According to http://findingada.com, “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science”.
So, I would like to celebrate the open source hardware achievements of Limor Fried, whose store http://www.adafruit.com/ sold me my first Arduino, the first serious electronics kit I soldered together, a USBtinyISP AVR Programmer Kit, and whose instructions and forums have been an invaluable resource in my Arduino and AVR-based projects.
I can’t tell you how many times over the past 9 months I have tried to update to the latest Apple firmware for our Time Machine, only to find the result is an unstable – unusable – wireless network. I always have to downgrade back to 7.3.2.
Please, Apple, GET IT RIGHT. This reminds me too much of trying to set up networks in the early days of Windows XP. It has to JUST WORK.
Phones need a “Report as Spam” button for text messages and phone calls.
I have been receiving junk texts for a while now, usually a few times a week, occasionally more frequently.
Today I received a text message which informed me that my bank account had been locked and that I should call some number to unlock it.
This kind of criminal phishing is disgusting. Law enforcement need to stop this but this morning I couldn’t even figure out how to report it. There is a form for registering a complaint at www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov but it does not seem to work well for for text message fraud.
Here is my suggestion: phones need a “Report as Spam” button for text messages and phone calls. Such a simple mechanism has helped to contain the vast diseased ocean of junk email. I’m sure it can help with text messages and phone calls too.
I just finished listening to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow in the form of an excellent podcast reading by Mark Douglas Nelson.
The book is set in a near future where Whuffie – a measure of reputation or kudos – has replaced money as a means of payment, and recounts the battle for hearts and minds (and therefore necessarily Whuffie) in the reconstruction of treasured rides at Walt Disney World in Florida.
A little research for this blog post revealed that the narrator, Mark Douglas Nelson has his own site and podcast (available from his site, not iTunes).
I strongly recommend this book and will be investigating other readings by Mark Douglas Nelson.
Quick post: yesterday I upgraded from Vmware Fusion 2 on my Mac to 3.0.
I also suffered the widely reported problem where the site could not find my previously registered copy of Fusion 2 and so would not give me the upgrade pricing option. Some broken web pages, and some hours later, I was unexpectedly presented with a page to actually pay for the thing. A little confusing because I wasn’t sure how I had arrived there. Still, I lived the dream and punched in my digits. I let it download overnight.
This morning I checked the instructions for upgrading an existing copy of Fusion in the “Getting Started” manual. No sweat: I just installed the new version and everything was OK.
Fired up my Windows 7 RC VM. First start seemed typically slow, with the scrambled graphics and resizing windows I’m used to seeing when starting Windows 7 in Fusion. Second start of Windows 7 was very fast.
Overall: slightly irritated about the site problems yesterday, but happy that the upgrade was smooth and – to a first approximation – does not seem to have broken anything.
I think the Kindle is a great way to read books, and I enjoy my Kindle 2. There are some definite negatives, especially the DRM on the books – what happens when Amazon decides not to support the format any more? – and now I have found another one.
The power management on the Kindle 2 is definitely under par. The battery drains in a few days, even when the unit is off. It will sometimes warn you that your battery is flat even after you have charged it, because it seems to generate the warning before checking to see if the battery state has changed.
Now, I have found a worse instance of that problem: my Kindle 2 seems to be unchargeable and unusable. The battery had become flat, and the Kindle was displaying a critical battery warning. I charged the Kindle, but when I turn it on it only gets part way through its boot-from-cold process before complaining again of the critical flat battery, at which point it stops doing any thing. The problem is described in a Kindleboards thread but the proposed solution does not seem to work.
What to do?
Update A few cycles of hard power off, charging, turning on etc seemed to fix the issue. Still, the firmware needs updating for sure.
Linux is great for the back end, but has continued to fall down for the consumer desktop because the UI doesn’t quite cut it.
Chrome OS uses the mature and continually developing UI provided by the web browser to fill this lack. No more problems playing video, music etc – the browser can already do that.
Blog post about an Arduino command line shell. I/O is through the serial port, and commands are available to set/reset pins, timers, inspect registers etc. Could be pretty useful for experimenting with a circuit before the code has been finished.
I just built a little audio amp using an LM386 chip and the Little Gem amplifier circuit. I plugged it into my Arduino and programmed up a little well-tempered scale. I found to my surprise that if the Arduino was off and I touched the amplifier input, then I got very faint speech out of my little speaker, which I am pretty sure is NPR!
