Wednesday 26 August 2009

It's been a busy week !!

First off my father tried to saw his hand off with his circular saw and he very nearly succeeded, he was pushing a piece of timber through his saw when something slipped and before he knew it he heard the "ting ting ting" of the blade hitting his bone on his right index finger. The thing is circular saw blades don't slice skin like a knife blade would, they actually work like a chisel and take out a 3mm or 4mm wide cut depending on how big the blade is and what type of cut it does, but either way it's at 4000rpm or thereabouts, so in less than 1/4 second he had cut a neat channel right down to the bone on his right index finger, he's even managed to take a neat 1/8th inch chunk out of his index finger bone !!

apparently another 1/4" and he would have lost all feeling in that finger, he had micro surgery yesterday under general anaesthetic and they've repaired the tendon damage (what was left of them), he won't be using his power tools for quiet some time methinks.....He should be back home today hopefully.

The only other thing of note was putting up a stud partition for Freya's bedroom, I've done stud partitions before, but I've never hung a door from scratch before so I had to call on my fathers expertise on this one (pre sawing his hand off)....

The only comical thing that happened was putting the plasterboard up, I had decided to cut it in one piece and nail into place, day one was fine the plasterboard was dry and it went up like clockwork..... day two however proved slightly more challenging because it had got damp overnight in our car port and although I measured and cut it with the same brilliant accuracy....it didn't make it through our kitchen, that's when the first bit flopped off, then the really comical part was me trying to hold it up with one hand and nail it with the other.... needless to say it ended up hitting me on the head a few times and after much swearing and cursing it finally gave up and let me nail it to the stud partition !!!! Thankfully it didn't look too bad even with the breaks in it, and they were soon got rid of with copious amounts of filler... all in all a very satisfying job :) The best part was the loan of my fathers nail gun.... it's deadly in the wrong hands but nothing gets nailed quicker than with a nail gun.... effortless... and if you've ever had a mouthful of oval nails and architrave/skirting board in one hand and hammer in the other... you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.....

Anyway it was completed in two days and that's plasterboard up, architrave, skirting board, electrics and light fittings.....the lot AND painted (Me and Andrea) and papered (by Andrea not me) and on the third day curtains and carpet (girly stuff so Andrea....except for the scary carpet join) .... well it was raining there was bugger all else to do..... so we now have our rather empty bedroom to ourselves again, not that Freya was any bother she could sleep with an express train running through the bedroom once she nods off..... Anyway it had to be done because Xbox boy is staying on at school so no hope of a free bedroom just yet, he's been warned though first sign of flunking or floundering and he's leaving school and joining the real world !!!

Tuesday 4 August 2009

DLink G604T

/SET GEEK MODE ON

Yes it's a strange post title for my blog.... but just in case anybody else wants to breath some new life into an old bit of kit... Namely the Dlink G604T wifi router, it will appear in google's search items and hopefully help somebody else :)

I'm running RouterTech AR7WRD Custom Firmware ( v2.9 ) on it now, after trying various updates from Dlink from around the world, the last one was a russian firmware from the Russian Dlink ftp site....which you can get ->here<- but all of them fell far short of what the router was capable of and some were about as stable as a tramp on meths.....except the Russian firmware which worked very well.......(maybe they used vodka instead of meths ??) so after many hours of diligent trawling of the T'internet, I eventually settled on Routertech custom firmware... and I have to say it's impressive !! for those of you who have stumbled across this blog from endless searching via google, as long as you have a Revision A G604T Dlink router made for EU use, you can do a simple flash upgrade from the Dlink firmware upgrade page on the original Dlink firmware.... If you have a different revision of the hardware, you can still do the upgrade but you will HAVE to read the installation instructions thoroughly....and run this bit of software to check if your router is upgradeable/compatible....

In my particular case the firmware I needed was AR7WRD ADAM2 4 PORT firmware. Latest: routertech-ar7wrd-adam2-firmware-20090415.zip (as of this blog date) and use the single firmware image Do NOT try to upgrade by using separate config + kernel + filesystem images, you will brick/destroy your router without a doubt....

the only pre-flash checks you have to do are :-

reset your router to factory defaults, connect via an ethernet cable not wifi, turn off your wifi AP in the old dlink firmware and hard wire your IP address (don't use DHCP), in my case it was 192.168.1.2 which was talking to the routers address of 192.168.1.1 subnet 255.255.255.0

Once you've flashed your router and it comes back from what seems like the dead, you will be impressed, I was, and I take a LOT of impressing.... you have to leave the router for at least 4 minutes after flashing it, I left it for about 20 minutes and came back to a nice new login screen :)

the firmware sets WEP encryption by default, and the WEP key is on the front page (very helpful) but you will need to change the WEP key to something less obvious and your initial login is admin and admin, obviously you'll need to change the password as well :)

other than that it's VERY easy to setup, and you can get right down into the gubbins of the router if you feel brave, it's revived a rather tired old looking bit of kit into something quite snazzy :) Enjoy !!! and kudos to the guys at Routertech !!

/SET GEEK MODE OFF

Standard disclaimer :- if you do as I have and your mileage varies..... tough... it worked for me :)