tech

One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don't throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don't let the sum you've already invested figure into your decision. To do so is known as the ”sunk cost fallacy”, and leads to ”escalation of commitment”. A good way to avoid this is to decide beforehand what your exit conditions will be, and then stick to them. A bit like saying “I'm going to play the slot machines until six o'clock or until I've lost $50, whatever comes first”. Google Maps offers a beautiful real-…

My 2006 smartphone, a Qtek 9100 On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It was a Qtek 9100, with a slide-out mechanical keyboard that I still really miss, a tiny screen, a stylus and a crappy camera. Since then I've had portable Internet access. I was already a self-described “net head”, and a particular reason for me to get a smartphone was that I'd started blogging a few weeks previously: I wanted to be able to post no matter where I was. On 8 February, for…

I got access to email through the SöderKOM BBS in 1994. In early 1995 I got a dial-up connection to the Internet via Algonet, an ISP started by my childhood buddy Ragnar. And in June of that year I put up a web site. It was a hand-coded static HTML page. A clearly recognisable version of it is still on-line after 20 years! But I haven't updated it since 2009. My site was one of the first to mention archaeology in Swedish, so for many years it had an absurdly high search-engine rank despite its rather modest contents, beating out the National Heritage Board and most of the country's…

Facebook's Android app seems to be monitoring whom I talk to on my phone. A few days after I've called somebody who wants to submit a paper to Fornvännen, or after I've texted the mom of one of Jrette's buddies, the web site will suddenly suggest, "Hey, maybe you might want to be Facebook buddies with this person you didn't even know was on Fb, and with whom you have no shared Fb contacts!". And there's that person. It's possible, I guess, that this is actually set off by those people looking at my profile on Facebook. But it's happened a few times too many. I wonder...

My whole housing development recently changed Internet Service Providers. We now have optical fibre from Ownit, offering hundreds of megabits per second. It works just fine. But there's a security issue and Ownit aren't taking it seriously. All over Sweden, Ownit are deploying wifi routers that work out of the box. If you want to change any settings on your router (such as the name of the access point or the wifi password), you'll find a URL in the manual which brings up a set of admin menus. Same URL on all their routers. All over Sweden. Actually, Ownit holds the password to the “admin”…

As detailed here before, a few Samsung laptop models have a firmware bug that makes them liable to becoming inert bricks if you install Linux. It's a one-way process. This happened to me when I bought an ultrabook from the Elgiganten big-box store last summer. Both Samsung and the store refused to reimburse me for the loss of my machine's use. At the suggestion of my home municipality's consumer advisor (konsumentrådgivare), I took the matter to Allmänna reklamationsnämnden, the National Board for Consumer Disputes (complaint no 2013-10081). My main argument was that installing Linux is a…

Here's what I did to replace Windows 8 (boo) with Linux Mint (yay) on a 2013 Asus ultrabook with the problematic UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware, using an external DVD drive linked to the machine with a USB cable. Download Linux Mint and burn a bootable DVD. Disable Windows Fast Startup (in Windows' Control Panel). Reboot machine while pressing F2, to get into BIOS setup. Under the Security menu, disable Secure Boot Control. Under the Boot menu, disable Fast Boot. Under the Boot menu, enable Launch CSM – if you can. (I couldn't at first. This menu option was visible but…

Linux is a common operating system, not least in its Android version, and it is universally assumed that a PC (or whatever "IBM compatible" is called these days) will be able to run it. In fact, machines that can’t run Linux are extremely rare since aficionados keep porting the open-source operating system to even the most obscure and outdated machine families. One of the PC makers who sell Linux compatible computers is Samsung. That is, almost all of their machines can run Linux, and when it was discovered last January that some recent laptops cannot, it was universally seen as a bug. Nobody…

This bug in OpenOffice / LibreOffice has been with me for years and years. You open a file, you delete it while open, you close LibreOffice -- and then LibreOffice will henceforth tell you eeeevery time you start the program that it tried and failed to recover that file. But I found a bug fix. Thank you "user177723"! 1. Open LibreOffice and create a new file with the same name as the lost one in the same directory. (Which directory this may have been, you have to remember/guess.) 2. Save it. 3. Close LibreOffice completely. (Yes, this is an essential step.) 4. Open the newly created file.…

Some parts of the discussion of Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: chaos, weather and climate confuses denialists have turned into discussions of (bit) reproducibility of GCM code. mt has a post on this at P3 which he linked to, and I commented there, but most of the comments continued here. So its worth splitting out into its own thread I think. The comments on this issue on that thread are mostly mt against the world; I'm part of the world, but nonetheless I think its worth discussing. What is the issue? The issue (for those not familiar with it, which I think is many. I briefly googled this and…

Here's a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote: Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for…

So the world is desperately excited by a programme called "PRISM", and we learn that - shockingly - the NSA reads people's emails. Can that possibly be true? Hard to believe, I realise, but stay with me. The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian sez the Graun, and the WaPo says much the same (Update: care! See below). But Google says they're wrong: we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct…

Refs * Powering Down Google Reader

Reading a term paper by one of my Växjö students, I learned something surprising. Being a well-read and erudite sort, Dear Reader, you may not be surprised. You already know that Japanese women have been having very few babies each since the 1950s, and that thus there's a growing shortage of strong young people to work in the care for the elderly. It has gone so far, and the prognosis is so dire, that the Japanese electronics industry is busy developing robots to care for old folks. What I learned is that the problem is really one of xenophobia. All of Japan's neighbouring countries across…

The Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo censors searches for the names of places where there are protests (currently Shenzhen). You could write a script that searches for the main Chinese cities on Weibo and plots the ones that are censored on a map. Presto, a dynamic map of Chinese political unrest! With data supplied by the Chinese government, no less. Who will do it first? Update same day: Daniel Becking points to the highly informative web site Blocked On Weibo. It has a wide remit. The most recent entry explains why the two characters for "pantyhose" are blocked.

Yesterday I went to Öland and showed my students some sites and landscape. We were joined by human geographer Carl-Johan Nordblom who knows all the post-Viking stuff. Lovely day! Though we couldn't find our way to the best-preserved of the Resmo passage tombs. The land owner has tired of visitors and closed off the driveway from the main road. My ride Stockholm-Kalmar was a fun little flying school bus, the Swedish 1983 design SAAB 340, seating 34 people. I had a great view when we flew back north in the sunset, golden horizontal lighting bringing out the surface contour. There was a little…

The people behind the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone made an odd design decision. They got rid of the standard fastening point for a strap. And the backshells on the market don’t have a fastening point either. But I really want a strap to be able to pull my phone out of my pocket and to keep from dropping it. Here's what I did. Get a shock-absorbing plastic backshell (I'm not talking about the cover of the battery compartment, but a secondary shell that fits onto the back of the phone when the battery cover is in place) and a strap or lanyard of your choice. (I prefer a short wrist strap…

Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun: The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more. (I remembered this roughly, but the exact text is from here. The picture I nicked and cropped doesn't match this description; I don't know if there is one that does). Ultimately, the Apollo programme was rather pointless, a dead…

Congratulations to SpaceX, who have connected their Dragon to the ISS. [That's a screen-grab, BTW, not a clickable video. Go to msnbc for video.] That isn't what I find so strange, though it is potentially the start of a big exciting Newe Worlde. What was so strange, so bizarre, was the mixture of the real-time video from the ISS with the Dragon capsule on the end of the robot arm with the world turning underneath it oh so beautiful and delicate, and all flung carelessly out onto the web for anyone who wanted to watch; with the stupid irritating Pringles advert I was forced to sit though…

Rode a pretty rare/air plane Bromma - Kallinge on Friday morning. It was a Saab 2000, a 1992 Swedish turboprop model of which only 63 where ever built. (Apparently they saw daylight in the mistaken hope that customers would want a turboprop this size, rather than the ubiquitous jets, and lost Saab a lot of money.) This one belongs to Golden Air. On the way back I rode one of those paunchy ATR 72-500s. Both models have their cargo bays right behind the cockpit.