number 9

I’m a bit of a Luddite, but sometimes things converge. 3 weeks ago:

1. I thought seriously about getting a PDA
2. I got junkmail from T-mobile
3. someone signed up for myspace, knocking me off my #1 slot

I wanted a PDA as I’ve become heavily dependant on rmilk (having outgrown tadalist and a free backpack account) and unfortunately I’m only sat on my ass in front of a monitor about 85% of my waking hours. The problem with a pda is that it’s another thing to lug around
(Ok, lug is a bit strong. But if it’s large enough to have to consider picking up in the morning, I usually won’t).

Then there’s the issue of syncing handheld <-> rmilk. My 1100 has reminders, alarms and notes that I sync by hand, and none of the Palms I saw improve much on that.
Besides, can you bang in nails with them? Do they have a flashlight? Exactly.

Screw the PDA, then.

The dead trees t-mobile sent were about Flext . Essentially you buy 34 pound of credit up front for 15 quid (normally 20, but 25% off till end of April) then spend it on whatever you want (text/talk/mms). My virgin pay-as-you-go costs 10 for virtually nothing (always too many talk minutes and not enough text, or vice versa).

I think GPRS is counted separately, but luckily I live next to an internet.

Plus of course you get a spanky free phone. Thought I’d pick something shiny so when it inevitably turned out to be a flimsy piece of shit I’d ebay it and just use my 1100.
Since google had spoken, I’d get one with bluetooth for syncing and maybe a half-decent camera (ours is inevitably at home whenever I meet Elvis).

First: the motorolas. SLVR, RAZR, etc. They’re the Apple of the phone world – great looks, great marketing. Amazingly, every review I could find said they were this seasons technically godawful (shitty camara, flimsy, poor voice quality, crap reception, awful UI) must-have accessory (because they were a bit thin, apparently?).

Nokia, then (the, uh, Volvo of the phone world).
I was about to, when I spotted a review of the w800i . Sounded awesome and it was on the 15/month plan.

Now, it’s a Sony Ericsson phone, and they’re not my favourite evil multinational. But open is as open does. I can honestly say I have no desire to install linux on it.

It plays well with others which is more than I can say for my old Zaurus.

Main features are:

• bluetooth 1.2 (decent profiles too. can be a mouse + keyboard if you’re insane enough to want that)
• builtin mp3 player (so decent sound quality all round)
• buttons are in the right place
• feels sturdy
• good size and weight
• reasonable battery life
• good speakerphone
• handsfree kit with a 3.5mm jack (to use your own headphones)
• 2.0 megapixel camera (video recording too)

• ‘joystick’ menu selector (much comfier than a d-pad)
• FM radio
• sound recorder (combined with a 3 year old, you need never download a ringtone again. It’s hidden under ‘entertainment’, thought I’d mention as google drew a blank.)
• SyncML support
• charges off a USB cable
• shows up as a USB (2.0) disk (no need for root kits )
• GPRS with xhtml browser
• flashlight (Score!)
• supports iTunes with a little help
• decent pim apps : calendar, tasks (todolists), notes etc.
• contact book supports email, birthdays, postal addresses, etc.
• usable utilities : calculator, stopwatch, timer
• can send MMS to email (handy as no-one else I know has a picture phone)
• the mp3 player goes off in your pocket when you sit on the phone (I’ve killed 2 phones that way)
• 512Mb core duo memory stick included (this is the same stuff the PSP uses, so it’s commodity prices too)
• J2ME (hey, if I can play Space Hulk on the train it’s a Good Thing)
• decent documentation (for a proprietary device)
• bounces when you drop it onto the carpet from head height (won’t be trying it on the dining room tiles anytime soon though)

So far t-mobile have been alright too. I couldn’t send MMS with attachments when I got the phone, and they sorted that quickly. Moving over my virgin number was a doddle too Their webpage has itemized online bills and you can send SMS through it too.

Only downers so far are :

• you need the handsfree in to use the radio (the rats nest of cables I carry around makes a bluetooth headset seem almost worth the ridicule)
• haven’t found a way to lock the screen (*, then choose ‘lock’)
• the colour scheme is a bit silly (get the D750 if you really hate it – but then you only get a 64Mb memorystick )
• can’t seem to record more than a few seconds of video (enable ‘high quality’ video shoot mode – they’ll be too big for MMS, but it’ll let you fill the stick)
• you can’t delete the picture of robbie williams that comes with the phone (I’ll crack that soon though)

All in all, really pleased with it, and I’ve had it about a fortnight, so I was expecting to hate it by now.

Expect it to break by Tuesday.

I finally took a proper look at my finances. Saved about 50 pounds a month
so far by practicing the ancient art of ‘retention team brinkmanship’
on NTL and several insurance companies (I heartily recommend this butt-ugly but invaluable site) .

Sort-of-related and as planned
, my last mini-itx board is on ebay this week.
Nano-itx boards are finally in the shops , and they’re a lot nicer than mini-itx in a lot of ways, but I can’t find it in me to get that excited. They’re very late ; EPIAs size “don’t impressa me much” any more (there’s more competition now), and even the fastest boards are dog slow compared to a 300 quid Dell (yes, they’re ugly. Hide them in the loft.). So they sort of fall between two chairs.

Anyway, by Thursday I’ll be server-free.
Instead of servers that sit around waiting for ribena to be poured into them, I’ll have (on toddler-inaccessbly high shelves):

• a 250Gb buffalo linkstation fileserver
• my slug
• a gumstix 200xm connex (sold the 400 to pay for it. 4Mb flash was a bit cramped)

The Linkstation was mainly because the eMac filled up
with bittorrented bbc telly and I needed a networked disk.
First thought was ‘use the slug’, but that’s for breaking playing with.

Besides, I want
lots of storage for not lots of money, so I need 3.5” disks.
That means an external caddy, which is ugly, noisy, unwieldy and needs a mains plug (it’s tricky to get mains power up by the wrt54g and I’m not up for dangling cat5 around the house like it’s LAN Christmas).

Creating users, shares etc is a doddle and it’s pretty fast.
It has a not-quite silent fan, but then it’s above the eMac (a.k.a. ‘the iHairdryer’)
so by comparison it’s a ninja on tiptoes.

Samba works fine, but I’d like a newer netatalk, multicast dns and NFS (then the slug and gumstix have access to comparitively unlimited storage) so I need custom firmware .
This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to get away from as a recovering makeworld addict
but in this case I think it’s justified.

In other news : hairy lobsters , eh? wow.

Two things were stopping me – new boards rumoured in the summer and the additional import fees (which I hear almost double their cost).
Last week a CFstix audio pack came up on ebay from a fairly reputable UK seller and I got it for cheap.

As you can see, it’s fucking tiny:

It gets a bit bigger (but still nowhere near a palmful) with the add-on boards.

400Mhz XScale PXA255 chip, 64Mb RAM and 4Mb flash, serial and USBnet, and a CF slot for wifi or storage. Oh, and sound if that’s your bag. Mighty nice.

Course, I haven’t powered it up yet (need a 2 → 3 pin adapter for the power brick), so it might be broken…

After a few false starts I
finally got stitch onto davie so I can replace my aging NetBSD box
with the WRT54g I bought ages ago (it’s is still someones backup MX, but a day off won’t kill anyone).

I set aside an hour last night to do it before I went bed. It took about 3 minutes.

the good

• boots in 4 seconds
• is silent ( as in ‘makes no noise at all’, rather than ‘mini-itx silent’ )
• managed feels a lot faster than ad-hoc (even without squid)
• doesn’t insist on being your DHCP server
• MAC address spoofs its WAN port (don’t have to reboot your CM)
• bridges between WLAN and wired clients
• dinky enough to stick on a shelf
• sturdy enough to survive a fall from the shelf
• HTTPS access to the web ui
• lots of wireless options to tweak
• decent wireless security WPA/WPA2 with or without RADIUS auth (need a separate server for RADIUS, though )
• half decent firewall – DMZ, traffic shaping, port forwarding etc (I only need the last one myself)

the bad

• doesn’t do static DHCP entries (just assign a static IP to the box, no biggy)
• getting dyndns working with custom DNS was badly doced in the web ui
• an embedded DNS server would have been nice (you can send one to DHCP clients, though I’d rather take it as an excuse to play with mDNS/zeroconf)
• According to wikipedia , the WRT54G blocks access to the firmware link below¹

I resisted custom firmware images – then it stops being something that Just Works and becomes Yet Another Server To Break. Nice to know they’re available, but I’m not touching them unless I have a real need.

Need to choose which of the two epia servers to ebay, and get WPA2 working.

¹ turns out that’s a crock.

Engadget just linked to a Tazer shop . Weapons are now ‘consumer electronics’.

Look at the website, they could be selling a mobile phone. Marketing it as a ‘defense system’ rather than a weapon presumably attracts the few remaining Americans who feel uncomfortable toting handguns ?

Despite the fact it’s sold to defend your family in case you are ’burglarized’, the demo video mainly consists of cops shooting unarmed people who’ve clearly already surrendered.

It’s not yet clear if the fatalities from kids zapping each other will happen before or after it comes with an integrated MP3 player.