Dave's List » Archive for March 2005

Cordless (not cell) phone that works city-wide

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13 years ago

by Dave in Personal, Technology & Gadgets

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/wireless/samsung-30mile-cordless-phone-036608.php

Reported on GIZMODO. Looks a little chunky, but cool.

Voluntarily unemployed

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13 years ago

by Dave in Personal

Well, on March 17, I gave my resignation, and I was told on March 18 that it would be my last day (I did give two weeks notice).

For those who know me, this shouldn’t be a surprise. There were many reasons I quit, but dominant among these were:

a) I wasn’t in a role that allowed me to grow the company (no influence)
b) I didn’t agree with my boss or his methodologies. Specifically, he was abusive to the sales organization and towards his subordinates.
c) I don’t need to work right now, and it’s a rare opportunity to be unemployed.
d) Given all the above, I’d rather be in Boulder, Colorado.

Making FireFox fly on Windoze

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13 years ago

by Dave in Technology & Gadgets

MOOX has released optimized, processor-specific builds of Mozilla FireFox that claim better speed. Here’s the link

Flat CAT5 Ethernet cable

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13 years ago

by Dave in Technology & Gadgets

I remember having a lot of problems finding Flat COAX (can buy at the greatest hardware store in the world, McGuckin’s in Boulder, CO and on eBay) for running through windows, etc.

Now here’s a great invention, flat Ethernet.

P2P sharing developments

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13 years ago

by Dave in Technology & Gadgets

As of today, here’s some of the news I’ve gathered on P2P networks.

Exeem 0.22 was released recently, and I took some time to check it out for content. It sucks still (no content!), and seems to even hang my machine up for prolonged periods. No more Exeem for me. When I first read the Bram Cohen interview, where he talks about Exeem in a somewhat derogatory manner, I dismissed his sentiment as sour grapes because it looked like Exeem was going to be the be-all and end-all. Well, more than a month later, I think he was right. Exeem is a carbon-copy of eDonkey in terms of functionality, but is much slower. BitTorrent, on the other hand, shares only the metaphor in common with Exeem and eDonkey, where “swarming” increases download speed by making every downloader an uploader. Bram was right about Exeem, but wrong about BitTorrent, which really does not appear to be superior to eDonkey, etc.
My last good resource for TV show downloading, when my TiVo didn’t catch it, was BTEFNET, which now appears to be down, maybe for good. Update, back up again, phew.
I still have not found a great Torrent client on the Mac. mlMac seems OK, but I cannot get the featured .torrent compatibility to work. Tomato works OK, but went completely nuts on the upload side without warning, killing my meager 384 kbps upload capability. I still haven’t got ABC, my favourite client, to work on the Mac. Azureus works fine, but it doesn’t take files double-clicked into it (which incidentally, was the reason I abandoned it on Windows as well.

Disappearing Microsoft Anti-Spyware

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13 years ago

by Dave in Technology & Gadgets

The beta Microsoft Anti-Spyware tool beta (very good) has been removed from the downloads section, after residing on there for about one week. If you want it, for loyal dave’s list readers, I kept a copy here. In the most recent PC World, although still in BETA, the Microsoft software rated ahead of other commercial offerings.

The Malicious software removal tool is not the same, and can still be found on the downloads.

Cheers,
Dave

Shredding

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13 years ago

by Dave in Personal

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

Industrial shredding…. Check out the oil drums.

I can’t imagine these videos were any more useful than fun.

Mac Mini review

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13 years ago

by Dave in Technology & Gadgets

OK, my Mac Mini arrived on Friday, and I spent the weekend playing with it. Overall, a good little machine, with a really sexy user interface, and a lot of power under the hood. This is my first time using a Mac in almost 5 years, so a lot has changed (including Mac OS X)

Here’s some notes, on my use of this machine to drive my 16:9 plasma (Panasonic, 852×480 real resolution, VGA input) and home theatre setup (Yamaha RX-V1400, connected optically):

They really, really should have made the 3.5 mm audio plug be the dual use analog/digital audio plug like the Apple Airport Express.
They really need to work on uninstallers and the device driver interface. Take one step beyond a basic installer, and you’re typing unix SUDO commands at a command line.
My M-Audio Transit is still not working, because it’s not streaming AC-3 audio to the optical out port.
I ended up buying the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard (very nice), but I had to pick the non-bluetooth RF Gyration mouse.
Sync for Palm is built into the OS, but sync for PocketPC isn’t. I had to buy the $40 Missing Sync program to do this. (I have an iPaq 1945)
Sync for my Motorola V600 phone is built right into the OS.
For wish list, I wish the device had a 1000BASE-T port.
Strangely enough, OpenOffice sucks on the Mac. It uses the X11 server software (free), so it looks like a bad port onto the Mac. I’m going to try out NeoOffice which claims to solve this huge discrepancy, but (gasp) I may be forced to use Office:mac to do the heavy lifting.
The resolution I like best is 1024×576 (native 16:9) but the Mac reverts to a much higher resolution every startup. Don’t know how to fix this.
Maybe a little too much of the power of this Mac is hidden under the hood. I wish some things were a little more configurable, or a little less rigid.
Safari is a very fast browser: I tried IE, Camino, Firefox, and they’re all slower.
Windows Remote Desktop Client works great on Mac OS X
All those cool expanding application dock animations are turned off by default.
Natively, Mac OS X can read PostScript, and even interpret it for non-Postscript printers. (I’m told it can also write)
Fire, a multiprotocol IM client for Mac, blows Messenger,etc, out of the water.
I managed to get my PostScript laserprinter up and running, but to my consternation I had to enable AppleTalk on it to make this work. I’m sure there’s another way, but I haven’t figured this out.
I have not got shared printing onto my Canon i9900 working on the Mac, even though I can apparently print to a printer connected to a PC.
File sharing to the PCs works like a dream, and is really easy to use.
I don’t like the Tomato BitTorrent client, I’ve been recommended to use the shareware Acquisition, but may try something cheaper like mlDonkey with the GUI mlMac, which is apparently fairly good (and free!) and supports a huge variety of protocols.