Pending Ideas

There are couple of ideas keep coming back to my mind. I don't expect to turn all of them into successful products, I do want to put significant amount of my effort to make some of those ideas happen. I herein archive them -

• Smart Board - digital ink with storage capability, replace conventional whiteboard
• Portable patient monitor - low cost, easy operation personal medical equipment
• Foetus ECG monitor - low cost, easy operation, accurate machine for family use
  
• P2P TV - embed peer to peer (BitTorrent, eMule) capability into home TV Set
• Infant feeding chair - a special chair to release parent's hands when feeding the baby
• Run errand - business model, help customer to handle personal affairs, e.g., retrieve visa
• Thinkgeek - business model, sell very special but interesting elecrical equipment
• Internal trading - sell bamboo derivates, e.g., foodstuff, crafts
• Wedding helper - business model, new couple list the gifts they want in our website, friends and relatives pick up what they like to offer, we deliver goods
• ...
  

personal pension and medical insurance

Today I went to a government department to retrieve a debit card, which I can use to deposit money as my personal pension and medical insurance as the company does not take care them for its employees. I need to deposit 869RMB each month, which is 26% of Shanghai average salary. Among 869RMB, 68% goes to personal pension and 32% goes to medical insurance. I need to deposit moeny before 10th or 19th of each month.

HUAWEI EC169 3G Adapter

Last week, my friends Weiming gave me a HUAWEI EC169 3G (cdma2000) adapter for a trial. It is very nifty, looks just like a USB thumb drive. I plugged it into one of Dell D630's USB interface, Ubuntu starts to recognize it and configure it without any manual intervention. Soon Ubntu reports there is one mobile connection available, by clicking the connection, one configuration windows appears, simply typed in service provider name "China Telcom", it connected to the network. I saw a "ppp0" connection has been setup by issuing the command "ifconfig". Connection speed is not bad, download speed is 480Kbps to a local server. Overall, this is a very good product and Ubuntu is also excellent at supporting this device!

Google spreadsheets was blocked

I was not able to access my online excel sheets hosted in spreadsheets.google.com, initially I didn't realized that it was blocked by GFW, according to most of articles posted in all kinds of forums, I added below contents into c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

• 64.233.189.101 writely-china.l.google.com
• 74.125.127.100 writely.google.com
• 209.85.225.101 docs.google.com
• 74.125.127.139 spreadsheets.google.com

But it doesn't work either. What I can do is to start Tor and add *spreadsheets.google.com/* into FoxyProxy whitelist, finally it works

Hacking your neighbour's wireless bandwidth

To save cost, we decided not to apply ADSL link from China Telcom or Unicom, instead we contact a gentleman, who provide a wireless solution at a very attractive price. Yesterday, he came to our office, bringing a high power wireless adapter (Realtek chipset), after installing the driver, I can search active wireless AP in the circle of 1.5KM radius around the building according to him. The second step is to crack the password, unfortunately, he can only crack the link encrypted in WEP. By booting the machine from Back Track 3 live CD, and running a program called spoonwep, we successfully cracked two AP password. The first one SSID is guiguan, password is 35363332313137383131313131, the other one SSID is zhenya, password is 6650324356. I know there is way to crack WPA-PSK link also but I won't spend time on it. There is one article talks more details: http://www.laha.cn/2009/06/11/bt3-spoonwep-handbook-pdf.html/comment-page-1/

A way to access picasaweb

Well, Great Fire Wall caused trouble again. Picasa web was blocked, I tried FoxyProxy+Tor, doesn't work at all. Fortunately Google search engine still works, find a very interesting solution posted by "ylyner" on Jul 28. Edit "C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts", add in below lines:
#picasaweb.google.com
203.208.39.104 lh1.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh2.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh3.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh4.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh5.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh6.ggpht.com
You are now connected to your web photoes. Please try mine

How to visit blogspot from behind GFW

One of the disadvantage leaving GE is I am not able to visit my blog via my ADSL link, it is blocked by the Great Firewall :( Thanks to open source community, there is a way to bypass GFW by using Firefox + FoxyProxy + Tor bundle. You can download PortableTor-0.2.1.19-0.1.15-0.exe from sourceforge, after extracting the downloaded file, please run PortableTor.exe application, most likely, you will get an error for the first time, the error log is "connect to relay directory failed", by click "更换身份" button in Vidalia control panel, connecting to Tor network will be accomplish in a while. Ok, please select tools->FoxyProxy->Options, select File->Tor Wizard, don't use Privoxy, use default port number, use Tor to receive DNS request. After configuration, there will be another window pop up for you to configure the proxy, by clicking "adding new template", you will be able to input the template name and URL, for blogspot case, I need to add two templates, URL for template 1 is *.blogspot.com/*, and the other is *.blogger.com/*. Finally, you need to enable FoxyProxy to use this template by choosing "使用基于其预定义模板的代理服务器". Now you are in blogspot