I’ve gone through several alarm clocks since I moved to Blacksburg. I like ones that have a radio, such that I can wake up to NPR’s Morning Edition. (Because my bedroom is downstairs in this two-level apartment, that’s all that these radios have been good for, as opposed to just flipping on the radio and …
Category Archives: Tech
Throw me a freakin’ bone.
Mayberry now offers public WiFi. Still no wireless in Charlottesville.
Think different.
Windows laptops look ridiculous. People use them in some of my classes, perched on the edge of their seat, a behemoth HP or Compaq straddling their thighs. The back of the computer is festooned with huge, useless parts, including 3″ wide parallel ports, a pair of 4″ square fans, and two different types of PS/2 …
Interference robustness.
This afternoon, my 802.11g wireless connection went to hell. I was reduced to 10- to 15-second ping times. I’ve been too caught up in working on Al Weed’s site to take the time to debug it, but it got bad enough that I couldn’t work any more. By way of background, I have an Apple …
Roanoke gets WiFi.
I’ve been pushing Charlottesville to set up 802.11x-based wireless Internet access throughout downtown for two years ago. I started off attempting to set it up as a private venture, but it became obvious that it would be difficult to do without cooperation from the city. (Additionally, I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good …
The nuclear age.
This kid in Utah built a fusion reactor out of discarded parts from junk yards. (Specfically speaking, it’s a Farnsworth-style inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion reactor.) For this he won second place at the science fair.
Verisign sucks.
The maliciousness and incompetence of Verisign is appalling. But, hey, now every domain works, so maybe I should just think of this as a feature.
Gone digital.
At long last, I’ve MP3d all of my CDs here in Blacksburg. At least, all of the tracks on each of my CDs to which I listen. For a long time, I’ve had perhaps a quarter of my listening library MP3d, and I consequently failed to listen to a large portion of my music collection. …
VT’s G5 cluster.
Virginia Tech is doing something very cool. They’ve bought 1,100 Apple G5s, which they’re going to group together to create one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. They intend to take delivery of the systems this coming week. There’s an information session being held about in this Thursday morning, which I’ll certainly attend.
PayPal changed their query format.
Without telling anybody — at least, without telling me — PayPal changed their format for URLs that permit people to send money. Nobody had booked ads on nancies.org for a couple of days, which I thought was weird. Turns out that the link that people click on to purchase a text ad led people to …