Tag Archives: Tech

DWL-G730 Pocket Router

September 13, 2008 – 3:05 pm

DLink-DWL-G730AP*This is not a paid review; strictly just sharing my own experience with this device.* Just in case anyone might be worried about me selling out :-)

I don’t think I’ve posted on this before, although it’s very possible that I did (here or elsewhere) and have forgotten about it. A while back I picked up this interesting device (the D-Link DWL-G730) and I was just realizing again today how useful it is.

As you can see by the photo, it’s very small - perfect for traveling, etc. It gives you everything you’d expect from a modern wireless router / access point (WPA, etc.), so nothing too revolutionary there.

The interesting thing I wanted to post about is that it also supports another mode (called “client”) which allows you to use it basically in reverse - whatever you connect the ethernet cable to (a single PC or the WAN port of another router) is the “client side”, and it can connect that device (PC or router) to a wireless network as a client.

The benefits might not be immediately obvious, but they are pretty cool. It will allow you to use a machine that does not have wireless hardware on a wireless network without requiring any additional hardware or software installation. As I mentioned earlier, this could either be used for a single computer or a group of machines by connecting them to a router and then virtually giving that router a wireless client adapter and allowing it to use a wireless connection for its external (WAN) connection.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Comments (0)

Link - Delicious 2.0 Launches. Really. It Totally Launched.

July 31, 2008 – 12:14 pm

Delicious 2.0 Launches. Really. It Totally Launched.

Testing to make sure my Delicious to blog feed is still working with the new Delicious release by sharing this story about the…

By xmlrpc | Posted in del.icio.us | Also tagged | Comments (1)

Piquing Curiosity

June 13, 2008 – 6:05 pm

I don’t have time to do a more detailed post on the technical details of my new blog consolidation approach, but I thought I’d throw a teaser out there and mention that I did it without adding any additional plugins. Just something for you WP enthusiasts to ponder / wonder about until I get around to explaining it. :-)

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

How to use Twitter + Track

April 23, 2008 – 8:25 pm

OK, so this will obviously actually be about how I use Twitter, and certainly not a prescriptive set of instructions outlining the “one true way” to use the service(s), but you’ve got to admit that this title is a bit more attention grabbing - and Twitter is all about attention, after all. ;-)

Anyway, here’s the basic outline of the way I’ve got things set up to meet my needs for regular Twitter usage:

  • For the people I follow and from whom I want to read everything, I have them set with IM device updates on, so that their messages flow into the jabber gateway (acessed via Google Talk - the web client, not locally installed).
  • Then (in GTalk / jabber), I “track” things like my name and randomly add and remove other subject-based words and phrases to track, depending on what I’m interested in at the moment.
  • Since I’m usually not connected via IM for most of the day, the above two steps result in an e-mail message in my inbox periodically with an easy to read summary of everything that would have come in on Google Talk, had I been logged in.
  • For everything else (people I’m not including in the above method - whether I’m “following” them or not), I add the RSS feed of their Twitter account to folder/tag in Google Reader that I just let pile up, and read it whenever I  feel like it, and clean it up without reading if it gets too big. I might investigate further subdividing (or cross-filing) these into various folders/tags to make it easier to sort through depending on what I’m interested in seeing at any given moment.

And that’s about it. My usage patterns have changed over time, even since I so recently began using it, and I’m sure they’ll continue to change as I go. So far, I’ve found that the above techniques allow me to fairly easily throttle the flood of incoming information into something manageable that I can digest, and also that I can tweak at any given time to give more or less content.

There’s a lot more to say about Twitter itself, ranging from the technical to the sociological / philosophical, and I’m realizing as I write this that I haven’t really mentioned it much before here on the blog. I’m thinking maybe I won’t, since I think it might be a mistake to try to wrap it in very hard-lined boundaries this early in its evolution as a platform. While I’m certainly not turning into a raging Twitter evangelist, I certainly was once very skeptical about it and am now realizing how vastly better / more disruptive it is than any of the other up-and-coming social network platforms (Facebook, Pownce, etc.).

So, if you haven’t already, check it out and find out how it works best for you. If you give it some time, you might grow to appreciate it (even and especially the character limit constraints). You can follow me using the link at the top left of this page.

As a teaser, Twitter, along with my other various content sources, will shortly take a more prominent role here on my blog. It’s something that I’ve been planning for a long time, but only recently started working on. More to come…

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged | Comments (1)

Does growth matter?

April 10, 2008 – 8:08 pm

Just saw this piece on Techcrunch regarding the relative stability of del.icio.us, and it raises an interesting question:

Does every product or service always have to “grow” in order to be considered successful? And why?

I think it may be primarily an influence of the stock market investment model that drives a lot of tech companies, but is that the only way to measure things?

Del.icio.us is a good example of a service that has always done what it does well, and (unless I’m missing something) is still just as useful today as it was when it came out. The drive to “improve” by adding features just for the sake of showing progress is not always wise, especially for a simple system with a clearly defined scope like this one.

There has been a lot of talk about the 2.0 version, but I’ve never really read any of it, or cared about the delays, because the current version works just fine for me.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged | Comments (3)

Mugshot update - thumbs down

March 26, 2008 – 11:16 pm

You may remember my optimistic review of Mugshot a while back. In the six months that have transpired since then, I’ve kept using it, in hopes that the negative aspects I was willing to put up with would get ironed out.

Unfortunately, things haven’t progressed very far at all. In this day and age I find it less and less acceptable for a system like this to not offer (complete) RSS feeds to keep up with the content. Heck, even e-mail notices would be an acceptable alternative, but as of right now, there are still several key parts of the system that you can only see by using the client app or going directly to their site in a browser.

I orginally believed that the saving grace would be its open nature; that some eager developer out there would step in and provide the features that I (and I’m sure others) perceive as “missing”. No luck, unfortunately. Occasionally, I’ve even briefly pondered doing it myself, but the fact is there’s only so much time in the day, and for me, there’s not enough for this. Further, as evidenced by the glacially slow progress of the API, it doesn’t even seem that Red Hat is really behind it all that strongly either.

I’ll still keep my account and check it periodically, but only because there are a few people that post stuff and share links using that system exclusively (at least as far as I can tell) that I want to keep up with. I honestly would have dropped it altogether a while ago if not for that.

But, as I do continue to use it, every time I have to switch over to their app or website directly it stands out in sharp contrast to all the other similar services I don’t have to do that for. Here’s hoping they get better.

PS - maybe someone will see this post and comment, pointing me to a vibrant community of third party apps built to address the stuff that I’m looking for that I just haven’t found yet. Keeping my fingers crossed…

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Ad Shock

March 10, 2008 – 6:36 pm

I’ve been running the alpha build of the next version of Ubuntu for a while now, and the other day I encountered a situation that surprised me by revealing how ugly the web has gotten lately. As is the case when running an alpha release, occasionally some parts are updated before others, and in this case Firefox 3 was updated to a version that the AdBlock Plus extenion hadn’t supported yet (although that update came the next day).

It was odd how many sites are covered with (and aesthetically ruined by) ads. Even the ones that fit in (in terms of style and/or context) are still extremely annoying when you’ve gotten used to not seeing them. I guess the ad blocking extension (plus others like NoSscript) has been sheltering me to the degree that I didn’t notice how bad it was getting.

Anyone else notice this? If you are browsing the web without these kind of extensions, why?

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Comments (1)

OggSync / Untethered

February 27, 2008 – 10:44 pm

Since I got my new phone last month, I’ve been using a product called OggSync to sync up my phone’s calendar to Google Cal, and it’s been working great.

The basic version allows syncing with one of your Google calendars (which is all I use anyway) is totally free; you can pay for the upgrade and sync multiple calendars.

They also offer a similar piece for the desktop Outlook client, using a similar pricing model. I haven’t tried it, since I don’t use desktop Outlook too much for calendar stuff, but this would allow you to keep all three (desktop, mobile, and Google) in sync with each other for free.

The other big goal that this helps fulfill for me is not needing to ever really connect my phone to my laptop for syncing; I want to do everything directly from the phone over either wifi or the 3G data connection: syncing media and other data without any cables or even being near my other computers. So far, so good - I don’t think I’ve plugged my phone into the computer for several weeks now.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Comments (0)

Hacking the Treadmill

February 25, 2008 – 11:14 pm

I’ve been wanting to get back to posting more tech stuff on here, despite most of my time and energy seeming to get consumed with the fitness stuff, so the other night at the gym the thought struck me that the opportunity was right there in front of me the whole time.

The gym has some pretty nice treadmills, and you can either go free-form and adjust all the settings as you go, or choose from a variety of predefined programs to run through. You can also program out your own workout routine (once you figure it out), but the drawback is that it takes a while to punch in everything, and you can’t save it, so going through all that trouble to do a custom one usually isn’t worth it.

As I was experiementing with this feature the other night, I noticed that there was a part of the interface that does actually let you save custom programs: the personal trainer menus. The only drawback to that is that you need a personal trainer PIN code to access them. While I suppose I could have asked someone who worked there about it, and either been told that I would have to pay for a trainer (not interested) or that they had no idea how to do it themselves anyway (much more likely), I figured that the most probable situation was that they never use this functionality, so they would probably never mind or even know if I decided to.

If you’ve ever played with things like this before, one of the first things you learn is that devices requiring short numeric codes like this often have some sort of factory default “master code” that will unlock everything and get you started. Since most people probably never use the programming features, I suspected that they would not have bothered to ever even type this in, much less change it to something else. With some quick internet research via my phone, I was shortly in possesion of the master PIN code, which of course worked.

From that main menu, I was then able to create myself a “personal trainer” PIN (no need to use the master one all the time), which would then allow me to log in any time in the future to enter and later recall my own programs. The only downside is that the machines are not networked in any way, so I’d have to repeat this procedure once for each one that I want to use this way. Usually getting a particular treadmill is no problem though, except on the weekend days when all ~20 are full.

So, whenever you’re faced with a consumer electronic device that isn’t quite behaving the way you’d like it to, just remember that everything is always on default.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Starbucks Following Me

February 17, 2008 – 7:45 pm

… to AT&T that is. One of the big reasons I stuck with T-Mobile for so long (until last month) was the discounted pricing on the T-Mobile Hotspots, when combined with an unlimited data plan.

Well, it looks like Starbucks couldn’t live without me, because now they’re switching to AT&T too. This is pretty big news, since I’m pretty sure Starbucks has the largest network of retail locations offering wifi. It’s great being able to get internet access virtually anywhere you might go, usually fairly conveniently.

The pricing model is surprisingly better than T-Mobile’s was too; it looks like there are several avenues for getting free service in some cases, and more to be revealed regarding pricing for AT&T wireless customers. I say this is surprising since AT&T wireless’ data plans are quite a bit more expensive (and restrictive) than T-mobile’s are.

Anyway, it will be interesting to watch this unfold as they roll it out.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , | Comments (5)