Why are more and more mailing list archives put behind https URLs with self signed certs? What exactly are they securing? What does it achieve other than pissing people off who have to accept the cert just in order to see a mailing list post? GNUCash is the one I happened to hit today, but it seems to be a not infrequent thing.

I'm such a funster. It's Friday night and I've spent it fighting with consumer routers in an attempt to get my home setup sorted out a bit. And I've made some progress, but it's taken a while.

My old setup was an Asus WL-500g with a USB Speedtouch attached. This was running a hacked up version of Oleg's firmware, with kernel 2.4.20 (ewwwww) and the userland Speedtouch pppoa3 driver. It's been up 253 days as I type, which is quite impressive IMO.

The plan was to get something else doing the same job so that I could try and get more up to date firmware on the Asus (probably OpenWRT) and give it to my parents as a wireless access point / print server.

First try was my Netgear DG834G. Unfortunately the ADSL interface on it doesn't want to sync to the line for any length of time. I don't really want to faff with it at present, so I gave up on that. I do want to try and get this sorted, as it has a native ADSL interface, but the AR7Port appears to have stagnated a bit.

Next was the Netgear WGT634U. I'd built an OpenWRT image for this and tried to flash it earlier in the week, but messed it up and bricked the router. So opened it up, hooked a serial console up and managed to restore it easily enough. A little bit of frobbing and I had it recognising the Speedtouch. Result. This has a 2.6.15.1 kernel, which means in kernel driver goodness and nice and up to date. Plus OpenWRT makes it easy to add various nicities like radvd and dnsmasq. I'm currently using this solution and will keep an eye on it over the weekend before reinstalling the Asus.

Of course my home network has become simplified a bit by the fact I no longer factor the NTL connection into it. That's always just been a backup thing since getting ADSL from Black Cat (mmmm, IPv6 goodness) and I've decided to finally ditch it soon. However I might want to add a modem to the WGT634U at some point - probably using a USB serial dongle I guess, as I don't think the internal ports do hardware flow control. That's a battle for another day though.

I also managed to get rid of a whole load of computer junk that was working but unused, thanks to Norfolk FreeCycle. Kathy will be pleased when she comes back from London tomorrow. :)

My keyboard has been getting progressively more awkward to type on, especially the A key (used extensively for screen). I had a spare, so I swapped it in today. Except it didn't feel right. My old keyboard was a Dell that's about 15 years old now; I think I picked it up for about £3 from Bull Electrical. The new one was an el cheapo eBuyer. So I decided to give the Dell another chance, and set about dismantling it. Very mucky. I shoved all the keys in the washing up bowl and dusted the rest of the mechanism as best I could. A few hours later, the keys are dry and the keyboard is back in action. I think I'll need to do some investigating of a better spare however.

Kathy and I went out for dinner last night at Tootsies with Becca, Dave, Eli, J, Kaz and Will. It was a good night (even if the girls beat us at Cranium), but I found myself having to stop talking about weddings - I could see J and Kaz starting to glaze over early in the evening. This a frightening event. Is this how people become baby bores?

Anyway. Kathy and I managed to look at a couple of potential venues yesterday and have another one arranged for next Sunday, and a few more to ring this week to hopefully see next weekend. It's all still very scary.

I forgot to mention that while I was home over Christmas I did some work on starting to get Northern Ireland mapped. Many online map services don't have particularly good coverage of NI outside of major roads and Belfast. Look, for example, at Google's map of Newry, where my parents live. Compare this with what I managed to get done with OpenStreetMap's map of Newry. And I didn't spend a whole lot of time getting tracks, so just imagine what I could get covered with a more concerted effort. I also covered the A1/M1 from Belfast to Newry; I'd hoped to cover the road to the point where it crosses into Ireland, but didn't get round to it.

Anyway, what I've managed is at OpenStreetMap Northern Ireland. I've a little bit more to upload at some point when I have time, but I'm hoping that others who actually live in NI will start to do some work towards it as well. I notice Ireland has now got a number of roads added as well - there was nothing when I was doing NI. Maybe they'll get connected at some point soon. Like, say, when I'm home next month and fly into Dublin. :)