Heads Up

December 8, 2003

New York Times:Heads-Up Displays Move From Cockpits to Cyclists' Helmets - Soon recreational motorcyclists and bicyclists will be able to take advantage of data projected into their line of sight.

This is quite similar to a device I was pondering while driving back yesterday. I want to combine GPS and a simple display with a wireless connection for updating road conditions and highway speeds dynamically. If the technology was used to track vehicle speeds like the fleet tracking or reporting from the ever more common roadside speed indicators.

CDOT has a pretty good site but it only does most people good while they are not in their cars but are at their computers.

Don't do it

November 21, 2003

- Andrew's looking for a new laptop too. [Scripting News] - I have to agree with Andrew. Don't get the Think Pad. They are simply awful. The Viao is a much better choice. Of course a Powerbook is the best choice but Sony makes a fine machine.

Cell Phone Post

November 21, 2003

I've been looking for the best solution for posting from the road. The Aircard Page has some good info on using the Sierra Wireless 555 card. The downside is that it disables the normal serial interface for the PCMCIA card so it would mean switching back and forth to download images from the cameras. However the page at the bottom tells how to configure PPP for OS X to use National Access (formerly Express Network).

The next problem is the lack of a Motorola v.120e on the list of modems in 10.3. A few tries without success. Finally used the "Sprint PCS Vision" choice.

Sourceforge outage

November 9, 2003

There seems to be a sourceforge outage today. Problematic for those of us who are attempting to get new sites up today. It does bring to light some concerns about having so many great projects in the open source realm hosted by a closed-source company.

Airport Roaming

October 13, 2003

Tonight brought some time to get the networking situation at the home office fixed up. The network now consists of two Airport base stations. One is an Extreme base station and one is a dual-ethernet base station that used to be at the office. The performance is good and it seems to work well. Best of all it seems to have eliminated problems with connections dropping here and there for no reason at all. The Airport Extreme station has an external antenna to help it rise above the interference in the room.

35K and going

September 18, 2003

Good Morning from 35,000 feet. I love morning flights across the Rockies. First the airport is empty when you arrive so the trip through security is much faster than later in the day. Once you leave the ground the air has not yet had the time to heat unevenly so the chances of turbulance in the air are greatly reduced. Finally there are beautiful sunrises like this morning. The clouds to the east of the Rockies were packed in tight. Like a knife edge the mountains cut the clouds and the only vestiage of such a complete carpet on the western side was a hazy morning dew. (I didn't bring the CF reader with me in the cabin so the picture will have to come later).

Mouse faster than a keyboard

August 13, 2003

This Ask Tog column has some interesting points about mousing being faster than keyboarding. I definitely fit the model of the people described in the article with my steadfast belief that the keyboard is faster. I wonder if there is research outside companies' R&D departments that might shed light on this question.

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What is 131.107.163.50?

May 11, 2003

This address in Microsoft's name space has hit the web sever about 500 times in the last day... It would be great if somebody at Microsoft would tell us what they are doing.

Update: This URL explains the responses others have gotten about Microsoft's Prototype crawler that lives at this address.