I made these frequently as a young boy, they are easy to make, parts are very cheap (if not free) and you can spend hours tweaking it!

What you need :

• About 1M (3′) Thin gauge enamel copper wire – thick enough that about three inches could support the weight of a pencil.
• Small magnet – many fridge magnets will do.
• 1xAA Battery (1.5v)
• Push pins or small finishing nails.
• Small square block of softwood (about 12 cm wide will do).
• 3cm (1.5″) diameter cylindrical object (large magic marker or C cell battery is about the right diameter.)

The Build :

Begin wrapping the copper wire around the cylindrical object 10 to 20 times leaving about 10cm (3-4″) free on each end- this will be used for the armature.  Wrap the wire a few times within the coil itself to keep the arms in place – you want to make sure they are exactly 180 degrees from each other and centered as they will be supporting the weight of the coil.  Strip the enamel off the arms  using some scissors or something sharp – they need to be totally free of enamel.

Cut two additional 10cm long pieces of wire and strip the enamel off completely – these will be the brushes and will support the armature / coil.  Now wrap each one a few times around each push pin and insert into the softwood block.  Create a small loop at the top of each brush for the armature to slide into.  Consult the (shaky) video if my writing doesn’t make any sense.

Attach the battery to each push pin with wires – it is really handy if you can find a battery chassis with the wires already attached.

I will take some steadier photos and maybe draw up a diagram if anyone wants further instruction.  All of the parts above I found at my favourite store Active Surplus for less than three dollars.  Enjoy your super fun DIY motors and feel free to submit your masterpieces – I will post them in a new article.

The good news is that we have gathered a team of developers to write a totally web based app for provisioning your endpoints with ease.  To start we will support the devices that we actually have and can test.  Within the week we plan to support the following models :

• Grandstream GXP XXXX & Budgetone Models
• Cisco 79XX series
• Several Aastra models (53i, 9143i, 480i)
• Linksys SPA94X
• Sipura SPA2102 (AKA Linksys PAP2)
• Whatever else can be found or generously donated.

We began development on the frontend which has two modes – wizard (basic) and advanced.  We have also constructed working templates for many models listed above which is probably the most tedious task.  We will offer HTTP and TFTP provisioning totally free! as well as the option to download your entire endpoint configuration to place on your own network (if you so choose).

A word on security :

Any and all data you submit to this application will be passed through an extensive encryption / decryption process and stored in the database – thus no one but you will have access to the private information.  You will actually have the ability to set your own security salt and change it if you suspect foul play (which is very unlikely).  We may also buy a CA for that extra peace of mind.

We will be adding this functionality as a module at ENUMPlus so sign up to catch first glimpse.

Anyone looking to help either with a donation of hardware or Paypal is of course much appreciated.  The more devices we can get our hot little hands on – the more we will be able to support.

After completely rewriting ENUMPlus from the ground up (2 days total) we have come much closer to a universal ENUM lookup source.  The new module can be downloaded here so install it now! Here’s why :

• The module forms a HTTP request to our API which queries many other sources and returns the most accurate address.
• There is no longer a need to add multiple lookup sources to the old enumlookup AGI.
• It audibly notifies you when the call is made over ENUM.
• You can track your calls in the panel.
• White pages / search functionality (including avatars )
• Call validation is much more stable.

If you don’t have an account, get one – registration is quick and simple and you will be a happy geek.

Check out the project page / wiki / site / sourceforge / FreePBX / voip-info / piaf for more info.

As a sole proprietor and “freelancer” it is never easy wearing all of the hats, especially when I am knee deep in bugs and get a sales or support call.  One of the most troubling issues I have is with asking for money.  I never have a problem creating the invoice but it is that bloody send button that kills me.

Because of the above – I have decided to finally get organized and put together an automated invoicing application so I don’t have to worry about billing – the computer does for me.  Basically you point your browser to a web app and adda few items to a job list – then save.  Here’s a screencast that should demo it better than I can type it :

Here’s some of the functionality summed up in a brief list.

• Add / Edit / Delete Clients
• Add / Edit / Delete Invoices
• Add / Edit / Delete Jobs
• Add / Edit / Delete Taxes
• Add / Edit / Delete Services / Products
• Auto Email Invoice
• Download PDF Invoice

It probably does a lot more but I am too excited to complete the PayPal module.

Be sure to check back for updates – a version will be available for you shortly!

It takes whatever title you give a form object and creates a copy / paste dump for your view, controller and Javascript.  It doesn’t handle checkboxes or select boxes – but that is because I find the form is not the time killer; it’s the Javascript and validation.  The nice part is that most of the heavy lifting is done for you – plus you do not have to worry about spelling mistakes or silly syntax stuff because it is all duped in the script.

I’d like to pop this up on a subdomain after making it pretty – please comment if you think you will find this little app useful.

PS. During the recording I noticed a small error in the code – no need to comment, it is fixed now.  The json_encoded array was returning a value that would not display in the error fields due to a mismatch in the name.

UPDATE : Check Out the Application Here!

I have fully tested the generated code and it works great, here’s a video demonstrating how to use “FormTorch”.

I spent a few days looking for a reliable and even more importantly, affordable web hosting control panel. Unfortunately the free stuff still came at a price (learning curve for unwilling clientele) and the pay stuff was way out of budget.

As any enraged geek, I wrote it myself, here is my masterpiece in action :

This thing ate up so much of my time but I didn’t even care.  The learning curve was huge – especially the DNS administration.  I had to think of new ways to execute administrative tasks from a very limited user.  I had to automate reloading services, span updates of SOA record strings – it was awesome.

The reason I put this whole video / post thing together is that I have a feeling there are others who are / were in my situation.  Now I need feedback and I need to find any insecurities / vulnerabilities so heres what I want to do :

I am putting together a demo server, one you all can play with and try to break – you wont see it for another day or two but it will be here.  I want to offer a full years free hosting to the one who provides the best feedback for this application.

Feedback may include :

• Best Feature Request
• Best Hack / Exploit (do your worst!)
• Stupidest mistake on my behalf

Submissions will be judged by an unbiased third party and we will gladly host the winners stuff for an entire year!

I will post the host / IP as soon as the demo server is complete and I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Another goal for this project is a smart media library which allows dragging content into these blocks.  I do not believe this is going to be as difficult to do as the actual CSS generation – but I guess we will see within the next week or two.  Anyway watch the video and leave me some feedback, I would like to know if this project has any potential whatsoever

By the way I started a Tumblr blog – check it out (subscribe too!) @ http://tumblr.geekhut.org

This has all changed now that I have been working under the hood.  Let me take a moment to explain how I went from dreading configuration to not thinking twice.

As always I started with the basics in a safe development environment – Bind9 and vi on a minimal Lenny VM.  I started playing with it locally – setting my desktop resolv.conf to my dev box and modifying one line at a time of example configurations to see what they did and more importantly what they didn’t do.

After about 20 hours of research, probing, testing and … well … smoking – I was ready to start writing the nameserver module for ENUMPlus.  I had a brilliant working model in a few hours – returning NAPTR records and all.  The problem was scalability.  My initial code would curl the web server, writing the NAPTR records to a local file.  I then had a cron job that would cat the SOA, NS, A, MX & CNAME records to a new file – copy the contents of the NAPTR records files created by the web server – then run sed to remove any empty lines and move the file into place (with a reload of course).

It worked like a charm, I mean I was VERY impressed with what I had accomplished, but as always I knew there was a better way.  I started to think how heavy it would be on the host writing out the file, sed, cat, mv blah blah then on top of that reload bind, so I looked for alternative solutions.  After just a few minutes of googling – I ran into PowerDNS, which just happens to support a MySQL backend (the exact same animal running ENUMPlus Web UI).  This was ideal as end users could immediately add their validated records without having to wait for the cron job to advance the SOA serial, write out the new records and reload.  Immediate results are definitely what is going to push ENUMPlus over the top in my opinion.

Anyway we have our hosting in order and are just waiting for DNS to propogate.  We are working on a distributed solution for others to join in the hosting fun (slave boxes for replication and redundancy).  If you own a box and would like to dedicate some cycles – feel free to contact me or come say hi at #pbxinaflash (I live there).