bitdepth

What to Do When Your Computer is Away

The screen of my MacBook Pro (an aluminum one with an LED screen) is unfortunately one of the ones that is defective so it needs to be sent out. Luckily it’s been intermittent, and I’ve got an external monitor at work and one at home, so when it does go out, I could still work. It’s going out for repair tomorrow which means that I’ll be working with a MacBook. Using Foxmarks and del.icio.us keeps my bookmarks organized, and with Sxipper I manage my logins, so I just had to backup my passwords to use them on the temporary computer. Over the past few months I’ve been using Time Machine with an external drive, so everything should be backed up, but I’ve also been burning DVDs as well as copying files to another external drive. So my documents are backed up and most of my mail is through Gmail, so it shouldn’t be too much of a pain. NetNewsWire is great to use since it syncs and I won’t notice any difference in my newsreading. But the biggest challenge turned out to be what to do with my iPod and how it syncs with iTunes. Continue…

December 7, 2008 computers, ipod, itunes, last.fm, macbook, macbookpro, songbird

When is a Text Message Not a Text Message?

I thought that I had things figured out with my mobile phone data plan to make sure that my Twitter updates weren’t costing me any extra money. With the short code for Canada it’s very easy to send updates, so I signed up for the unlimited outgoing text messages with Aliant (which is now Bell). I had noticed some 15 cent charges on my phone bill for “TXT Services 2″, which seemed to correspond with Twitter updates.

After a few minutes on the phone I started some detective work with the customer service representative and we determined that the “TXT Services 2″ were indeed my Twitter updates. So I asked why I was being charged for them and it turns out that the short code is considered a service, which is why there is the charge. The whole reason I had unlimited text messages was to avoid being charged like that, and then I found out that there isn’t a plan that includes short codes as “unlimited” text messages actually mean messages from phone to phone. The representative helpfully explained that if I updated on a web site that there wouldn’t be a charge, but that defeats the whole purpose of mobile updates.

I do have unlimited web browsing, which means that I can use the Gmail mobile app on my Motorola ROKR and go to web sites as much as I want, so that’s the workaround. But with applications that are downloaded that aren’t from my mobile provider’s site, I have to approve each connection, so every time I refresh my inbox, open or send an email I have to approve the connection, which is a bit of a pain. Twitter’s mobile version works beautifully, but on my phone the built-in browser isn’t great, but I did find that the new Opera Mini works very well and even has an option to rotate the screen. It’s no iPhone or iPod Touch, but it’s the best mobile web experience that I can get now.

It would be great if somewhere there was a simple explanation of what you can do with various mobile phone plans and what it would cost. It’s frustrating to know that I could spend hours and hours in the mobile browser for a flat monthly fee, but every time I use SMS to send or receive updates there is a 15 cent charge. The complexity of the plans and options is confusing for everyone and far too much time is spent trying to figure out what works and with all of the unexpected charges I can understand why most people in Canada still only talk using their mobile phones.

August 18, 2008 mobile, phone, sms, text, twitter

Public WiFi in Fredericton

Fred-eZone sign I’ve been up to Fredericton briefly a couple of times in the last 3 weeks and one interesting thing that is going on there is that downtown there is free, unlimited public WiFi access (the Fred-eZone) in the downtown area. The network is made possible due to some forward-thinking in the city when they decided wire up the downtown with fiber in 1999 just as it looked as if there was no end to the dot com boom. The high-speed network downtown was set up for the needs of the city, but with the excess capacity they decided to open it up to the citizens of Fredericton. What a great idea! I haven’t wardriven much, but what is cool about how they have things set up in Fredericton is that there is a little “e” with radiant lines on the side of signposts and buildings in areas that are covered. I sat on a bench with my PowerBook a couple of weeks ago and went online. It was neat to do and it worked well. Inside the Film Co-op (which is just above where the bench is) it didn’t work as well, but that could be due to the walls or other things in between it. It’s great that Fredericton has it and I wonder how many people are using it. It would be great if this would catch on in other places.

May 31, 2004 fredericton, wifi

Wish I Was There

I’ve been looking at some of the notes that people have been taking at the latest O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and I really wish that I could be there. Cory Doctorow‘s notes are great and have induced my sense of missing some stuff that is amazing. Two of the talks that got me thinking were Elizabeth Lawley‘s talk, “Breaking into the Boy’s Club” about diversifying your team and how to attract women to tech-heavy and male-dominated fields. Great advice that I will use. The other one that got me thinking a lot was the “Life Hacks” session by Danny O’Brien who is the editor of Need to Know. O’Brien talked about how geeks organize their lives. I recognized a lot of things that I do and some advice that I think will help me get things together a bit more. But I wish I could have seen and heard it for myself!

February 11, 2004 corydoctorow, dannyobrien, elizabethlawley, etech, lifehacks, oreilly

iPod AV?

I was playing with the new iChatAV beta using audio chat and wanted to use the new iSight, but I don’t have one, and my G3 PowerBook is too slow for video chat. But I was thinking about the amazing design of the new iSight and how it just uses FireWire to connect. Then I was thinking that it would be cool if you could take that camera off of the computer to take pictures unconnected…then I thought about the iPod, which is a FireWire hard drive. Hmmm… if you plugged the camera into an iPod you have a camera and a hard drive. (But now the iPods have a Dock connector instead of straight FireWire.) What if the iPod 2 or iPod AV had a colour screen, video playback and recording capability? That would be cool. Plug in the iSight, look at the iPod screen and record video… and maybe if the iPod had AirPort you could stream video from the iPod or have a neat wireless iChat without needing a keyboard…maybe sort of an iPhone for around the house? It seems as if all of the parts are in place for this and maybe it’s just a matter of time.

June 25, 2003 apple, chat, ichat, iphone, ipod, isight, technology, video

Bitdepth is 1

My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 and it’s the first machine that really brought the Internet into my home and marked the beginning of my writing everything on a computer. I bought it from a professor of mine and used it to write essays and articles. It had 512 k of RAM with a memory expansion that could be used as RAM or to store 768 k of information or programs. There was only a 720k floppy drive and no hard drive. I used WordPerfect 4.2 which fit onto 2 floppies. In 1992 when I moved to Montreal to study I bought a modem (2400 baud) to connect to the Vax at Concordia to use electronic mail and telnet. One of the first hypertext programs that I used was Hytelnet. It was written by Peter Scott and it connected Telnet sites. This was before I used Gopher and before the World Wide Web. I used Telnet and Hytelent to do a lot of research at various libraries around the world. Then I organized things in a WATCOM database from the University of Waterloo.

Then I began looking at MOOs and MUDs to explore the fascinating culture of creating worlds and community through text. I really had a great time discussing postmodernity and cultural theory in the Postmodern Culture MOO which was the online component of the journal. It’s where I first had a voice online and began connecting with people around the world. Then it started to get more popular and a bit too crowded so I moved on to the BayMOO and then to the Diversity University MOO where I took an online course in Adult Education using technology.

The Web was (and still is) very exciting to me. I launched my first Web site about 10 years ago… right after I used Cello and Mosaic and found HTML to be fascinating. My first Web site had a rant about the film “Disclosure” and (as pretty much every site then did) a bunch of links to other sites. The site was hosted at an Antarctic research station Web site that had extra hard drive space. You just sent an email asking for space and they set you up. That was before the Web was commercial…and you could know most of the people who were around… and we were happy… and walked uphill to school in snow storms….but that’s a whole other story. Now a decade later I’m celebrating the first anniversary of my own domain and Weblog. Things have changed a lot in some ways, but not so much in others.

May 9, 2003 baymoo, bitdepth, cello, computers, diversityuniversity, education, gopher, html, hytelnet, moo, mosaic, mud, postmodernculture, technology, telnet, toshibat1000, vax, watcome, wordperfect, www

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