Month: April 2003

We regret any inconvenience ..

If you happen to have an iBook running Mac OS X and also happen to have a GPS
with a serial cable, and you think to yourself, “Gee, Self, wouldn’t it be nice
if I could use my GPS with my iBook?” .. and your self replies “Yes!”, so you
decide to go to Fry’s, and if while you’re there you see the IOGear USB
PDA/Serial adapter, tell yourself not to buy it, even if it’s the only
USB-to-serial device they have in the store. The packaging, in this case, is
not out of date or incorrect: “Supports Mac OS 8.6 to 9.x” (as well as every Windows version) — suspicions confirmed at iogear.com:

We regret any inconvenience this may cause you; however, at this time, OSX is not supported for that particular product.

The inconvenience here being the drive back to Fry’s to get a refund for their useless dongle product. I don’t (yet) have any PC’s without a serial port, or any old Mac’s with USB..

Finally …

a decent looking portable MP3 player that can also record straight to MP3.
There’ve been a few others out there, like that Archos thing (a bit to big ..
and ugly 😉 and that other thing (can’t remember the name, but it only has 128
megs until you snap on the extra hard drive module). It looks like
Philips has done it right with the HDD100 .. 15GB,
USB2.0, in-line remote, and it records :-).

Oh, and they’re looking for beta-testers 😀

(via Gizmodo)

News?

Can anyone tell me why (oh, why)

c|net’s news site, named “News.com“,

is actually located at http://news.com.com?

It’s not because they don’t own the “news.com” domain, because they do … and it gets redirected to news.com.com.

D’uh?

*thinks* .. maybe they didn’t always own that domain, so they got
com.com instead … but even if that was the case, they own it now, why not
phase out that silly redundant .com? Do they think people like the extra .com? It’s definitely not easier to remember ….

odd ..

insane?

So they say insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

What do you call it when you actually get different results?

(Been trying to troubleshoot a half-dead computer, but it’s very frustrating
since it hasn’t failed exactly the same way twice. Almost convinced it’s the motherboard .. will swap out tomorrow and see.)

Geek Gene

Gary Turner says being a geek is genetic.
That could explain a lot. 😉 He also asks where this gene came from ..

there’s little evidence of geek behaviour prior to the appearance
of the electron apart from the fact, of course, that we all know that cave
paintings were an early form of weblog.

If you want to go back that far, why not fire, or the wheel?
But between the stone age and electricity, I’m sure there was plenty of geeking
going on.. I suppose geekiness implies application of a pure(r)
science. So while physics might not be very geeky, something like architecture
— using physics to build some structure that lasts thousands of years — would
be an early form of the geek gene as seen in ancient Greece or Rome…

hmmm.

Oh yeah, he also shows how he managed to use an iPaq and a GPRS phone to get a shoutcast stream into his car

*drool*