VLAN4: Nated wireless network with Laptop


One thing which was quite a quirk, and which i used hours to figure out was that you have to do a ifconfig vlanX up on the FBSD box to enable the VLAN devices. As im primary a Linux user im used to that devices shown with ifconfig are infact enabled.

Creating a “public” hot spot is a bit on ice until i can find some other software then Chillispot for managing clients, since it didnt seem to work like expected.
It might just have been me failing to do some address translation or something, but ill see what i can do about CoovaChilli, the fork of Chillispot later on.