Tag: technology

Things achieved so far:

• Got to Preston in three hours, which is pretty good going. We got stuck behind some idiots who seemed to think that “national speed limit” meant 30mph for awhile, but by the time we got to the big roads it was plain sailing. Without sails. Or a boat.
• Fixed my dad’s wireless network. He has a wireless network comprising his desktop PC, each of my sisters’ desktop PCs, and an ADSL router. Having recently gotten a new laptop he wanted to connect this to the network, too, so he got an old USB wireless adapter he had and plugged it in. Hmm.. can’t seem to join the network: can see it, but can’t join it. So he goes and buys a new adapter – this time, one which was of the same brand as the ones of which his network was already composed. Nope, still nothing. Eventually, has patience at an end, he borrowed my sister’s adapter… and it worked fine.If you’re a network geek, see if you can think what the problem might be before you read on.

  The problem was that his network had been set up to use MAC address locking – preventing access to the router by anything but a list of particular hardware devices (or, for non-geeks: every piece of networking equipment has a supposedly globally unique number assigned to it when it is manufactured: my dad’s router had been configured only to allow particular numbers to connect to it ). So, it was a simple challenge to allow these new devices access to his network. The net result seemed to be that there was one useless wireless adapter.

  But here’s where things got really silly: it later turned out that his new laptop had a built-in wireless adapter, and he’d never known. All he had to do was actually install the drivers for it (to be fair, you’d think on a pre-built laptop they might have done that for him) and voila: he was on the network… two useless wireless adapters.

• Installed Firefox as the default browser on all of the IE-default machines we’ve come across.
• Met the puppies (4), the chickens (3½), the rabbit (1, with 3 others loose somewhere in the scrubland behind the house – kids on the neighbourhood sometimes catch one – at great risk and loss of blood [theirs’, not the rabbit’s] – and ransom it back), and the hermit crabs (2) for the first time. Re-met the dog (1), and the cats (4… 5…? 6??? who knows). My mum’s house is becoming quite the menagerie. I’ll try to get some pictures online before we leave here on Monday.
• Taught my parents to play Fluxx. My dad turns out to be surprisingly… lucky… at it.
• Drank mead from the holy isle of Lindisfarne, where my dad has recently been.

By the way – Paul: I’ve left a key to TheFlat with Bryn, so there’s no need to camp out at the cafe all day in anticipation of Troma Night tonight: have a good one, guys!

Right – off to watch Spongebob Squarepants.

This afternoon, I’ve taught Iggy, the robot who looks after the RockMonkey ChatRoom:

• How to play The Game. Damn – I’m out. He’s not very good at it, and, by proxy, neither am I.
• Comprehension of facts expressed as “concept ARE fact”, rather than “concept IS fact”, and about knowing “who” people are (ask “Iggy, who is Ava_Work”, for example, or teach him who other people are…).

The by-product of this is that I’ve been learning to program in Tcl. And as a result, discovering why nobody writes in Tcl. Here’s a quote from bash.org, which I found in the bMotion source code:

<Procyan> is there like 1 person on earth that knows tcl/tk and is writing all of the apps?
<unSlider> procyan: no, there are a bunch of people who dont know tcl/tk but are writing apps for it anyway

No, I’m not talking about that god-awful de-da-de-da-de-do-do-do de-da-de-do do thingy: I’m talking about this ingenious MEng dissertation project, in which the student hooked up six hamsters to a MIDI device and, with some clever hardware and software, used their movements to compose music. If you look at the site, be sure to download the video clip or at least a sample of the music produced!

Do you remember in the middle of last week I finally discovered that I could make Firefox have all the features I loved in Opera, using plugins? Well; I’m honoured to report that my comments haven’t gone un-noticed: I’ve recieved a comment on that post from Jonny Axelsson, dude who does standards-related stuff for Opera. To save you going back there, he writes:

In the meantime we’re getting out Opera 8, so it would be even harder to compete…

Not much to say on the matter, but hey. I tried Opera 8 beta, and it’s fab, but it’ll need to improve on the web developer and adblocking things if I’m to re-adopt it as my browser of choice. That said, I’m still using Opera at home, because I haven’t been bothered yet to download all those Firefox extensions that make it “as good as ” Opera for the things I need in a browser.

Right – Shrink is here – time to break the internet again.

Back in 1979, Atari came up with a design for a next-generation console called the “Cosmos” (you’ll find it on this list of handheld games consoles. This remarkable device, planned for release in the early 80’s, would have used holographic games in order to give an illusion of 3D, all in a hand-held unit.

In any case; only five prototypes were ever built (and only two of those ever had their electronics put in)… but one of “the three” has come up for sale on eBay on Buy It Now. I kid you not. Price is just short of £10,000. Don’t you just want one?

• AtariMuseum’s page on the Atari Cosmos – with piccies; fab!