Category: Web Services

Werner Vogels got a rocking Archos AV380 for Christmas.  These gadgets are not cheap, but the quality of video and audio is amazing.

Merry Christmas to all that celebrate!  Except for my cat-induced 4am postings, I will probably be spending most of the day offline.

Happy holidays!

Jeremy Zawodny took advantage of the holidays and did some back seat wardriving yesterday.  It’s reall amazing how different wireless ecosystems can be from one small region to another.  For example, in most residential parts of Montgomery County, Maryland that I’ve casually explored, Linksys access points outnumber all others by a pretty good number.  Almost all of those Linksys APs broadcast thei SSID, hand out IPs to anyone who strolls by, and have no security.

Doc Searls‘ slow-mo wardriving is quite easy around here.  Pick yourself a random residential road in pretty much any lower-middle class neighborhood or upward.  Start sniffing.  Start driving at 5-10 MPH or so.  Within a block or two you should have a Linksys AP calling out to you and offering you an IP when you ask for it.  Of course if it doesn’t give you an IP, setting your IP to 192.168.0.something usually does the trick.  I have found that for the most part, these totally open access points are usually attached to a Comcast cable modem.  I’m not sure if DSL customers are any smarter, or if they just have a lower tendancy towards wireless networking.

Of course wardriving in commercial parts of Montgomery County tend to yield tons of T-Mobile hotspots (there is a Starbucks every few blocks after all) and mostly well-configured access points with some form of encryption.  Of course I said mostly.

Overall this county seems to be pretty wardriver-friendly.

While trying to find the port of PuTTY for the Nokia Communicator, I stumbled on excellent news from a few days ago: PuTTY for Symbian OS released a port of Putty for Series 60!

Note that this release is marked as beta, so if you’ve never crashed your phone before or if the idea of crashing you phone scares you, wait for a final release.  I wasn’t able to connect to anything, but I’ll try again later when I’m in a more GPRS-rich area.

Even though the 9290 lacks GPRS, I’ve found that it is quite useful as an SSH terminal.  The jury is still out on the usefulness of SSH on something with a whacky keypad like the 3650, but we will see.

From the antiquated bleeding edge department comes the announcement of my purchase of a Nokia 9290.  Despite its lack of essential things like Bluetooth and GPRS, it’s an awesome little toy, er, tool.

The 9290 that I picked up seems to be about 90% functional: it works as a phone (in such a brickish way), but the speakerphone and speaker from within the Symbian environment (the same thing, I’m sure) are not functional.

The darn thing is quite usable and super fun even without that functionality, and will probably remain so, as it looks like a major repair on this thing would involve about $175 if I sent it off to Nokia.

A few quickies for reference sake:

• To do a really really hard reboot and format the C: drive, remove the battery, then replace it.  Open the Communicator and when the Nokia reaching out picture (that I’m sick of) comes up, hit CTRL-SHIFT-F.  It will ask if you’d like to format your C: drive.  You will have to plug the phone in or have the battery fully charged in order to do this.  On my phone, once the C: drive was formatted, I was left with just the bare essentials.  All of the stoftware that ships with the phone should be on CD you can be downloaded from Nokia.  Don’t be a moron like myself and click on each file, say yes to the EULA, and then save to my hard drive.  Scroll down to the bottom and just download the file that says ‘All Data.’
• *#0000# will tell you your version number, just like my 3650.  I’m currently running 3.35.  5.07 is the current release.  Is there any way I can have my phone upgraded and if so is it worth it?
• Ewan pointed me towards Psiloc, who have some excellent utilities for the Communicator, included Extended Internet which allows you to access the internet via IR from another device.  (Think 3650 GPRS -> IR -> 9290)

CNet:

The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman.

I’d love to have a meg of L2 cache just like the next guy, but these lower end Athlon64’s bring the price point down, I’m all for it.  Right now, prices of this new chip seem to be hovering in the just over $200 price range, but time lowers all chip prices.

Netcraft brings the bad news: Sun has EOL‘d the Cobalt RaQ’s and Qubes.  Maybe we’ll see a better and lower priced selection of those cute littel Qubes on Ebay.

If you are curious what the top 5 programs sold through the Sony Ericsson Application Shop are, check out my Mobitopia post.  See also the Q3 2003 Handango Yardstick.

Via Slashdot, 55 operating systems on a Powerbook is quite awesome.  I love the notes on getting Inferno to run:

Even though Inferno 4th Edition includes Mac OS X as a host system, it has issues on Panther. It is simplest to run it within Linux within Virtual PC within Mac OS X.

The article brought me back to the early DOS days among other things.  I have a copy of DOS 2.1 on a few 5-1/4 floppies somewhere…

During the dot-com boom, you could walk in to a 7-eleven store and pick up prepaid dialup access.  Alas, it appears that you can no longer do that, at least in the DC area.  Prepaid dialup used to be all over the place: in grocery stores, office supply stores, gas stations, and so on.  Nowadays I can’t find anything beyond the latest AOL release.

Sometimes prepaid dialup access is just what you need.  For example, my friend Adam is in town between semesters.  At school he has ethernet in his room and wireless in the library.  When he is in town, he is at the mercy of the dialup gods.  He’s burned through all of the AOL free trials.  He has worn out his welcome at Netzero and Juno, both United Online companies.  He really only needs dialup access for about a month, so signing up for monthly services like Earthlink does not make any sense.  Sprint offers prepaid internet access, but you can only order it online and it only ships via US Postal Service.  That’s great and all, but by the time it arrives at the door, Adam’s vacation will be halfway over.

I did what any geek would do in a situation like this: I googled for it.  The fourth entry down was for a company called Budget Dialup.  I clicked around the site a bit and liked what I saw.  They have the same old stupid software that you can download to get dialup running on 98/ME/2000/XP.  You know, the type that sits in your tray and makes everything seem a little less stable.  Luckily, they also offer the option of manual setup, where you just use your login/password and point your modem at a local number.  Another thing that rocks is that they acknowledge that Linux exists, and even provide basic information about using their dialup service under Linux.  Their supported systems page lists all of the major Windows releases as well as Macintosh (I believe they have instructions for ~OS9 and OSX), PDAs, Linux, gaming consoles, and more.

Their prices rock too!  You’re looking at $4 for 10 hours, $7 for 20 hours, and $20 for 60 hours.  They also have the plan that I signed Adam up for: 120 hours over 30 days for $10.  Now we’re talking.  I signed him up and passed on his username/password along with a pretty impressive list of local dialup numbers.  There were probably 4-5 numbers in his zip code or a neighboring zip code.  A couple of hours later he was back at home and online.  No problems.

Early results are encouraging.  He has not been randomly disconnected, which is a problem that he has had with the major free/low cost providers out there.  Speeds are about as zippy as they get from his house, and he has had no problems so far.  They use Level3 for their modem pools, which seems to be used by some of the larger and higher cost ISPs in the area.

The only nit I have with them so far is that they linked to a list of settings for various operating systems when I made my purchase, but I have not been able to find them again on their site after looking around for 5 or 10 minutes.  They are probably stashed away somewhere, and I could easily get things set up in Linux, I just didn’t have a chance to look at them when I was checking out.  But that is really a minor issue.

If anyone is looking for prepaid dialup, or backup access if their broadband connection goes down, I would definitely suggest Budget Dialup.  I’m tempted to pick up 10 hours just in case my connection goes down or I need dialup access while out of town.  All of the plans except for the 30 day plan can also be used with a toll-free number.  For the cost of a normal sized latte, it’s not a bad thing to keep in your back pocket.

Yes, things have been quiet.  I’ve got some longer entries that are currently fermenting in my brain.  More in the next day or so.

Nice!  Leo Laporte has finished the new Dial-A-Song box for TMBG.

Via the print edition of The Washington Post this morning, you can now track your FedEx packages from Google.  Just search for fedex <your tracking number> and away you go.

Via Jeremy Zawodny, it looks like we nabbed Saddam.

Geekzone.co.nz covers Bluetooth Americas day 1.  See also their coverage of day 2.

Today is Wi-Fi Day over at Mobitopia.

The Dulles Annex of the Air and Space Museum opens next week.

The bulk of the annex is a giant hanger.  There is an Air France Concorde in there, as well as the Enola Gay and other historic aircraft.  We’re talking a Space Shuttle, an SR-71, and more.  It’s also another local IMAX theatre.  I’ll try to head over there at some point in the next week or two.  Of course I will moblog it.

Congrats to Russ on his new job.  Tough decisions indeed.

The realtime notes from the XML conference in Philly are excellent.

WRAL:

RALEIGH, N.C. — A small earthquake that started in Virginia was felt by several counties in the WRAL viewing area.

Officials say at 3:59 p.m. Tuesday, an earthquake measuring 4.5 magnitude was reported.

Its epicenter was 30 miles west of Richmond. There is no word on the length of the tremors.

Myself and some coworkers felt it here in the DC area.  Aparently it’s big news on the AM news/traffic/talk stations, but no big deal on The Richter Scale.