I just sold my Linksys WRT54G router on Marktplaats (a hugely popular second hand marketplace here in The Netherlands). It had been gathering dust or a few months, and I didn’t think it deserved that after being my ‘lifeline’ for years. This router has been my single favorite piece of equipment ever. I love the way it looks, I love how it never ever failed on me, I love the simple setup, it’s hackability (although I never did load any of the alternate firmwares out there).

I feel silly for feeling bad. Guess it’s quite a feat for a small plastic box to get me all sentimental. But now that wireless-n is here, and my provider-supplied modem/router finally supports WAP encryption, there’s no need for me to hang on to it. I hope it makes the buyer happy. Sigh…

Dear Movie Industry,

I love movies. I go to the cinema nearly every week, buy and watch lots of DVDs and occasionally catch a flick on TV. I also love high definition video, and now that the ‘format war’ is finally settled I’m looking into buying a Blu-Ray disc player. My problem is however that I own hundreds of movies on ’standard resolution’ DVDs. I’m afraid these will look poor by comparison, and will eventually have to be replaced.
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As an old school web designer, I consider myself to have a firm grasp of what pixels are all about. Back in the early 1990’s I used to optimize the hell out of tiny graphics, manually editing colour palettes and using things like Floyd-Steinberg dithering. Maybe this is why I don’t understand the hype about upscaling DVD players like this one.
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I’ve been connected to my LAN through the air for a couple of years now, and I’ve had some pretty mixed experiences. My Linksys WRT54G router is a marvel, and has yet to fail me. The adapters I’ve used with my PC however have for the must part not been able to keep up. And, as I realized today, they all happen to be made by Sitecom.
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It’s been three months since I got my Nabaztag/tag internet bunny, so I thought I’d share my experiences so far.
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It was time to renew my cell phone contract this month, and I the first phone that caught my attention was Sony-Ericsson’s new W890i. It’s really flat (10mm), has a 320*240 pixel screen, great network support and all the usual features. But what really made me want one was the design. Boy does it look good. Unfortunately it’s not yet been released, and while I was waiting for it to become available I met the Nokia E51.
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I’ve always found syncing calendars to be troublesome at best. I used a Palm III years ago, and even the software that Palm supplied was hard to set up and buggy as hell. Most sync tools nowadays assume you’re using Outlook, but if you’re using Google Calendar you probably aren’t. The whole point with “GCal” is that it’s the web 2.0 alternative to Microsoft’s horrible PIM.

Now that I run my own company, I have to have my appointments handy at all times. I hate those bundled stacks of paper that some people use to jot down their schedule, so syncing my calendar of choice suddenly became a priority. unfortunately, Google does not offer something similar to their brilliant mobile gmail software to access your GCal. While googling for solutions I found two interesting options.
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I’ve never been a loyal customer when it comes to graphic cards in my PC. If I remember correctly I went from an S3 card to a Matrox G100, a G200, a nVidia geForce 256, a cheap ATI card and now I’m back with nVidia. During all this the only real driver trouble I’ve had was with the Matrox cards, which could not render OpenGL games. But today I found out that nVidia’s Vista drivers do not feature nView.
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It’s here. Yesterday a colourful box arrived that contained our new house pet. My daughters fell in love instantly, but my own initial joy was tempered somewhat by the fact that it took me an entire evening to get it online. As it turned out, the bunny uses a 802.11b network card (apparently, 11 mbit is sufficient bandwidth for the rodent). My router however was set to “g-only” because I ‘d never had a ‘b’ device before. Entirely my fault, and as soon as I changed this setting the bunny’s lights turned green and I was good to go.
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Last week’s Christmas celebration at work also marked my last gettogether with the people I’ve worked with for all these years. Saying goodbye to collegues I’ve come to regard as friends wasn’t easy, but the gift they got me really made my night. It will take a while to be delivered, but I can’t wait for my Nabaztag to get here.
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