tech

The Phoenix Lander survived touch-down on Mars, has deployed its solar panels successfully and is transmitting pictures! Yay! Here's the news feed where this baby's discoveries will be announced over the coming months.
With its extremely late urbanisation, Sweden doesn't have much of an archaeological record compared to Italy or China or Peru. But we keep really good track of the stuff we have: active organised surveying for ancient monuments has been going on for over 70 years, aided by the fact that Sweden has no trespassing laws and affords land owners no ownership to archaeological remains. Sweden's National Heritage Board has been placing its sites and monuments register on-line gradually over a period of years. At first, it was only accessible to professionals, offering a crappy map and working only…
I'm at my son's end-of-term violin concert. Wonder if I can blog from the new smartphone w/o using email and a human intermediary? [Yay, I could! The Samsung for some reason comes with both IE and Opera preinstalled. Though Sb's Moveable Type installation still doesn't work with IE under Windows Mobile 6.0, it does work with Opera.]
After some deliberation, I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 smartphone to replace my Qtek 9100. It has served me well for 2 1/4 years, but I felt it was time, and I've put it up for sale. I've only had the Samsung for two days, but I'm very happy with it so far. Improvements over the Qtek: GPS navigator 3G network support offering much better internet bandwidth Mousepad More flash memory for mp3s Thinner, thus fitting better in my pocket Less heavy Comes with two web browsers preinstalled, making more web sites accessibleThe only drawbacks I've noticed so far is the Samsung's much smaller keyboard…
I'm messing around with Skype and I find it's working very well indeed. (Skype is in fact the only part of my linux installation that can interact with my Logitech USB headset.) So, Dear Reader, feel free to give a shout to mrundkvist!
I just installed Hardy, the brand new version of Ubuntu Linux, on the household's two Dell PCs. They're a Dimension 4550 mini-tower and an Inspiron 6000 laptop, and I'm happy to say that everything's running fine so far. (Almost.) The release is so new that Google hasn't even had time to update their toolbar for the new version of Firefox. The irritating wake-up bug in Gutsy has been taken care of. Used to be, every time my laptop went into suspension or hibernation mode, it would have to wake up, immediately and spontaneously go back to sleep and wake up a second time before I could resume…
The audio connector on my Qtek 9100 smartphone (handheld computer cum cellphone) has crapped out for the second time in two years. The warranty's lapsed, and repairing the thing would cost a third of what an equivalent machine of a current model would set me back. My 9100's battery life is flagging, it's a 2005 design and it has a number of irritating design glitches. So I'm in the market for a new handheld. When I asked my readers two years ago to recommend me a machine, I didn't get a single answer. You guys are a wee bit more numerous these days, so I'm thinking maybe you might have an…
For the past two years I've been packing a soap-sized handheld computer named the Qtek 9100. It's a version of a design named the HTC Wizard, sporting a slide-out qwerty keyboard and running Windows Mobile. The machine's been good to me, though is has a few annoying quirks & glitches, and I would never go back to carrying anything with lesser capabilities. As I am phasing out Windows XP for Ubuntu Linux on my machines, one of the 9100's shortcomings has become an acute problem. It will only let you transfer files by cable using a glitchy piece of Microsoftware named ActiveSync, and this…
A couple of recent Skepticality interviews (with environmental engineer Kelly Comstock and environmental toxicologist Shane Snyder) taught me something that may seem obvious, but which was radical news to me. Tap water is an industrial product. It occurs nowhere in nature. Water suppliers use natural water to make tap water according to current scientific understanding of what's healthy for humans to drink. To make tap water, you need to remove a lot of stuff, such as micro-organisms, industrial pollutants, organic residues and mineral particles, perhaps also salt and lime. Then you need to…
At PZ's suggestion, I've twiddled some knobs behind the scenes to force the blog to speak utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1. This will hopefully allow you guys to write even stranger comments than usual. Maybe I'll even be able to stop writing stuff like "& a u m l ;" Please try it out! Såy sömëthïng ïn Swëdïsh! Mattias, have you any lewd suggestions to make in Koiné Greek? Is anyone able to rattle off a few lines of Arabic love poetry? Go nuts, y'all!
It's February 2008. I've had access to the WWW for 13 years. Yet I can still not get a news feed filtered to any reasonable approximation of my tastes. I want very little news: only the important stuff. I think almost all conventional news are a complete waste of time. I want no business, no sports, no reports on individual crimes or house fires, and for Dawkins' sake, nothing about TV shows or pop singers. Until recently, I took the front-page feed of Dagens Nyheter, my country's biggest newspaper. This is the material they deem maximally important, but it's full of sports and reports on…
The Skalk article I mentioned the other day (with the rubber goat) tells the story of an unusual find made in northernmost Jutland in the summer of 2005. Peter Jensen was stripping some land of topsoil for gravel extraction when, from the vantage point of his machine, he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen happens to have much experience of machine operation at archaeological digs. It turned out that he had managed to identify a pit in the subsoil filled with thousands of amber beads: an Early Neolithic votive deposit datable around 3500 cal BC. Most votive amber deposits…
I'm on a train in Östergötland. A while back I caught a fond glimpse of the barrow at Stora Tollstad in Sjögestad that me & Howard Williams trial-trenched and dated to the 9th century in 2006. I'm giving a talk this afternoon to my colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum's excavation unit about my research in Östergötland. I think it's pretty damn cool to have wireless broadband on a train.
A pretty Chinese maths teacher said hello to me on ICQ the other day, hoping to marry a Westerner. This inspired me to dig out and re-post the following entry from November 2006.For many years I have spent most of my working days alone at a computer. Alone, but thanks to the internet and messaging software, not lonely. As mentioned before in connection with the story of Lennart, International Casanova, it's good to have a chat now and then with other solitary souls over ICQ. They become your workmates even though they may be located on the other side of the planet in meatspace terms, to use a…
Back in April, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my oldish Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, bought in early 2005. Ubuntu's rapid boot process and snappy action has made it my favourite operating system (while I continue to run Win XP and Mac OS on other machines). The sense of non-commercialism is also nice. But of course I have some problems. They may be things that are fully possible to do in Ubuntu, though too complicated for me to accomplish at my current level of ignorance; or semi-possible to do in Ubuntu through an ugly kludge that's not worth it; or they may simply be impossible to do in Ubuntu.…
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars four Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for three months, yet they continue to trundle around that cold, distant planet, taking pictures and analysing rocks. Check out the project's web site for news! [More blog entries about astronomy, space, mars, nasa; astronomi, rymden, mars, nasa.]
Here's something for the gearheads. At home, we've got a permanent Comhem broadband fiber connection offering 10 Mb/s down & up. Its actual performance is about 9 down and 10 up, which is OK. I like to have a swift uplink since I send a lot of large files and keep my data on a DAV server for easy access from the four computers I work with. This, to the majority who have never heard of a DAV server, means that with a slow uplink, it would take a lot of time for me to save my work when I press CTRL-S. (A funny thing about permanent internet cabling in Swedish apartment houses is that its…
I was musing about how haphazardly I learned about certain indispensable software and information sources. Then it struck me -- maybe there are people who don't know about Google Definitions? OMG! I've got to tell them! I use Google Definitions daily. It's an on-line meta-dictionary, collecting definitions from all over the web. To use it, just type "DEFINE:" into Google's search box and then whatever it is you need defined. And it knows everything, not just the sort of straight-laced stuff you find in printed dictionaries.define: myrmecology Myrmecology is the branch of entomology dealing…
Originally posted 19 September from my handheld via the cell network and e-mail to my old site. Drove to Linköping this morning listening to the Digital Planet podcast, M Coast's latest album and a Povel Ramel hits collection. On site in Kaga I was greeted by my friendly National Heritage Board colleages Immo Trinks and Per Karlsson. They were busy assembling Scandinavian archaeology's first motorised magnetometer setup, and informed me that my site would see the equipment's first non-trial run. The setup consists of a long trailer made of aluminium and held together by bronze and plastic…
Being an archaeologist, I like tombs, and being a science fiction fan, I like Jules Verne. So you can imagine that I'd like Jules Verne's tomb regardless of what it looked like. As it turns out, David Nessle has pictures from Amiens showing the tomb in question, and it's an incredible piece of work. Look at the lettering! Look at that sculpture! "It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Jules Verne who's been resurrected and learned to fly!" [More blog entries about books, graves, julesverne, sf, sciencefiction; gravar, julesverne, sf, sciencefiction, böcker, läsning.]