wasted day

So, I got some new toys recently. Like Thursday. One was an MP3 adapter for the car. It's kind of nice. But would be nicer if it could go just a little lower in the frequencies. I found that 87.9 seems to be a good channel to use, but the new device only goes down to 88.1. Which has a station on it.

Boo for living in one of the largest radio markets.

The other toy was a BRU-353 GPS dongle for my computer. Which I want to use with my Alfa wireless card, and laptop or netbook to go war driving. I spent most of the day trying to get the the GPS to work. It hasn't yet. I don't know if the problem is faulty hardware, or if it was because I was in my house testing. Although I had it suction cupped (comes with it) to my front room window. So hard to tell.

Although in the process I ended up breaking my laptop. I use it the most, prefer the keyboard and shape. Sure it's not a widescreen monitor but that is fine. The keyboard on the Eee PC netbook is just a little too small, and the trackpad way to sensitive.

So I broke the laptop. By installing and removing programs trying to get the GPS to work. Some how, the system got messed up and figured it didn't need some 300 odd packages related to Gnome / Desktop environment. It dropped it's network management software too.

I was happy between /var/log/dpkg.log, some awk and sed, and a little help from my netbook and usb drive I was able to recover the networking. Which led me to being able to recover the rest of the software. :)

I really thought I was going to have to go through the hell of re-installing.

And I just got done installing backtack linux 4r2 on the netbook. Triple boot, but ubuntu isn't booting so I'll have to solve that. Think it'll just be a case of fixing grub.

Life is good. My head only hurts a little. :)

Although I still need to get the GPS dongle working, and get a magnetic mount antenna for the car to war drive with.