project: Slurpr - the ultimate wardrive box
click to go to the projectpage
click to go to the projectpage
What is it? what is it?
Find out here:
Slurpr – the mother of all wardrive boxes
press release (over at Boris’ blog):
The Slurpr – Mother Of All Wi-fi Access Points!
^_^
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engadget.com
oh my, I even got my own tag over at engadget.com
gizmodo.com
appreciate the small things, like logos ^_^
Well, first of all, does anyone know where these little stickers all of a sudden come from? (or did I just spot them while they have been around for ages?)
I’ve seen them on a variety of electronic gear lately. On stuff I just bought for instance and I went like “don’t throw it away?... Well, I was planning on using it, if you don’t mind, I just paid for it…”
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
That same sticker also was on this heat gun my friend Gabriël used during the restoration of a couple of windows and somehow I think they could’ve done a better job for a sticker with some advise on it, like, don’t light your cigarette with it! (but Gabriël is a cool lady, this trick went well without a burn flaw! *^_^*)
Not long ago I couldn’t help myself and bid on this mug on eBay… it’s a blue mug with a logo in gold on there of CRAY research, inc. ^_^
I guess I now officially suffer from some old supercomputer romanticism … *^_^*
Just like SGI, the heydays of Cray are long gone, but I keep having a soft spot for that stuff (out of that era too)... Somehow nowadays supercomputers, even though they are a gazillion times faster than their predecessors, somehow (imho of course) they’re less ‘super’. Same thing goes for cars imho, the best supercars were made in the seventies… (also imho of course!) you can check my dreamcar list for instance, that one hasn’t changed in ten years I guess… Loving old stuff does have its advantages ^_^
Maybe it’s because this is the stuff (computers and cars) which were on top of the hill when I first knew that this gear even existed and somehow, in my mind, it never got better than that! ^_^
Well, of course it did get better, but it was more exotic back then for sure. Cray for instance now uses Opterons… (and SGI uses Intel Itaniums). I mean, I’ve got an Opteron in my closet!. This stuff used to be made from stuff no one ever heard of! Ah well… on a sunday like this I like to sit in my spare room full of old gear out of the golden age (imho) and this mug complements it very well!
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It’s quite impossible to make a photo of this mug (although I made these shots with a webcam…), because of the golden logo… it reflects way too much to be able to get a nice shot of it, but you’ll get the idea…
“coffee tastes sooooo much better out of a supercomputer mug!”
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Well, I need to get back to some development now (for which this extra room turns out to be excellent!), more on that coming tuesday.
(although pics start to surface on flickr ^_^)
It isn’t about the adapter, that’s still in the pipeline too, but will surface somewhat later…
from now on, no more ads!
Well… in the past I’ve been experimenting with ads, to no avail (I’ve also put that in my about-page) but lately I’ve gotten more irritated about ads, the ‘ad-revenue business’ and everything around it… It just stinks.
With this site going up and up on traffic and links etcetera, you don’t want to know how many inquiries I get for hooking up to some ad-program and I always tell those people the same. This is a personal site and just as I wouldn’t want to put all kinds of stickers of companies and products I don’t like on to my car, I’m not willing to put those on to my site too… (I don’t even have a car, but still…).
But somehow, some of these guys from these services are really persistent, keep on mailing, and to make it a little easier for myself, from now on, I want to simply put them through to this blogpost ^_^ Oh, and I guess I already pissed some of those guys off a little too much or it’s just a coincedence, but the amount of spam per day in my inbox is growing at an enormous rate at the moment… (now think about the probability for two seconds, no matter if it’s truly the case, that one of these ad-revenue-guys put me on a spamlist, isn’t it strange that (imho at least) it seems quite probable?...) ^_^
Anyway, my 2 cents about the ad-business and ads on the internet in general…
Not long ago, I visited a site from a PC I just installed. And on this particular site, a full-screen pop-up flash ad opened, with sound! Now, somehow, naive as I am maybe, I thought “this can’t be true” so I mailed them and asked if something went wrong. As a response I got back from one of the editors “don’t you have a pop-up blocker then?” ... Well, I was too lost for words with that response and I didn’t react to it, but it got me thinking… I mean, this site installed this on purpose but on the other hand expects that the crowd they have has got pop-up blockers? What kind of crap is that?
Now ad-guys always talk in click-through rates and such. The latest inquiry I got had to do with text-link-ads and such… You know, those highly irritating bogus hyperlinks. So, for instance, every time I would use the word ‘computer’ it would automagically get hyperlinked and when you click it, it would bring you to some webshop where you can buy computers! I mean, how dumb is that? But of course, these guys claim success because 2% (or whatever) clicks on these! Yeah well, that’s the same logic a spammer uses… “Every time I send out one gazillion messages, there are ten people buying!”
So, somehow, when you bring this down, all these sites with ads somehow want to draw a crowd of 2/3/4/5 percent morons who click on ads…
For a long time, the only ads I’ve been running were a couple of text-only adsense google-ads. Now those are somehow sort of widely accepted, but still. Every time I logged in to my adsense account I got the feeling I got into spammers-HQ. “Optimize!” “set goals!” “you’re not reaching your goals!”... geez… this is worse than some multi-level marketing scheme and this is about my own site! Soooo… there were two ways to go… or optimize the heck out of these ads, but where does that stop? Well, look around and you’ll see where that goes, try to surf around without a pop-up blocker for a change, if you really want to make a buck that way, you have to change your site into some commercial christmas-tree where ads take the top spots on the screen (cause that way you get the highest click-through-rate!) and the content, in my case, the only reason I’m doing this, would be subordinate to the ads…
Simply put, if I would go this way, I end up optimizing my site for morons (and there by probably totally forgetting who my real crowd is…). Now of course, it’s hard to criticize something that works and ads work, no doubt about that, but I simply refuse to optimize my site for morons.
Well, the other way, of course, is to simply remove all the ads and yesterday, after doubting about this for quite some time, I did just that. So, no more logins of creepy ad-schemes with click-through-rates and stuff like that.
Do I miss out on money now? Yes, those few adsense ads I had brought in a couple of hundred bucks a year* (and I never used it for hosting or something else useful, I always ended up buying something crappy with it, it’s jinxed! ^_^). But I also miss out on money because I don’t have a URL tattooed on my forehead.
Somehow I find it incredible that running ads, especially on blogs, is the defacto standard, why don’t these people drive cars full of stickers? I’m sure there are companies willing to pay a few cents for that too… especially when you would make it a double deal including a tattoo on your forehead!
Next to that, a lot of the (imho) really decent companies out there don’t seem to run ad-programs, so even though I (that’s me and my little company) am petite compared to them, I’d rather look that way than having to put up with all this spam-crap, no matter what others make with that.
No, but seriously, there are other ways to make money, also with a site and I’m burning 100+GB a month right now, so somehow I should know… Well, if I fail to raise enough for my hosting, I stick to what I said earlier. I’d rather be flipping burgers for a few bucks than to run ads. You guys would buy a burger from me, wouldn’t you? ^_^
* because I never optimized a thing, I had the worst click-through-rate possible. I had to run 500.000+ pageviews to raise a $100+... you do the math…
on national radio!
About three weeks ago I got a visit from Herbert Blankesteijn, a well known journalist overhere in Holland. He was already writing and talking about computers at the time I was eight years old and tried to get a grip on a friend’s C=64. (To give you a clue how long he’s been around…) ^_^
click to go to the corresponding pic on my flickr
It’s been a pleasure to be interviewed by him for his show De Elektronische Eeuw and his show airs tonight on BNR Nieuwsradio overhere in Holland.
The (30 minute!) show itself is in Dutch (just like all the links in this post ;-)) and I will post the link to the podcast overhere too, once it’s available. So for those who want to hear me chit-chat in Dutch for a change, this will be your chance! *^_^*
added:
The show just aired! The podcast isn’t up yet, but for *ahem* windows media player users, this link should work… ^_^
The podcast can be found overhere and you can subscribe to it (if you really like it!) overhere
hush hush unfinished madness
Well, I think we all have these kind of weekends, maybe it’s even where weekends are for… doing stuff without actually getting somewhere… ^_^ Somehow I try to use every free hour I’ve got to spend on current projects but well… a lot of things take a lot more time than expected and so, at sundaynight I find myself with a lot of unfinished stuff… I did make quite a lot of progress though, but I couldn’t really finish anything in particular… so… no finished projects at this time… but I can give a glimpse of the stuff I’m working on… ^_^
These first few pics are from a project of which I can’t give all the details (yet) but think of something like an ultimate wardrive-box and you’ll be very close… also think six wireless interfaces ^_^
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...which made me make this… six wireless routers to mimic a typical big city environment.
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This is the device in the flesh! Now, before you start thinking I handsoldered this, I didn’t! You can get this kind of hardware ready-made and it’s lovely hardware! Only thing is, the plans I’ve got with it take quite some time on the software side (for a change!) *^_^*
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Now I might’ve finished all this if this one particular person hadn’t emailed me so much! *^_^* But I enjoy the mails and replying to them and waiting for replies on my replies way too much so I guess I’ve only got myself to blame for that… (y’all know what I’m talking about right?)
uhu *^_^*
...one more thing
Next to all that, I’ve got some obligations of course. I’ve been promising a whole lot in this youtube-vid and I’m working hard to make it all work out…
...So, does anyone have a wild guess what this is? *^_^*
(and no, I don’t have a prize for those who know!)
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Now, this will still take quite an amount of time, but… I guess I can say ‘we’re getting there!’
getting where? well, to the end of my weekend, how’s that for starters? *^_^*
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Creative Commons (!)
the Macs are back! ...and then some
Last week I got the Mac SE/30 visualizers back. They’ve been on tour with my favourite rockstar Krause! *^_^*
the Macs in their blue carrying bags
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Now, even though she’s a proper rockstar with expected behaviour (*^_^*), she also managed to keep the Macs in one piece! (luckily) and so they’re back at my place now.
Krause performing
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
...that funny coloured iBook also came from here.
At one point, it was very nice to see that VJs who performed on some of the same venues Krause did, integrated the Macs into their visuals.
Anyway, even though the Macs were still in one piece, they still needed some work (ah well, I’m a perfectionist sometimes)... One of the tubes had a little flaw in it, something which I did to it myself but I already decided up front I would switch the CRTs with the innards of yet another Compact Mac I had laying around, once the Macs would arrive back at my place and so I did…
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The black&red cable you see in the picture is my ‘CRT-discharge-cable’, no joke… I made that one earlier, I didn’t trust any of the wallsockets for ground and so I made a cable which runs back to were the fuses of my house are located… I use it to discharge CRT-tubes before I do anything else to them…
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On the left the two tubes (I’m not sure which one went in and which one came out of the visualizer…) and on the right you can see ‘em in action!
Now in the months Krause has been using these, every now and then something would go wrong with a supplied amplifier (that had nothing to do with the Macs though ^_^)... The first two have been blown beyond repair and last night I thought I should have a look at the third one, which has been acting funny on it’s own but wasn’t blown… It seemed that it was old age it suffered from. It’s a Sony and it seems the amplifiers from, let’s say, ten years ago, suffer from bad soldering… Even though I hadn’t located the exact spot where it did go wrong, I decided to run past all the soldering inside…
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And guess what? It worked! The symptom was that it would give an enormous loud noise out of one of the speakers, not controllable with the volumeknob or anything… And now it’s gone, better yet, I’ve been playing on this amp a while and it actually is a rather nice little amplifier… (for those who want to know, it’s a Sony TA-AX2)
So, the ‘Krause setup’ has been repaired, fixed, whatever and I could make plans on how to integrate these into my livingroom.
But, last week I’ve also been getting an Atari 2600, which needed some work on its own… And so I’ve been taking that one apart also, cleaning it, running it through its paces etcetera…
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a nekkid Atari 2600! OMG, where’s the age-verification? (if you know what it is, you’re old enough to see it in this state…)
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details on the atari…
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And so… one and one is two… Yesterday I, all of a sudden, had a plan to visualize the game-sound of the Atari on the Macs… *^_^*
Believe it or not, but in the end, this took the best part of my weekend, but I had a lot of fun fixing everything and making some sort of ultimate retro setup (well, imho that is of course)...
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To top it off, I made a little video (well, it’s 6+ minutes)
I’m sorry for the sound though, I’m gonna look into that for a next video. I tried to find some noise-reduction-filters but to no avail yet.
earlier on this site
hinv, geektechnique’s hardware inventory
a(nother) rockstar in my hometown! ^_^
How to make Mac SE/30 audio visualizers
giving my iBook a nice colour
Big Pimpin’ TV (80s style)
...calibrating my Sony Video Projection system
sets on flickr
unterwegs mit Krause
Clash 06
Krause at Mediamatic MuseumN8
my Vista experience
Well, I guess it will surprise at least a few people out there that I’m actually testing Vista at this moment. But… next to everything I do on this site I also still have some professional duties and it is expected that I at least know some about it. Next to that, I’ve been critical about Vista in the past and as you know, it’s quite easy to be critical, but a lot harder to be correct. Sooooo… to be totally correct I’ve ordered an upgrade late December and somewhere last week I got my official copy in the mail…
Now I didn’t decide quite yet on what kind of hardware I was going to run this (heck, I didn’t even make up my mind if I was going to run this at all or just burn my copy or hang it on the wall). Well, yesterday my old media center was starting to act up on its XP MCE-install so I thought this was a good time to finally make up my mind. I downloaded an Upgrade Advisor and to my surprise, my 3 and a half year old media center passed the test?!?! Well, once again, hats off to the still brilliant ATI 9700 PRO which even seems able to run the Aero desktop (it needs a pixel shader 2.0 and yes, this old card has just that), how about that? ^_^
if you think it’s funny to see this on a Mac SE, here’s how
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So, decisions had been made, I decided to give this a go on my current hardware (although without activating it just yet, this gives me 30 days to really make up my mind, I guess). Honestly I must say that the installation wasn’t at all bad (as an upgrade started from XP, although I opted for a fresh install) and the machine was up & running on Vista in no time. But when I found out that I had no sound and it gave me an alert that there are no Soundstorm-drivers for Vista either, I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t thought of that before.
Anyway, first of all I think it’s a shame that NVidia aren’t releasing drivers for either NForce2 or Soundstorm for Vista. Of course I understand they stopped selling it a long time ago, but still, this could very well be the reason I never buy a motherboard with NVidia chipset again. I’d rather pay more as long as I know it’s supported for as long as it’s technically viable and it seems (yes, to my surprise too) that this old NF2-motherboard is quite capable of running Vista at this moment, so no reason there. So much for customer satisfaction.
But when searching for a solution, I was reintroduced with the magical compatibility mode of Vista (“it’s a brand new OS” “written from scratch!” “your old drivers still work!” “uh?”) and yes, when I ran the installer on compatibility mode and after that let the system run the NVmixer-application in compatibility mode also, it all works! magic!
installing NForce-drivers in compatibility mode
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Now, somehow this started to smell… I mean, I watched a movie last night on this setup and the sound works flawlessly… That’s good of course but I started to have my doubts on how ‘new’ and ‘from scratch’ this OS really is… The Media Center setup is 98% the same from the old one, except it looks a little fancier. Today I’ve been playing around to get more settings done to the system and 9 out of 10 dialogs are the same too… It’s too bad I can’t remember a spelling mistake somewhere in one of the XP-dialogs cause I was willing to bet whatever on it that it would still be there. ^_^
They can tell me a whole bunch of stuff about Vista. They probably started from scratch as a first step, but they probably copy-pasted all of the XP-code in there as a step two. (and that was probably already in their third try to get it right) This isn’t a new OS after all…
Now when you think about that, they really should be ashamed of themselves over at Redmond. They took six years to come up with something which is generally the same, it only looks a little fancier (but imho gets beat by Beryl) and got a whole lot more bloated… Now on the one hand I’m glad I didn’t (have to) buy new hardware for this. Although I’m going to put some extra memory in there and a cheap USB-stick for this other magical trick, Ready Boost.
Vista’s idea of security. Now who clicked on ‘change settings’, was it you or was it an intruder? Go figure it out, Einstein ...geez…
And then they enlighten us with splendid results last week, For the quarter ended March 31, Microsoft’s profit jumped 65 percent to $4.93 billion... as if they succeeded… Well, the shareholders will be happy (maybe?) but imho they failed miserably. I really can’t grasp the fact how you can spend six years and come up with this?!?! There simply is no innovation, nothing, nada, it’s the same old thing, only you need a faster PC to run it. But that same PC could run XP or Ubuntu a whole lot better than Vista can… So, I truly hope that next to Dell, other big manufacturers will also keep offering XP as an alternative and keep insisting on it. I guess when the other big boys in this industry do the same, it’s going to be quite difficult for Microsoft to kill XP after all…
I never have been a big Dell-fan, but the latest slashdot-headlines make me smile:
Dell To Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs Again
Michael Dell Using Ubuntu Linux At Home
Dell to Sell Machines with Ubuntu Pre-Loaded
...and Microsoft deserves it. They had six years and they failed. Still, somehow I think Vista is cute. Cute like when your little two-year old nephew tries to draw you a picture and it looks like shit. You smile. Somehow I’m having fun with it, but luckily I don’t have to work with it day in day out. It’s bloated like a mofo, but I guess I never had a fancier firmware for my VCR. *^_^*
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my Queen's day catch
Today in Holland it’s Queen’s day. Where we celebrate the Queen’s birthday, well, a former Queen’s birthday to be exact…
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One of the activities on this day is that in (I guess) every town or city half of the population is sitting on the streets trying to sell stuff they don’t need anymore and the other half walks by… and so did I.
So, even though it’s some sort of flea market or garage sale if you like and most of the stuff is in the one or two euro range, I ended up with gear I wasn’t exactly looking for on this day but were on my imaginary list of things I somehow wanted if I would come across them.
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So, what did I find?
I found a 1977/1978 six-button Atari 2600 with joysticks/paddles and a bunch of cartridges. I was surprised to find it and also in this state, it’s dirty, but apart from that, it seems to be totally complete and intact. I paid 15 euro for it.
I thought it was and after some searching it indeed seems to be the original model from 1977/1978.
I mean, an Atari-logo on (fake) wood. That’s all we need right?
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Next to that I found a PSOne with LCD screen. I already own a similar screen, but that one’s being used in a future project and it seems that you can modify these Sony-screens a lot better for other uses (a true mini LCD screen hooked up to your PC for instance). I’m not sure if I will modify it since this one came with the PS One also and a bunch of games. I paid 30 euro for it. Not long ago, the screens alone retailed for a lot more overhere.
PS One with LCD-screen
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Even though I spend a little more than I expected, I also didn’t expect to find this kind of gear in between all the other stuff.
Well, time to clean it all, something I always do with second hand gear I buy. Somehow it starts to become mine once I took it apart and cleaned it first (and who knows what I do next).
*^_^*
ADDED
OMG! it was only when I went through the bag which carried my catch for a second time that I saw I have an extra cartridge for the 2600… And it’s E.T.!
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If there’s one cartridge with a very big story attached to it, it’s this one. Some consider it the worst game of all time and it is believed that five million(!) of these cartridges have been buried in a New Mexico landfill.
*^_^*
ubuntu feisty fawn is go!
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
I’m loving Ubuntu ever more. I mean, it’s nice and even though it’s not the kind of tough distribution so you can impress your geek friends with your unix masochism (but we’ve got others for just that), it’s very workable. Like I said before, on some machines you just need to work and my workstation is one of them :-)
So, just as OS upgrades should go (hint hint), I got a message I could upgrade and if I wanted to do just that I only needed to click.
The upgrade on it’s own went flawless, only thing was, I lost my window-borders?! It was still workable, but I really started to look for a solution when I found out that also my terminal windows were unusable, I got some white squares (without borders!). I normally use some transparent terminalwindows and I suspected the whole thing had something to do with my custom Beryl install so I started looking there. I checked all the configuration-windows but couldn’t find anything. Luckily I found Niklas Lindblad’s blogpost about the same thing and that solved it! (although I had to go back to some failsafe terminal without copy-paste-functionality(at least, I don’t know how you do such a thing there) to fix it, by adding the stuff to xorg.conf by hand). Anyway, it’s fixed and everything now works like it should.
Better yet, since a couple of weeks I’ve got a Wacom Volito2-tablet and I’ve been following instructions for that, but I couldn’t detect any input on my machine… So I left the tablet on my desk, still connected. And guess what? I was going through some paperwork and saw my mousepointer move all of a sudden… I picked up the pen, made some moves, and now this one works also!
*^_^*
Ubuntu is here to stay (as my desktop distribution) that’s for sure!
food for thought?
A couple of days ago, I quickly scanned a list I came across:
- 1 – arstechnica.com – 121 homepage stories – 91277 total diggs
- 2 – www.engadget.com – 84 homepage stories – 66409 total diggs
- 3 – www.nytimes.com – 44 homepage stories – 36487 total diggs
- 4 – consumerist.com – 41 homepage stories – 59473 total diggs
- 5 – gizmodo.com – 33 homepage stories – 34729 total diggs
- 6 – news.yahoo.com – 32 homepage stories – 34974 total diggs
- 7 – www.cnn.com – 32 homepage stories – 29821 total diggs
- 8 – www.washingtonpost.com – 30 homepage stories – 27867 total diggs
- 9 – news.bbc.co.uk – 27 homepage stories – 23236 total diggs
- 10 – www.wired.com – 26 homepage stories – 18781 total diggs
and I was like “this can’t be true?, the BBC and Wired don’t even have 30 homepage stories?” I mean, geek technique, my personal little one-man operation has a total of 9 homepage stories... At the time of reading I was in a hurry and forgot all about it but… it just popped up in my mind again and I thought “let’s search for that list again and see if this is really true, because it simply can’t be…”.
And then I found it… This is a study over the past 30 days (from April 14th 2007 to March 14th 2007)
Ah! so while my statistics are from over a 600 day period, theirs is from a 30 day period… phew! I really would hate it when I would start to become megalomaniacal and now, there’s no need to either! *^_^*
With this added 1:20 factor this isn’t any food for thought for me anymore, but I guess it is food for thought for more traditional media, or is it? The other day I also found out that in the technorati-index (anyone using that still?) this site and Bright (for whom I work) are closing in on each other. Now those two are totally different, Bright is in Dutch and this site is not, but still. Bright is also a proper company with a magazine, employees, advertisers, budget and a staff of editors and such. And this site, well, doesn’t have all that stuff (but I do have a kitchen table!). Any way, I’m not so sure what to think about this. Anyone?
and ars technica has four frontpage stories a day!?, geeeez…
