Month: April 2004

John Battelle on the Google IPO, including the company founder’s “Owner’s Manual” for prospective share holders. The emphasis on the long-term future of the company is unusual and very welcome. (Via Dave Weiner)

Scotsman: Lifetime’s struggle for sake of ?33 a week. I found this an interesting article, and one that has me almost convinced on the advantages of education vouchers. Unfortunately I think that, instead of encouraging small, teacher-run schools, we’d see a small number of large corporations move in to chanel the lucrative government money straight to their shareholders.

Guardian. Paradise lost – with napalm. “In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out. … Rainforest is being clearfelled and then burnt with napalm. The world’s tallest hardwood trees, eucalyptus regnans, are being reduced to mud and ash. And the monocultural plantations that replace the old growths soak up so much groundwater that rivers are drying up.” 

I’m not sure what to make of this site. It doesn’t seem to be a joke or parady, but I have doubts about the economics of selling toilet paper over the net. Cool name, though. (Via BoingBoing)

My old amigo Richard Godfrey finally has a blog! Richard is a “Manager/Architect” at Microsoft UK and a pretty smart guy, Run with it, Richard!

My old amigo Richard Godfrey finally has a blog! Richard is a “Manager/Architect” at Microsoft UK and a pretty smart guy, Run with it, Richard!

Register: ‘Universal’ hard drive system to ship this month. Miniture USB cartridge hard-drives. Yum.

Americans Pave Road to South Pole. Why is this necessary? Its the last undeveloped landmass on the plant for fuckssake. Why do we have to build a road across it. Why?

My seemingly unstoppable mission to own every gadget whose name begins with the letter i continues. Last year it was an iPod. Now I am the proud owner of an iPAQ h4150.

This is my third PDA. The first was a Philips Velo 500 – a second generation Windows CE (v2.1) handheld. This was a pretty powerful machine for its time, but the batteries sucked so badly that it had to be recharged every day.

My second PDA was a Palm Vx, which lived in a hard case in my back pocket for about four years. For at least two of those years it was actually my primary email system – because it was just so damn convenient. It also only needed a quick recharge every two or three weeks. The main downsides of the Vx, and the Palm platform in general, were the poor interoperability with Windows (particularly in terms of working with common file formats) and the wimpy operating system. About once a month, AvantGo would go mad and stamp randomly over the contents of the memory while the puny o/s just sat there and did nothing about it. End result was a dead machine until I got home and restored it from the last backup. Big pain.

Anyway, over the last month the bettery on the Vx started to loose its ability to hold a charge and so, after some research, I bought my third PDA – an iPAQ h5140. Its a sweet little machine: the same size as my old Vx, with a bright 320x240x64k screen, integrated Bluetooth and 802.11b, 64Mb memory, and an SD slot. Unlike the Palm, it also has a proper OS that has a real file system and multitasking. Bar far the neatest feature, though, is the built-in WiFi. I wrote some time back about the wireless experience I’d like, and now I finally feel I’ve got it. 

If you have a Linksys WAP54G wifi router and you want to update the firmware and you live outside the US, make sure you download the correct non-US version.

On Monday (six days ago) I upgraded the firmware on our router (a BEFSR41) and access-point (a WAP54G) to the latest versions. In the case of the A/P this was version 2.02.7. Everything worked fine.

Today it just stopped working. After six days! Connections wouldn’t authenticate and I couldn’t access the A/P’s configuration screens to diagnose the problem. After a couple of very frustrating hours I finally nailed it, thanks to this page opn dslreports. Somewhat surprisingly, there is a difference between US and international hardware. Non-US hardware needs a special international version of the firmware. A non-US device will allow you to upload the US-specific firmware, but operation will be erratic. To find non-US firmware it, click ‘International’ on the Linksys home page and navigate to the product downloads via an unnecessary flash page. The UK version (1.08) of the firmware is here. The solution is described at dslreports.

Argh.&nbsp