chuma.org

Author: chuma

  • out with the crap, in with the new

    For the first time, umm, ever, I finally have a cell phone with the features that I want instead of the best thing I could get for $0.

    Old Phone, New Phone

    On the left: my crappy old Motorola V101. Goodbye, sweet stupid bulky box with a full keyboard. Why didn’t you have a WAP browser? On the right, my brand new and now fully unlocked Sony Ericsson T310. Most importantly the new phone has easy connectivity to my PC and anything else (like, say, my Newton) via its IrDA port. All I wanted was a phone with a flippin’ IrDA port. Yay. Thanks dad.

  • Nothing like some wackos on a Tuesday.

    Steve Currey’s Expedition Company – Voyage to Our Hollow Earth – This sounds like it’ll be one helluva trip. I mean, just look at the itinerary: Day 1 – Depart your Hometown to Moscow.

    Day 2 – Arrive in Moscow. Transfer to Hotel Russia. Sightseeing Moscow. Overnight in Hotel Russia front of St. Basil’s.

    Day 3 – Sightseeing Moscow in morning. Afternoon flight to Murmansk. Board Yamal Icebreaker. Overnight aboard Yamal.

    Days 4-7 Enroute to North Pole

    Day 8 – Spend day at the North Pole

    Days 9-11 Enroute to Inner Continent

    Days 12-14 Travel up Hiddekel River to City of Jehu.

    Days 15-16 Monorail trip to City of Eden to visit Palace of the King of the Inner World

    Days 17-18 Monorail trip back to City of Jehu

    Days 19-23 Enroute from City of Jehu back to Murmansk.

    Day 24 Flight Murmansk to Moscow. Connecting flight back to your hometown.

  • phones phones phones.

    Seems like Nokia still has the most phones that have an actual infrared port. Given the cheapness of the hardware I don’t understand why all phones don’t have one. Anyways. I’m seriously leaning towards getting either a 7210, 7190, or 8390. The 7210 and 8390 are still current models, while the 7190 is older and kind of the granddaddy of the former two. Also the 7190 is the phone they used in The Matrix. The Sony Ericsson T310 is looking pretty darn spiffy too, but sold by Fido (although given my current situation, I’d be buying an unlocked phone anyways.)

  • Someone build this mail client. Now.

    This is IBM’s view of the future or mail clients. It kicks ass! I want it now! Of course, only IBM is stupid enough to publish their research like this instead of putting a bullet in the head of Lotus Notes and releasing this instead.

  • Uptown theatre in Toronto collapses

    CBC Toronto – Man killed in theatre collapse – It’s weird to find out about things that just happened in Toronto via the BBC.

  • phone envy.

    Okay. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve chosen some poor phones in my life. Like our Uniden cordless phone which I just bought another rechargable battery for – the third one it’s had in over two years. At this point I’m thinking of building one myself. Or the Motorola V101 – when Sandy and I signed up for the Rogers Family Plan some 16 months ago now, we both got one of these. I thought it would be really useful to be able to easily write SMSes on the keyboard and use ICQ Mobile – and I was right, and I used ICQ Mobile a lot. But I soon learned that the 101 is horrible, absolutely horrible as a voice phone. Also, the interface is just crap. I don’t think Motorola learned how to make a decent cell phone menu until very recently. Sandy ditched hers in favour of a Motorola C332, but found it to be very quiet, and the battery seemingly held very little charge (might be defective). You might remember that I had to unlock that phone. She just switched again and bought a Sony Ericsson T226, which she loves. I think this one is a keeper for her.

    Anyways, this story is about me, and I still have the V101. I barely use the SMS anymore because I’m no longer behind the evil firewall of doom at work, so I can use ICQ and MSN from my PC. The usefulness of having a QWERTY keyboard is almost gone. It’s pretty big for a phone, and the phone volume is bad, but better with the handsfree. I’m thinking of replacing the V101 with something else, but I’m not sure what. Spending money on a new one (which I would have to buy outright) wouldn’t seem to be worth it for the amount of time I use my phone. I could switch over to Sandy’s old C332 but there’s the lingering battery issue.

    Ideally I’d like to have a phone that has IrDA or serial data cable capability – so it can communicate with either my PC or my Newton. The C332 only has a USB data cable, so that wouldn’t be useful for my USB-less Newton. Bluetooth would be future-proofing but those phones are still expensive. Right now I’m jonesing for the old days of my Nokia 5160 and data cable. Can anyone suggest to me a decent GSM phone with IrDA? It doesn’t have to be available new. IrOBEX and IrCOMM would be required though. Also, price is an issue.

    I wish there was a huge matrix/table somewhere comparing all phones and their features…

  • If you are running Windows right now…

    … I urge you to do these simple things right now to protect your machine:

    • RUN WINDOWS UPDATE. Install any and all critical updates. If necessary, install the latest service pack, reboot and re-run Windows Update. It’s so darn easy to do and yet people don’t know about it.
    • Get a decent piece of anti-virus software. Whatever came with your computer is probably crap, or its automatic update licence may have expired by now. Get yourself a copy of Norton AntiVirus or Mcafee Virusscan. Like Coke vs. Pepsi, the choice is yours.
    • Don’t use Outlook Express for e-mail. Outlook Express is like drinking through a straw with holes in it. Use Mozilla for browsing, mail, news, IRC, or if you don’t want to leave your beloved exploit-filled Internet Explorer behind, just install Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. Built-in free and effective spam filtering will be your reward.

    I’m writing this because I’m amazed at how many bloody unpatched machines there are out there. It just happens that I was up until 2am last night de-worming, cleaning, updating, and patching Sandy’s co-worker’s laptop. It had three different worms on it, all of them expoiting the DCOM RPC exploit from August. One of them was an IRC bot, so likely someone was remote-controlling their machine to do distributed denial-of-service attacks. Sigh. And of course they were running plain-vanilla XP Home connected directly to their DSL provider, with some very outdated virus software that came with their computer and had never been updated.

    On the upside, I now know how to defeat nefarious worms that frickin’ close windows while I’m trying to use them.

  • Thanksgiving? No Thank You

  • How you can tell one of your hard disks is dead.

    When this happens:

    That bad. Luckily the drive is less than a year old, so I will RMA it. Also luckily I burned the important stuff off of it last night.

  • the mustard of your doom

    Yes, I got my first speeding ticket ever this weekend. And I didn’t get off easy. Suckage.

    I got my latest order of cool very 3rd-party GBA stuff from Success. Including a new F2A 256Mbit flash cartridge and linker. Now I can finally put a 128Mbit game as well as a ton of other stuff on a cart! I feel like the most spoiled GBA player ever. I also picked up the stupid GBA headphone adapter in my order – for $1, how can you go wrong?

    I’ve been playing a lot of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga on my GBA. It’s a really funny and good game. Also, now that I have tons of space on my GBA, I can bring along lots of classic GB and NES games, by using Goomba and PocketNES respectively, and PogoShell manages it all.