Background dad’s bike which has happy sat out the frount of our house for the past 6 years was stolen a couple nights ago. managed to take the bike not wake up the dog or anything.
So I starting thinking how can I set of a alarm when people open the front gate or any gate which leads to our stuff.
So pretty simple hard hack
Requirements
Door bell
Magnetic Reed Switch NO (normally open)
Method
Pull apart door bell switch, the part with the button on it.
locate the button
solder the Magnetic Reed Switch across the button so that if the switch is ON it shorts out the button.
put back together.
Pictures will follow.
For those who don’t know magnetic reed switches are things you see on doors and windows where they actually installed a real security system
Install the door bell / switch tomorrow see how it goes.
Notes:
With the HPM door bell it only rings once and doesn’t ring again until you’ve closed the gate and reopened it.
Yes I know it would be much easier to secure the bike eg. not full view of the street or not locked up.
Need to look at adding a override device so when you come home at 3 am in the morning you don’t wake the whole house.
Christmas was very good to Gabz, he scored Wii controllers, remote control helicopters and of course what this post is about, a new netbook, namely a Acer Aspire One, Linpus 512 Mb Ram 8 Gb SSD.
Impressive Parts
Size, Weight and Keyboard.
It’s small like you would expect but the keyboard is easier to type on that the XO olpc which is the only other netbook sort of thing I’ve gotten to play with. It’s really light weight and the battery is giving me 2.5 hours.
Boot time – Linpus got one thing right 14 second boot time from cold boot it also does hibernate but that isn’t really any slower than a cold boot.
3G Modem support. If your 3G modem is made by Huawei (Optus, Vodafone or 3 ) then your in luck once you download the software from the acer site the Huawei modems work great. They even use the same software as you would under windows so you can still send those SMS messages. only extra step is making a new profile for your modem.
Mobile Partner
If the 8 Gb SSD Isn’t enough for you, you can expand with a SD Card they even merge the 2 drives together to appear as a single drive.
Also the webcam is builtin, the Mic is placed well and once you download Skype from the acer website it works great.
If you brought the extra USB DVD-RW like I was given you be pleased to know that under Linux you have DVD playback out of the box. Also the DVD-RW DL powers just from the USB port so no extra cables needed.
Unimpressive Parts
LINPUS ! – For starters it’s based on Red Hat (Fedora) being a Debian guy I find this to be a negative.
Limited Range of Software, Acer isn’t supporting much they have an Acer game installed which is trial ware. Not really impressed that the full range of linux software isn’t easily available on this distro.
Security ok when you start linpus for the first time, you set the root password. Ok fair enough but there is no User password. Which is ok by it self. But guess what the user has no password but has Full SUDO rights ?! So if you ever want to change the root password on any linpus Acer try “sudo passwd”
Root Password changing
Basically I’m very happy with this Netbook, and most of my problems will be solved in the coming weeks when I get Ubuntu on to this netbook. Though I would love a way to decrease the Ubuntu boot to the 15 second range.