Halogen Labs Weblog

A couple weeks ago, after being enticed by a final cost after rebates of $15 USD, I bought a D-Link DI-514 wireless access point/router. What the heck, I thought. After only a couple weeks, the router has forgotten all of its settings, reverting back to a factory-clean state of having a fully-open wireless node and no administrator password being set.

Needless to say, this piece of junk is going back to Best Buy. I prematurely cut out the UPC code from the box for the rebate, but I never sent the rebate, so I still have the UPC. Hopefully I don’t have to argue with them too much to get my $60 back.

Incidentally, I’ve owned a Linksys BEFW11S4 for over two years and had no problems. My only complaint about it is that the screen for MAC filtering is a little not-obvious. It says “MAC FILTER” and you’re supposed to type in a MAC address. The only question is will it filter OUT a MAC address or let only that MAC pass-through? I’m too scared to try.

Even though the idea is cool, the actual implementation of the RSS Weather Alerts at the National Weather Service leave a lot to be desired.

Sure, you see headlines like “FLOOD WARNING” and some brief text, but the Short-Term forecasts have absolutely no info in them besides when they’re issued and the URL to view them at.

The real meat of the data are the CAP/XML files, but unfortunately RSS readers don’t support the format. This is where openWeather comes in.

One of my main goals for openWeather is to subscribe to a warning/watch type for a specific county or metropolitan area (which is really just a set of counties). When a warning matching your subscription criteria is issued, you’ll be alerted through RSS or other means.