Category: Uncategorized

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

Reading for today: One Half of a Manifesto, By Jaron Lanier. Plus some responses by a whole shedfull of deep-thinkers.

skepticsannotatedbible.com: The bible with sceptical annotations.

Xerox PARC Blue-and-White Series. Facinating archive of PARC reports. A few documents are available in Postscript, including one by Charles Simonyi. #

Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, today is 2/3/4. Make the most of it, because the next on isn’t for another thousand years.

A First Look at ObjectSpaces in Visual Studio “Whidbey”, by Dino Esposito. #

BBC: The US Army is building a second version of Earth on a computer, to help it prepare for conflicts around the world. (Via Slashdot)  #

What You Need To Know About Recording Streaming Audio. #

Guardian: The British-US axis no longer makes any sense – Why Blair dressed up war realpolitik in dodgy moralistic rhetoric.

VentureBlog: Practical Networking: Make Your Own Luck. Hints for geeks on people networking, not wires and bits. #

Curio corner: Government of the Island of Sark. #

Doubleplusfunny: Students for an Orwellian Society.

Flipstart PC. Ultra-portable PC with a 1GHz CPU, 30gig hard disk, 1024×600 screen, and running full Windows XP. Gotta have one. (Via The Inquirer)  #

Kuro5hin: We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source. A quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source. The malignant hive-mind that is K5 does its thing. #

NY Times: Facinating article on the work that goes into “finishing” the tone of new  Steinway pianos.

Amazing photography from the Hubble space telescope. #

Some extended link-following in Wikkipedia brings us to Loglan. The mind boggles. Then it begs for mercy.