I’ve been using GSM phones for years. Cingular is the major provider in this market (T-Mobile in some others). They’ve been fine with one exception; I can’t get service at my very rural home’s location. Sure, they’re useful after I’ve travelled about twenty minutes into town but, it sure would be nice to have service when I’m out here in the hinterlands. I finally noticed that some folks did indeed have service… on another carrier! I checked into that provider, Verizon, and wow, $35-$50 more per month for a plan similar to the one I have now. That having encouraged me, I spent a couple hrs. Googling last nite and may have found the reason that my coverage is so poor out here. My Nokia GSM phones are 1900 mhz. single-band and my little Sony-Ericsson is tri-band (900/1800/1900). This means that I have no reception on the common 850 mhz. band. 850 has greater range and penetration.
So, as an experiment; rather than “upgrade” my phones and incur yet another contract lock-in with Cingular (I’m out of contract, yay!) I ordered a Nokia 6010 GSM phone with 850 and 1900 mhz band coverage for $48. This way, if it works, I can upgrade my other phones via vendors like letstalk.com or even ebay. And if it doesn’t, I will have at least upgraded a 6yo phone to something more current and serviceable.
I’ll let you know in a few days after Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holydays!
It was only a few days back that the Sony RootKit story broke and I was starting to think about how to write about it with regard to Mac users. Well, I didn’t get around to writing quickly enough and events have overtaken. At this point I have several recommendations:
Do not buy Sony product until or unless they finally show that they will respect purchasers and complete a full recall for CD’s in the channel that have RootKits. Advise your friends and family the same.
If you have Mac using family and friends (there’s really nothing you can do for the Windoze users) advise them to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER provide any password in response to simply inserting a media (non-game or program) CD. NEVER.
I have a big family. I drive a 1994 Ford ClubWagon XLT 15 passenger van. This style of van has been much in the news the past few years due to a high-frequency of rollover accidents and fatalities. I am a very experienced driver and have experienced some of the symptoms mentioned in many of the stories. In several instances of emergency avoidance maneuvers, only these reflexes as such an experienced driver saved us from serious accident.
I’ve grown concerned that with so many large families using vans like these that we should be doing more to educate the main drivers and to ameliorate the risk as much as is reasonable. I will be creating a new set of permanent pages that link to reasonable information (not just ambulance chasers) with which to improve your familie’s safety in these vehicles.
The folx at M$ think that they’re smarter than everyone, so they have asked the round-manhole question in job interviews for years. There’s only one “right” answer for them and you’re supposed to be a dummy if you don’t just parrot that answer for them.
Here’s a little fantasy about what might have happened if one of their interviewers encounted someone who actually was smart.
“In the aftermath of Katrina*” we’re seeing story after story that exposes corruption, incompetence and failure in persons, authorities and agencies that are commissioned with public safety functions.
Here’s more:
Mac and Linux-using hurricane survivors are unable to use Federal disaster relief claim form services online.
This is because the much-criticized US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a service that only works with Windows and Internet Explorer 6.
Story here
This is so stooopid that it boggles. I almost can’t think up any response. hmm, here it is, “every monopoly loves a monopoly”.
There are a lot of people that need to be fired in the wake of all this.
* Don’t all the stories begin with this phrase.
I too am concerned that we’re becoming a nation of “your papers please”. There’s little that any of us individually can do, but the collective power of millions of decisions to resist authority… when it oversteps its jurisdiction… will have an effect. Here is a story about one man’s decisions and how they’re helping in that regard. Following some of his examples may be beneficial. Also, as my son, Hans, says, “Support the EFF“.
We’ve been having trouble connecting to some websites here and there for a while. And some of our friends have been having trouble connecting to our websites.
I tried pinging from shell accounts on other hosts. I tried tracerouting. I was getting confused. Why was this only happening for some websites? Was is our firewall? Was it our outbound NAT? Was it our Squid proxy? Was it our DansGuardian filtering? Was it a blacklist problem. Was it something in the routing of packets in between our connection and the rest of the world?
Well it dawned on me while driving somewhere this evening that I should look at the rfc1918 filtering of packets on our firewalls… because I finally realized that all the sources and destinations had this in common… they were 70.x.x.x addresses. Those used to be unroutable addresses but have been put back into use due to the strain on IPv4 address space.
Sure enough, temporarily turning off rfc1918 filtering cleared things right up! So a little spelunking turned up an updated list for rfc1918 and I was able to turn it back on again.
Moral of the story? Drive around and think more.
I give in. I’ll put stuff that I think is mildly interesting on this blog. My wife’s website actually has real content because she has real thoughts but, this blog will contain my contribution to this year’s increase in the popularity of blogging.
For instance, if you’re running FireFox there are a whole bunch of goodies and toys that you can get for it at
FireFox Extensions
This is the category where I’ll post stuff having to do with the tech issues of the websites we run here.