Clearing out the spam folder on our mail server, I found a piece of spam that gave me a little twinge of nostalgia, taking me back to those heady days of 1994.

Yes, I got some Green Card spam.

Wow. Commercial spam is over 14 years old - in fact nearly 15 years. The spamgularity awaits.

Does the result of the recent vote in Congress mean that the bailout is now an EPIC FAILout?

Enquiring minds and all that.

"It's like watching a RAID array rebuild".

(29.4% Complete, Time Remaining 399.8 Minutes)

A 1927 navigation device. Scroll the map through the viewer to guide you on any of 20 or so pre-set routes.

Yes, I know, it's a link to the Daily Mail. And from a Guardianista like me, too. Sorry...

I have won a baseball shirt in a raffle here at IDF that's been autographed by Gordon Moore.

You can't get more geek cred than that!

I took advantage of John Lewis' technology clearance shelves in their Peter Jones store yesterday, and spent £25 on a new DSL router for the house network.

While switch to DSL Max a while back had sped up our network connection a fair bit, I wasn't entirely sure that we were getting the best out of the available connection. To be honest, the fact that Linksys hadn't fixed the VPN bug in there firmware which meant that a PPTP connection wouldn't traverse the NAT mappings was also a problem. So when I saw a D-Link DSL-G624T for not very much at all, I decided it was worth trying a swap out. After all, this was a router that was designed for ADSL 2+ connections, instead of my old ADSL 2 hardware.

Setting up the new router wasn't quite as easy as my previous Zyxel and Linksys devices, but once I'd understood how it mapped NAT connections for my servers, I was able to get it up and running in fairly short order. While web pages seemed a little snappier, it wasn't until I decided to download a DVD image from the US that I saw things had really improved - I was getting sustained download speeds of over 750KB/s, rather than the (still respectable) 400-500KB/s I'd been getting before.

I think I managed to get a little bit of a bargain there.

Spotted in a Pasadena mall, a children's ride that's obviously an old Thunderbird One ride repainted as a sort-of NASA capsule. But us geeks know what it really is...

Pasadena, California
May 2007

Yesterday I hooked up a Slingbox to our Sky+ system.

The Sky+ lets us time shift our TV watching, and the Slingbox adds a new dimension: place shifting. It turns the video output from the Sky+ into a stream of IP data that we can watch anywhere in the house, or anywhere there's an Internet connection (once I punch the appropriate holes in the firewall). It also means I don't have to run extra cabling round the house, or spend money on additional Sky subscriptions.

It's a fine example of appliance design - simple software, easy to understand instructions, just a few connectors, and underneath it all a device that's doing something rather complex.

All I had to do was plug the box into the house network, hook up a couple of IR emitters, and plug the Slingbox into the Sky+'s S-video output. Once I installed the software on a PC (Mac and mobile versions are available), a wizard walked me through configuration and video stream optimisation, and, well, there it was, working.

One neat feature is the on-screen remote, which looks just like, and works just like, a Sky+ remote. So I can use the EPG, and even watch stored programmes (even if I keep trying to click on the screen). I'll even be able to program the box when we're on the road...

Thanks to those nice people at Merula we're now on ADSL Max, and are getting an order of magnitude more speed than our old 512/256 DSL connection. I've also just replaced the main house switch with an unmanaged gigabit beastie from D-Link that works rather well, and gives me a few more free ports for future expansion.

So, things are currently looking a little like this:




It's rather nice being able to download a DVD image from a software company on the west coast of the US in under an hour. (Something I have had to do several times this week last, as we've been churning out lots of features and reviews about some pieces of software that came out this week...)

Next: Build a new house server with the VPro Core 2 Duo motherboard that arrives next week, and source a gigabit network card for the current server.

Anyone after an unmanaged 16-port 100 Mbit rackable switch, drop me a line, and we can negotiate. I seem to have one for sale...

One of my favourite bits of Watchmen is the comic-within-the-comic, one of Moore's alternate world's pirate horror comics, "The Tales Of The Black Freighter". Images from an issue of the comic interspersed the story, adding a counterpoint to the big picture of a world tumbling into chaos, and highlighting its darker moments.

And now someone has extracted the Black Freighter from Watchmen, giving us a full 20 pages of speech and illustrations from a comic that never was.

The world's fastest diesel is a JCB.

Not the familiar yellow digger, though the colour is still the same, this is a pencil-thin streamlined vehicle, designed to break records...

A car built by JCB has broken the diesel engine land speed record after reaching 328.767mph (529km/h).

A spokesman for JCB Dieselmax said the vehicle attained the average speed during two runs in Utah, USA.

The team received official confirmation from the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile which oversaw the record bid on Tuesday.

An impressive feat - especially if you've ever been stuck behind a yellow digger as it crawls through a country lane!

Here's the official site.

Goggles bills itself as a Google Maps flight simulator. It's not really, but it;'s a nifty bit of AJAX mashup work, putting a small 3D plane in your browser, and using it to control Google Maps.

Here I am flying over Park Lane.



Fly the little plane around the map, using your keyboard, as aerial photographs from Google Maps scroll by underneath. It gives a whole new look to Google sightseeing. Only a few cities so far (including London and New York), but fun!

Just don't crash the plane...

Now, this cool little device from Sony is a simple GPS position logger that will capture your location and time, and then sync this with the timestamp in a photo's EXIF data, adding location information. Just clip it to your camera bag when you set out on a shoot.

Using time and location recordings from Sony’s GPS-CS1 GPS device and the time stamp from a Sony digital still camera or camcorder, photo buffs can plot their digital images to a map and pinpoint exactly where they’ve been.

The 12-channel GPS unit is 3-½ inches long, weighs two ounces, and is sold with a carabineer to easily attach to a backpack or a belt loop.

[...]

To arrange your pictures geographically, import the logged data from the GPS device, using the supplied USB cable, and then download the digital images to a computer. The supplied GPS Image Tracker software synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from the GPS-CS1 device.

While Sony says it's for their cameras, I suspect it should work with any image with EXIF information...

Want!

Link from DPreview

The Japanese clothing Ikea, UniQlo, is dong a range of t-shirts printed with ECM album covers.



"Mmmm. Jazz. Nice!"



Me, I found one illustrated with one of my favourite albums of all time, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays' wonderful "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls"

A while back I mentioned my shiny new Belkin F1DH102U Dual Head KVM.

After a day or so using it, I discovered that it really couldn't cope with UK keyboards directly - quite hard when writing about C# and the # key doesn't work. I suspect this is down to it capturing and scanning key codes to handle the keyboard shortcuts for device switching.

I could switch to a US layout, but that's not really much good. However, after a little experimentation I discovered that you could put a USB keyboard in one of its standard USB ports, and it would work just fine - in fact you could go back to using application launch buttons and media controls (and in the case of my keyboard of choice, the scroll wheel and copy and paste buttons). There was just one problem. The KVM complained most vociferously that it didn't have a keyboard where it was expecting one. The incessant bleep was rather annoying, and meant I had to find another solution...

Luckily Belkin has some firmware that removes the keyboard detection functions from its KVMs, so I downloaded it from the Belkin site, and set about reflashing the KVM.

This is where this turns into a cautionary tale. I didn't realise there was a problem with my PC's printer port (I still struggle on with a motherboard that I really should have replaced after the PSU went "bang" last year), and a failed firmware transfer bricked the device. Ooops. It was working on one PC, but I couldn't switch to the other. The button didn't work. At least it wasn't going bleep every few seconds.

More awkwardly, Belkin didn't seem to make the default firmware available, so I wasn't able to return it to its default state. I decided to put things aside for a couple of days, and got on with writing. After all, it was deadline crunch week.

When things quietened down, I went back to the problem. I wondered if the Belkin software contained both versions of the software. It seemed bigger than it should be - but there was no documentation one way or the other on the Belkin site.

In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I hooked the KVM up to marypcb's PC, and reflashed it. After I power cycled it, it sat there going bleep. The buttons seemed to work, too! I quickly hooked it up to my rig, and yes, everything was back to normal.

I then hooked it back up to marypcb's PC, and flashed it again. No bleep, and the buttons worked. I hooked things back up, and everything was working just the way I hoped. It even coped with multiplexed USB devices (so I've got a USB port free that I can share between my PCs. I suspect I shall hook the web cam into it).

Phew.

A lesson or two learned.

Oh, and Belkin? Please update your documentation to note that the flash software contains both the original and new software, and will happily restore the device to the default configuration if there are any problems with a firmware update. Thanks.

Thanks to the joy of Bitorrents, the pilot of "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip".

Oh yes, it's good. Sorkin snappiness, Felicity Huffman in Dana mode, and the best denunciation of network television yet, as Jud Hirsch's character melts down in front of the cameras.

You should change the channel right now, or better yet turn off the TV.

No, I know it seems like this is supposed to be funny, but tomorrow you're gonna find out it wasn't and I'll have been fired by then. This isn't supposed--this isn't a sketch.

This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomized by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience.

We were about to do a sketch you've already seen 500 times. Yes, no one's gonna confuse George Bush with George Plimpton, we get it. We're all being lobotomized by the country's most influential industry which has thrown in the towel on any endeavor that does not include the courting of 12-year-old boys.

And not event the smart 12-year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots, of which there are plenty thanks in no small part to this network. So change the channel, turn off the TV. Do it right now.

...and there's always been a struggle between art and commerce, but now I'm telling you art is getting is ass kicked, and it's making us mean, and it's making us bitchy, and it's making us cheap punks and that's not who we are.

...We're eating works for money, "Who Wants to Screw My Sister", guys are getting killed in a war that's got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe...

..and it's not even good pornography. They're just this side of snuff films, and friends, that's what's next 'cause that's all that's left.

And the two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho-religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott.

These are the people they're afraid of, this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network you're watching. This thoroughly unpatriotic--

You can find an early version of the script here.

(Still, mediawise I'm enjoying Sky's new series and reruns of "Las Vegas" which is smart, sassy, and well directed, with good, fun stories.)

The answer has to be the rather useful Popurls.

Find out what's been dugg, redd, del.icio.used, flickrd, metafiltered, slashdotted, odeod, farked, furled and youtubed in one glossy Web 2.0 site.

A definite one for the bookmarks (and possibly the home page if it turns our to be as useful as it looks)...

Drew Benvie at Lewis PR was wondering what social media tools various folk use. His list is pretty decent and has given me a new tool to try out...

So what are my five tools?

Newsgator: it's my standard RSS reader thanks to its Outlook integration, and it synchronises with its online reader well. The online side needs a bit of work to catch up with Bloglines or NewsAlloy, but it's pretty decent all the same. On the road I tend to use RSS Bandit, as it's small and fast. However, I'm looking forward to what the Newsgator folk do with the RSS technologies in Windows Vista and 2007 Office System. I keep a local archive of my RSS feeds and index it with Lookout. That gives me a whole long tail on RSS that turns it into an excellent research tool.

Trillian: IM is the ultimate in social media tools. While I use Skype and Skylook for work purposes, most of my social network is managed through IM (friends, colleagues, contacts, folk from previous jobs), and having a single tool that gives me access to MSN, AIM, Y!, ICQ and Jabber is vital. Its metacontact tools make managing all my many IM contacts incredibly easy. Now that my main blogging tool has turned on a Jabber server it's opened up a whole new layer of interaction - that's already more than proved its worth.

LiveJournal: my main blogging platform with a built in social network tool. LJ's "friends" model may be a combination RSS reader and buddy list on steroids, but it does give the LJ platform something lacking from other blogging tools - a community. As I've got a permanent LJ account bought several years ago when the service was needing new servers urgently, I get a lot of benefits that have more than paid for my $100 contribution to the service - and I've mapped my LJ blog to a personal domain. I also use Wordpress for a more esoteric occasional technical blog that I really must do more with... LJ's also blessed with a whole range of offline blog editing tools, which leads me neatly on to...

Semagic: an excellent free blog post editing tool. It works with LJ, Blogger, and Wordpress (even MSN Spaces!) - and also links to online photo hosting services. An excellent little tool, with a lot of powerful features. It's also free. It's not the only tool I use. I keep a copy of PocketPoster on my Windows Mobile 5.0 device for moblogging, and I occasionally use the Firefox Performancing extension for quick blog posts without leaving my browser.

Flickr: I photoblog a lot, and a good image hosting service is important - and it needs to be social media friendly. Flickr wins out by a long way here. It also has good tool support - and API that lets me do and find out interesting things with and about my pictures.

So there you have it - five social media tools (and combinations of tools) that are an essential part of my day.

What do you use?

...of tiny wheels.

Yes, we're going to have robots!^*

Our very own mechanical slaves to clean the house, before tey eventually rebel (like all machines). Of course, we'll have to give them names, but I think I may draw the line at the little french maid's outfit...

Now, what will the cats think of them?

^*A Roomba and a Scooba from a UK importer on eBay!

I've finally got Exchange's new push email set up on my phone (and on the house mail server). I have to say, it rocks. It works really well and I'm getting mail on my phone before it pops up on my desktop PC.

That's not to say there weren't some rocks along the way.

Everything began smoothly enough. Downloading and installing the AKU2 Windows Mobile 5.0 update working on my SPV C600 was fairly straightforward. I still need to reinstall some favourite applications, as the ROM install wipes the phone's memory, but that's pretty much par for the course.

Unfortunately for those of us who self sign our server certificates Orange has kept the ROM update tightly locked down, and the old certificate unlocking methods have stopped working. I ended up using the automated certificate installation tools that Orange have set up for registered developers to create a signed copy of my server certificate in a CAB file. It's easy enough to sign up for the service, but I really shouldn't have to be delving into the heart of my PKI to get this working...

I'm still waiting for AKU2 updates for the MDA Vario and the MDA Pro...

Next, on the mobile home email front, is getting our own Blackberry Enterprise Server up and running...

RSA, the encryption and security folk, have a consumer product line called Cyota.

Am I the only one to read that as "Cover Your Online Transactional Arse"?

After all, anything can be automated.

Even something as self-centred as egosurfing. Yes, you can now "Know Your Place", as egosurf.org's tagline so neatly puts it, at just the click of a button. No more typing your name into Google or Yahoo!, or even MSN, del.icio.us or Technorati.

Fill in your name, some appropriate URLs, and you can quickly see just what the web thinks (or doesn't think) of you.

Ever the happy guinea pig, I tried it out.

Apparently my egopoints (whatever meaningless number they are) are:

engine	ranking	ego points
google.com	1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th	7899
yahoo.com	1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 9th	8298
msn.com	1st, 2nd, and 3rd	2692
del.icio.us	2nd, 3rd, and 6th	2362
technorati.com	7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th	7599

A nifty tool, and quite fun watching it pop up the results - the whole thing is a fairly decent piece of AJAX code.

Nullriver's PSPWare turns a Sony PSP into an effective portable media player (as long as you have a decent sized memory stick).

It's a simple enough little piece of software, with tools for synchronising content with your desktop PC and down converting video files to display on the PSP's screen (yes, it even does wide-screen). It'll even sync iTunes and browser favourites (it still doesn't take OPML and fill out the PSP's RSS reader, but that's still new enough that they haven't had time to write the code...)

Well worth registering at only $15. It's given me a whole new place to watch my fansubs!

Mac and Windows versions available.

Thanks to codepope for the recommendation

How to tell the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0.
I do like the fact that the "BETA" is anti-aliased, and of course in a Web 1.0 way, the whole thing is an animated GIF. Ironic, neh?

[via Ajaxian.com]

Here's a nifty Firefox extension that runs Internet Explorer inside a Firefox tab.

So now you can use Windows Update and the like without leaving your day-to-day browser. It's still under development, and somewhat buggy, but it's promising and useful.

Windows only