Pointless rant corner

I love my Palm Pre but I'm starting to think it's something of a dead platform that only me and a handful of others are on.

Here's the thing, if you have a fledgling OS then you need to get it out to as wide an audience as possible attracting both end users and developers. So what the feggin' hell are they doing at Palm HQ?

Nigel dropped his Nokia E90 last October -the clot! Its been sitting on a shelf ever since waiting for the day when it can become a parts donor for when I (inevitably) end up dropping my E90.

What else to do with a busted Series 60 Symbian handset?

Well, how about turning it into a wireless webcam? So long as the camera isn't the busted bit...

 

You've gotta love retro books. This beauty was £4 on Amazon and dates back to 1971. On its opening page it says [computers] "are fascinating when they are used in rocketry and space research" while "we are inclined to be alarmed by their complex mechanisms" and that "many people think of them as almost human machines with 'brains' that allow them to think". How cool is that??!

Our interoffice IRC chatting (well, slating of people we know) was getting a bit too fruity for our publicly hosted IRC channel so recently Nigel set up a private channel over an SSL connection. It's nice and secure and allows us to swear with impunity about whoever we want however it wasn't compatible with my non-Linux clients and finally meant the end of use for my (not altogether) trusty PowerBook 5300 that has been running IRCLE for the past five years.

To cut a long story short, I had to fork out about sixteen of my hard earned pound coins on Wireless IRC by mobileways.de so I could pick up the channel chat on my E90. Fortunately, Wireless IRC is ACE and well worth the money.

Wireless IRC also supports Twitter so I thought I'd give that a go tonight. I quite like the idea of being able to broadcast events about my mundane life in real time. It's one of the reasons I built my weatherproof webcam allowing me to check in with what's happening from the point of view of my TV aerial from wherever I am.

Yeah, I know. Nobody's interested!

It's probably one of those novelty things that I'll soon get bored of or that nobody else I know will bother with even if I help sign them up and install it (as happened with Skype), but for now it's flavour of the month.

I'm at:

http://twitter.com/r3uk

It's taken exactly two years but my Adsense account finally hit $100 today! I just hope it doesn't take Google the same amount of time to get around to transferring it to my bank account.

It's kinda surprising it makes any money at all what with ads for dodgy diagnostic software that I'd never think of using and questionable AdSense 'intelligence' that places an advert for a Muslim women dating website on a page that blabs on about mobile data connectivity or Spanish car hire on my page about constructing a weatherproof webcam!

Still, I can't complain. A hundred bucks over two years probably isn't going to cover the electricity costs of maintaining this website but it's better than a kick in the nuts.

 

Being able to solve a Rubik's Cube has just been one of those things that I've had for ages on my list of pointless shit to do before I die (I think it's at number 47).

The wife bought me one for my birthday recently so I sat down with it on Saturday and finally figured out how to do the thing...

VirtualBox is a rather nice open source virtual machine platform. I use it to run test boxes on my Toshiba A300D. This guide (correct at the time of writing) is posted here so that next time I rebuild the trusty Tosh I have a set of instructions on getting my virtual environment back up and running.

You know what it's like when you install a virgin operating system, you need to spend a good hour tailoring it to your tastes. I've just installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) onto a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300D which means there is a lot of brown and a default desktop background that looks like a coffee stain. Here is my list of things to configure to get the look just right for my tastes....