tech
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2010Four years ago (when I had only been blogging for a month) I asked my readers what kind of smartphone I should get. Nobody replied, but I got some advice elsewhence and bought a Qtek 9100. Then, two years ago, I asked the same question again and got lots of answers. In the end I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 that has served me well since.
I'd like to get away from Windows Mobile while there's still an aftermarket for the Samsung, so here I go again, asking you, Dear Reader, for advice. Here are the specs I'm aiming for.
Cell phone connectivity
Wifi connectivity that actually allows me to connect…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2010
Not everyone knows what's inside a golf ball. I do. Or I thought I did.
When I was a kid a friend of mine taught me how to open golf balls. You need a hacksaw (Sw. bÃ¥gfil) and preferably a vise (Sw. skruvstycke). It's impossible to open them with a knife or wire cutters - you're guaranteed to stab yourself if you try. After removing the dimpled hard white shell, we found a layer of soft black rubber, then tens of meters of tightly rolled-up thin brown rubber band, and at the ball's centre a small limp ampoule of soft black rubber that felt like it contained oil. I don't recall opening that…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009After six or seven weeks of Windows, I've finally gotten Ubuntu linux to run again. My installation crashed when I tried to upgrade on-line to the most recent version, Karmic. And then I couldn't boot Karmic from a USB stick. I thought the copy on the stick had gone corrupt. Yesterday Tor lent me a CD burner, and I found that Karmic simply won't boot on my netbook. It crashes midway through bootup in the same way regardless if I try a USB stick or a CD. So I downloaded the previous version, Jaunty, and it installed just fine.
Is the Karmic release Ubuntu's Vista? Is it a dud release, like the…
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2009
These are my obsolete portable music players. A post-1985 cassette player, a 2000 minidisc player and a 2002 iPod whose sole means of communication with the outside world is a firewire socket. In the 90s I didn't listen much to music while on the move. Since 2006 I use a smartphone as my mp3 player.
stoat | December 5, 2009If you believe in climate related software being open, or even if you only believe in the ultimate triumph of Python over Fortran (personally I'm a Perlista when not rooting for embedded C, though I have respectable colleagues who adhere to the Python heresy, and who may convert me in time), then go visit:
http://clearclimatecode.org/
where you can find a guide to the project history and some interesting results and their google code. This is all a free effort by Nick Barnes and David Jones and others at Ravenbrook, but they welcome others to join. So far they are concentrating on the…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2009
I'm enjoying one of my infrequent laptop days, that is, days during which it actually makes sense for me to tote such a device around. I type these words from the Konradsberg campus of the University of Stockholm. Konradsberg is a name that resonates in my city's history, because it used to be one of the main mental hospitals, known colloquially as the "Castle of Madmen". I haven't been committed (yet). I'm here for the second day of the Wikipedia Academy 2009 conference, representing my employer, the Royal Academy of Letters.
In order to get on-line I had to solve a decidedly analog problem…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2009
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Ãrtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt lÃ¥nga perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived from the distant past, and aspects of how data from archaeological sites and museum collections can be safeguarded for a long future.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The venue is at ForskningsgÃ¥ngen 6, square 2, floor 2, on the premises of IT…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2009Hear me, Ubuntu-using brothers and sisters! Never use the on-line upgrade option to switch to a newer version of the operating system! In little more than two years, it has trashed my setup twice, once killing the machine outright, and the last time (yesterday) making it impossible to boot from the linux partition.
When the time comes to upgrade, copy all your files to somewhere else, re-format the linux partition and install the new Ubuntu version from scratch. Then copy all your stuff back onto the partition. There is no safe way to upgrade an existing installation.
A corollary of this is…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2009I've been on the instant messaging service ICQ daily since 1997. Last week, though, my entry in some database apparently got screwed up, so my password no longer works and I can't get the retrieval mechanism to send me a new one. Looking through my contact list I then realised that I hardly ever use ICQ anymore, because almost everybody I chat to is on MSN. (I hadn't noticed since I use client software that handles several different messaging protocols transparently.) So I've decided to simply say goodbye to ICQ. Anybody who wants to get in touch should be able to find me anyway, for instance…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2009
Saturday me and the kids went on an unusual package tour. First we took the 1903 steam ship Mariefred from Stockholm to Mariefred, and got to visit the engine room while the machine was working. Mariefred is a small town on Lake Mälaren whose name preserves that of Pax Mariae, one of the last monasteries founded in Sweden before the Reformation. It is home to one of Sweden's liveliest steam railroad societies which runs a narrow-gauge railroad with a plethora of lovely locomotives and wagons. We saw an amateur musical played at the old railway station, with the actors making entrances and…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2009The Rundkvist family's aging computer collection is in a sad state.
Our newest machine is also the only one that's still working flawlessly. A little 2008 LG netbook, it runs Win XP and Ubuntu linux and is mainly used by Junior as a gaming machine. When travelling, my wife and I like to bring it along for its handy dimensions and slight weight, but the dinky screen doesn't lend itself to everyday computing.
My dear 2005 Dell laptop, on which I type these lines, is barely holding together. Its recently renewed Win XP installation is flaky, booting up with an arcane error message and unable to…
stoat | June 6, 2009Following my oops I got a new portege, though it had a blank disc. Fortunately I didn't really care about that, as I wanted to swap discs. This turned out to be a matter of 2 screws on each box, and lo and behold the mind and memory of my old machine is transferred to a shiny new one, with the added benefit of keys that you can read and even press, due to a lack of biscuit crumbs and apple juice residue.
The only slight faff was that the wireless wasn't recognised, presumably due to some hardware up/downgrade between the old and news ones. Downloading everything from http://aps2.toshiba-tro.…
stoat | June 1, 2009Oops.
I think I may have kicked it a bit too hard this time.
[Update: best comment so far has to be the ref to http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/windows-7-to-…, but http://www.computerhistory.org/VirtualVisibleStorage/popup_image.php?ba… is a good second-best.
Another update: I was quoted ~£150 to fix the screen. So I bought a reconditioned machine off ebay for £100 + postage. Such is the internet.
Meanwhile: remember this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqyc37aOqT0&feature=related -W]
bioephemera | May 11, 2009And if so, will it make us even stupider? Only one more week until we find out! This could be the datahead's ideal engine:
It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.But a technical audience is still big. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2009We recently installed an air source heat pump to heat our house. If you heat yours with electricity from the grid, and if the structure isn't divided into many small rooms, then a heat pump will cut your power consumption so dramatically that the whole $2500 installation pays for itself in two years. And power consumption equals environmental footprint.
It's quite a fascinating technology, and friendly to the environment too as long as you don't rupture a pipe and release circulation fluid. You know a fridge? An air source heat pump makes your house into a fridge turned inside out.
Heat is…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2009My buddy Mathias is planning an interesting course at the University of Gothenburg for this autumn: "The IT Society's Vulnerabilites". I translate:
The goal of the course is to improve understanding of the vulnerability inherent in the central role information technology plays in society. The course offers seminars on the relationship between IT and society. Various implementations of IT are presented and discussed, as well as their influence on individuals, organisations and society. The course imparts knowledge about the role of information technology and issues of responsibility,…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week.
The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2009Computers are built to preserve information, not to be creative, and certainly not to be random. Therefore it is a problem to get a really random number into a computer when you need one. A common source, looking at the hundredth of seconds in the computer's clock, is not all that good as it leads to predictability if you pull two numbers from the hat with a recurrent time interval between them. You really need to link the computer to something non-digital if you want real randomness.
A legendary 80s science fiction computer game, Elite, used pseudo-randomness to generate its world. The game…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2009Since getting a smartphone, I never use my iPod anymore. (I handed it down to Junior who is now getting a psychedelic musical education. He's into the Marbles.) But the switch of course led to a huge drop in the ease of use. Here are the steps I have to go through to get my phone to play my mp3s in random order:
Unlock phone.
If need be, navigate to "Favourites" tab of start screen.
Start Windows Media Player.
Click on "Menu".
Click on "Library".
Select "Storage Card" from top-left menu.
Click on "My music".
Click on "Play".
And the software is absolute crap at remembering where I was in a…
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2009
My experiments with the wifi installation in our house and the excellent Bredbandskollen TPTEST bandwidth tester (mainly for machines in Sweden) has taught me a few interesting things about wifi.
Your operating system may report the quality of the connection in percent or columns or somesuch. This is not directly proportional to the actual bandwidth you're getting. One percentage estimate may correspond to a wide range of bandwidth figures.
The bandwidth of a wifi connection is extremely sensitive to obstacles such as walls, doors, even waste paper baskets.
I started with the access point…