drewp for 2009 July

I replaced the LED nightlight in our bathroom with a MegaBrite.

I got some plastic domes on eBay. Do you want one? I have several extras.

I attached the dome to the ceiling by tying some bicycle tire around pushpins that press out against the inside of the dome. Here are a few other uses for old bike tubes.

Here are some unretouched photos of the MB with its dome lighting up the bathroom. Shutter times are 1/2 and 1 sec.

When I was testing the MegaBrite, it was hanging down from the ceiling and I happened to have a glass of water nearby:

The first two pictures are from different positions of the MB in the glass; in the third one I am sloshing around the water:

I'm controlling the MegaBrite with a parallel port, which is very simple to do. I'm getting LED power from the 5V rail of an old computer power supply. The power is going over perhaps 50 feet of cat5 which probably adds a lot of resistance. I measure 4.7V at the MB end (with the MB turned on). The parport control code is here. It has no attempt at optimization yet, and I think it takes just under 1ms to do a single update. If I add more MBs to this chain I may need to fix the inner loop in that code.

Self-sign a new certificate:

openssl genrsa -out self1-ca.key 1024
openssl req -new -key self1-ca.key -out self1-ca.csr
(common name is the same thing you'll put in the 'incoming mail server' hostname field, e.g. 'bigasterisk.com')

openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in self1-ca.csr -signkey self1-ca.key -out self1-ca.crt

Plug the Pre into a USB port, mount the drive if needed:

sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt

cp self1-ca.key /mnt/self1-ca.pem

Unplug Pre. Device Information app, More Info button, top menu, Certificate Manager. '+' icon in bottom-left; pick the self1-ca.pem file.

Back in the mail app, add an account, set incoming mail server 'encryption' field to SSL.

Related:

ssl configuration for dovecot IMAP server

more straightforward instructions on making a self-signed cert