Having lit up the Bluetooth functions on my X60s, but still not knowing how in heaven’s name to get a Motorola Borg Headset to work with the fricking thing, I can at least declare some success in getting my Treo 650 to hotsync with the machine.
I would estimate 5 hours of frittered away time trying to get Bluetooth working on this machine. Not acceptable.
Major breakthrough. Wiped out all vestiges of bluetoothian b.s. on the machine, let it start back up, did a pairing, and ta-da!, there was my headset.
That’s about it. There is my headset. Can’t Skype through it. Can’t listen to Rob Zombie through it. But it lives. It lives!
and in futher Phuqital Labs news, I have managed to Ubuntu the world’s worst laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1200 — the one’s they give to prisoners just to mess with their heads — and lordy, lordy, I am an honest to goodness Linux weenie. Will start growing my beard tomorrow and am in the market for some birkenstocks and a recumbent bicycle (wait, that’s the LISP look), anyway, Morris Dancing can’t be far away now. Gotta say, GNOME is a pretty UI.
I am a geek manque.
PS: I almost climbed on my “other” bike today, the SnotRocket, but due to lack o’helmet, thought better and came inside and defragged a hard disk instead.
WSJ.com – Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application
This is truly significant. Writely was nothing spectacular. Calendar, okay, cool but not earthshattering, but taking on Excel brings back fond memories of the bloody spreadsheet wars of the late 80s. Back then BillG waited for Phillipe Kahn to slash prices and bundle the apps, once that was done Microsoft waded into the pricing game like a hippo into a tea party and before long Lotus 1-2-3 was a joke and Excel pulled off the biggest mass app switch in history.
Now, can Google get anyone to budge from their pivot tables?
PCWorld.com – The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
I was just reading PCWorld’s hugely entertaining list of the 25 worst tech products of all time and found myself in vigorous agreement with most of their choices. As I drew near the end of the the series, I asked myself, “Where’s the CueCat?’
One more page and there it was, the evil Kitty, in 20th place (AOL was number 1, which I wholeheartedly agree with.).
One of the reasons I fled Forbes.com in 2000 was the decision to support this evil device, a bar code reader disguised in a plastic cat-shell. The brain-dead assumption was that the magazine would print bar codes in advertisements and articles and a user — armed with the evil Cat — would scan the code and be taken directly to a special URL on the advertiser’s or Forbes’ website.
I thought it was the dumbest thing I ever heard of. But no one was listening. The fact that the inventor, Jovan Philyaw, [now renamed as J. Hutton Pulitzer] was an infomercial king who made his money on windshield wipers was lost on everybody. This nasty little thing personifies the stupidity of the late 90s for me. I thought if you sanded off the ears, it might make a good vibrator.
“20. DigitalConvergence CueCat (2000)Appearing at the tail end of the dot com craze, the CueCat was supposed to make it easier for magazine and newspaper readers to find advertisers’ Web sites (because apparently it was too challenging to type http://www.pepsi.com into your browser).
The company behind the device, DigitalConvergence, mailed hundreds of thousands of these cat-shaped bar-code scanners to subscribers of magazines and newspapers. Readers were supposed to connect the device to a computer, install some software, scan the barcodes inside the ads, and be whiskered away to advertisers’ websites. Another “benefit”: The company used the device to gather personally identifiable information about its users.
The CueCat’s maker was permanently declawed in 2001, but not before it may have accidentally exposed its user database to hackers.“
What were people thinking? Forbes wasn’t the only dumb money in the scheme. Wired got in on the fun, as did Belo, the dumbest of the dumb newspaper companies. Mark the passing of the CueCat as the last gasp of print media to get in on that Web thing.
I bought a black Nano last spring. Today I understand that Apple charged me a premium for the color. Black suits me. I am not a white kind of guy, though I am a white man. But I don’t go for that white look that Apple has carved out over the years. So, when the Nano came out, I bought a black one. Black makes me happy. Black is why I like my Thinkpad. It isn’t silver. It isn’t purple. It’s just functional.
Apple’s introduction of a black MacBook is leading to some discussion on why there is a premium being charged for black. Would Lenovo charge an extra $200 for a white Thinkpad (ewww, ewww, I have blasphemed)?
This whole “what color is your laptop” thing makes me think of a nasty comment made by Bill Gates around the time Steve Jobs introduced the Next workstation in the late 80s. I have to paraphrase, but he said something like: “You want a black PC? Get a can of spray paint and I’ll make you a black PC.”
Okay, so I am not the kind of consumer who buys different faceplates for my cellphone. I don’t reskin my applications. I screw up my WordPress theme everytime I get artistic. I earned an “F” in first grade for coloring outside the lines. I think less is more when it comes to design. If it’s classic, if it looks like it will endure, then I will buy it.
So Apple climbs on the black bandwagon. That’s cool. First they climbed on the Intel bus, then they climbed on the Windows bus with Bootcamp. Now they are on the black bus. I wouldn’t buy one for obvious professional and legacy reasons (working for PC Week in the early 80s made me highly allergic to the Mac, and I still, try as I might, lack the Mac chromosome). But welcome to the black camp Apple. Hope you offer a bottle of windex to every owner, I had to sink my Black nano inside of a leather “incase” to stop the scratching and pigging it up with finger oil.
I transferred my life onto a new Lenovo X60s — the ultraportable in the same form factor as my old X41 — but with dual core processors and better built in wireless. The thing is fast, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote about electric windows in the convertible he trashed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the machine jumps like a frog in an electrified pond. We’re talking fast. Hyperspace fast. Stars getting blurry fast.
I’ll rant about system migration in another post. Forget about crossover cables, backups, etc.. So much customization is lost in a migration that I’ve come to dread the process and the weeks of noodling and fiddling that must ensue to relog into all my web services, download extensions, etc. etc. Now I’ve managed to get Verizon’s EVDO console to throw an error message every time I surf to a new web page…..
So, having contradicted myself in my earlier post this year about my hatred for luggage with wheels and losers who use wireless headsets and appear to be talking to themselves like the prescription to Clonapin ran out last week … I bought a wireless bluetooth headset made by Motorola after getting a citation at the toolbooths leading to Manhattan’s FDR drive for driving while talking on a cell phone.
It’s an okay headset. Volume is funky, buttons are too big for my sausage fingers, but here where the potential comes in — because the X60 has both Bluetooth and EVDO and Wi-Fi, I figured I download Skype and pair the headset to the X60. Smart right? Wrong. The laptop won’t discover the headset. Woe is me. I need to go hunt down the engineering guys, waste an hour googling “Pairing Motorola Bluetooth X560, and keep at it until the thing works. When it does, I will post the solution as I have buddies in the same boat. Pointers on how to solve the issue would be appreciated, but I will not go buy a Bluetooth dongle, but I will contemplate reinstalling the Bluetooth stack to one more friendly to my headset.
My intention is to fire all phone companies by September.
» Apple’s Boot Camp Lollapalooza | Jeffrey Young’s Technicon | ZDNet.com
A good commentary by Jeff Young at ZDNET on the implications of Apple’s Bootcamp on the PC industry.
Frank Abagnale inspired me to keep pushing the limit on my forgery story. My editor was getting impatient and asking for some proof that there was a digital forgery issue, and I needed to keep writing the standard Forbes fare of one page company stories and other projects while working on the forgery piece on the side. I knew that unless I could come up with some great criminal cases — “Forger Found in Apartment with Smoking Laser Printer” — I’d have to demo-or-die as it were and cut my own check.
I flew out to the west coast to talk with some desktop publishing and digital imaging experts and analysts, looking at the state of the art (circa 1989) in scanners, image manipulation software and laser printers. All the great stuff was Mac based, and having just left PC Week, the trade paper devoted to the IBM platform, that was going to be a tough transition for me in terms of technical skills. I had no Mac, wanted no Mac, and could not for the life of me understand how people could function without a two buttoned mouse. Whatever. Forbes wasn’t going to buy me a Mac with a scanner and high end laser printer and going to the local Kinkos to rent time on their machines was going to get me arrested, so I found a Rent-A-Mac service and had $7000 worth of Cupertino’s finest iron delivered to my Back Bay apartment, setting it all up on the dining room table. Continue reading “My career as a forger – Part III”
Secure Computing: SmartFilter web URL filtering and reporting
The folks at Boing-Boing — the world’s most popular blog — are a little annoyed that users in the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, and even American elementary schools are being blocked from seeing their site thanks to a web filtering app called SmartFilter from Secure Computing. Apparently a couple naked pix on Boing-Boing earned them the 404 treatment.
Knowing Boing-Boing’s terrier-like penchant for taking up a cause — the Sony rootkit for example — this ought to be fun to watch as Secure Computing gets whaled on by the blogosphere.
Today the folks at Boing-Boing are really stepping it up, pointing out that “Smart”Filter ain’t so smart and even blocks the Declaration of Independence.
I would be that the execs at Secure Computing are only beginning to become aware of the brouhaha.
Boing-Boing even came up with a boycott button — this taken from a public domain photo of Michaelangelo’s David:
