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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.