Expect things to stop working if you don’t sign up for a two-year plan.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Using iPhone with a prepaid plan?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009Words of Wisdom
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Lifehacker links to an article on dangerous search terms – ones which often lead to malware sites that will attempt to subvert your computer. The most dangerous search terms might not be the ones you’d think would be dangerous (which makes them all the more dangerous).
I also got a good laugh from commenter JimmyOnTheBlock, who said:
Also be aware that Dicks Sporting Goods does not reside on dicks dot com I have made that mistake exactly once.
I never made that mistake, but I have made comparable ones once or twice.
New advances in wireless coverage technology
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Via Bits and Pieces.
I was checking my email … really
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Ringed planet under construction – locally
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008Russel Seitz points to information from the European Space Agency mapping the growing ring of geostationary satellites and debris.
Sore Thumb (Drive)
Monday, April 14th, 2008Every now and then, something breaks. I’ve had two USB thumb drives go bad on me (and a couple others go missing). The most recent one to go bad was a 2 gig one. I try not to keep anything really important on them, but they’re a lot more convenient than burning CDs or DVDs, so that doesn’t always hold.
In any case, I knew there was a lot of stuff on this one that I hadn’t saved yet, so I wanted to offload it, if I could. There were two options – either there was a mechanical failure, or one of the chips had gone bad. If a chip had gone bad, I was out of luck. If it was mechanical, I could possibly do something about it.
Since I had an old USB 1.0 hub that was itself acting a little flakey, I decided to sacrifice both of them to a rescue attempt. Now, a soldering iron is supposedly one of the most dangerous things a software type can have in hand, as illustrated below. It worked, however. And isn’t that what really matters?
(As is now presumably usual, click for larger.)
Phone troubles
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008First, I got a spam text message on my cellphone, advertising a Texas Hold’em poker website. It had a corporate email address in the “from” field, which I presumed was spoofed. I certainly hope I don’t have to deal with more of those, but I’m afraid it’s a harbinger of things to come.
Then, I looked at the phone’s display a few minutes later, and saw that I’d missed a call from my daughter. The phone hadn’t rung to let me know, which is something that happens from time to time. Given that she was going to call me today concerning getting together for dinner, I figured I’d best call her back immediately.
She hadn’t called. Why the phone told me she had, I have no idea. The phone log doesn’t have any entries for today. If it’s going to start lying to me, maybe I need a new phone. Of course, if she’d been about to call me, I could claim that it’s a psychic phone, and I wouldn’t need another one. The problem is, a psychic phone could send out text messages in my name before I get around to it, and who’d know the difference?
I think I agree
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008Fireball throwing robotic catapult is the best post title so far this year.
Assault and batteries
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007Batteries are causing problems. Once again, laptop batteries are catching fire.
And, in other news, cellphone batteries may be lethal.
Laptops are more powerful than pen and paper and abacus, and I certainly wouldn’t want to give up my cellphone in the hopes that I could expect to find convenient phonebooths, but modern technology can come with an unexpected price.
You can build a mainframe from the things you find at home
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007Well, perhaps not. But Bill Buzbee built his own roughly-8086-equivalent computer from scratch, using wire-wrapped 7400-series logic. He also ported a C compiler an an operating system. Now that’s a homebrew computer!
Via One and One is 2.