I’m currently staying in a small flat in the Mt Cook area of Wellington. The place has no internet connection so a friend kindly lent me his Vodem (aka the Huawei E220).
The Vodem
This is a cute little USB modem that plugs into your computer and connects you to the internet via Vodafone’s 3G network (supports GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA). It’s quite stylee in curvy white and has a fully Hardware 2.0 blue LED light on it.
One of the cool things about the Vodem is that it not only installs itself as a communications device, it also includes a built in flash-drive that contains the software and drivers you need to make it all work. This means there’s no need for a separate CD. Also, when you update the modem firmware you’re also updating the built in software. Nifty.
The Network
The idea was that I would plug the Vodem into my laptop and then share the internet connection over our internal wifi network so that Kim could also use it. Finally we’d plug the NAS storage device into the wifi access point and our little internal network would be all set up with both of us able to get onto the internet. Even better, we’d be able to do this wherever we went as long as we had power and a Vodafone signal, so it would be a perfect way to keep connected during our planned South Island touring/camping trip.
While none of this was incredibly complex I was a bit wary at first – Vista’s built-in networking does some odd things at times, partly because it’s trying too hard to help. I see what they’re trying to do with it (easier to setup and good default security settings) and I think it’s a good idea in principle but they haven’t got it right yet. I look forward to the whispered-about SP1.
However, in this case I was pleased to see that it was all very easy. Install the Vodem, share the connection, plug in the AP, plug in the NAS box, tell Kim’s laptop to connect through mine – and everything worked. Yay, we had ‘net! And then the connection dropped. And came back. And dropped. And then it wouldn’t come back at all, with the software reporting some nonsensical error message about an incorrect broadcast address.
The Problems
The first problem was the Vodafone supplied software. For some reason that I completely fail to understand, it appears that telephone companies and manufacturers of telephone equipment are incapable of writing good PC software. Fixing this wasn’t too hard – discard the software and set up the connection within Windows as a normal PPP connection using the Vodem. Problem #1 solved.
Sadly there was a problem #2 as well. While the PCs and internal parts of the network were happy, there was still a problem with the Vodem and Vodafone’s network. They support three of the multiple data standards used for mobile data (GPRS at up to 60kbit/sec, UMTS at up to 384kbit/sec, and HSDPA at up to 3600kbit/sec) and in theory the Vodem will seamlessly switch between them depending on what network is available. And it’s that word “seamlessly” that’s the problem.
The Vodem would rather spend time endlessly hunting between GPRS/UTMS/HSDPA, flicking its little indicator LED from blue to greeny-blue and back again, then actually moving data back and forth. Each time it switches there is an interruption in your internet connection that lasts 10-30 seconds, and there’s no guarantee that when the connection is re-established that it won’t immediately switch back again.
The Verdict
In practice this means that you have a tremendously annoying and frustrating internet connection. You’re happily surfing/chatting away and then suddenly it stops. You glance over at the vodem, see the light flickering, sigh, and wait for it to re-establish itself. It does so and you get the next page and …wham, it stops again. It’s frustrating to press submit on a web form, see the LED change colour, and know that there’s definitely going to be a service interruption and there’s only about a 50% chance that whatever you submitted will actually get there.
It’s got to the point now that I’m looking for the commands I need to disable some of the connection types in the hope that it will be more stable (because it’s treated like a modem it uses a very extended version of the AT command set). GPRS may be slow but I’d rather have a stable slow connection than an intermittent fast one. Sadly the documentation isn’t very good and the Huawei website doesn’t let commoners like me download the manuals. Time to go googling, I’ll post an update when I find the solution.
Verdict: The Vodem is a neat idea and I really want it to work but I can’t recommend it at this time.
When I got my new laptop with Windows Vista, I decided I was going to try out as much of the built in software as made sense to me. In particular, I thought I’d try Internet Explorer 7 and see if it really was a decent competitor to Firefox. My initial impressions were good:
- It had tabs just like Firefox.
- It seemed nice and fast.
- I liked the look and feel, and how they had minimised the space used by the user interface in order to maximise the space used to display the website.
- The search bar worked well and was easy to configure.
- It seemed stable, and the times that a website did get bound up I could kill just that window without losing all of the others.
- It didn’t do that incredibly annoying thing that Firefox does when it steals the cursor focus on a screen where you’ve already started typing stuff into the form fields.
However, while the IE7 core browser was better than Firefox there were some features that I missed:
- Web Developer – an amazingly useful extension if you’re ever doing any web development work. The in-place CSS editor has saved me countless hours tweaking and reloading style sheets, and that’s only one of the features.
- AdBlock – Web based ads never used to worry me too much. I’d ignore them most of the time (often without even noticing that they even existed) and very occasionally I’d even click on one if it looked interesting. Then came the ads that covered the webpage or had audio/video of music or people talking. Something had to be done and AdBlock just cleaned all that crap out.
I used IE7 for a while but then I had a development project – and suddenly I had to install Firefox so I could use the Web Developer extension. And day by day those damn ads were annoying me more and more and finally I installed AdBlock in to Firefox and switched to using it as my default browser.
That was about a month ago and so far it’s been going well. They seem to have got the instability and memory leak issues under control in the latest version, and using AdBlock has made reading material online much more enjoyable. Firefox is still the best option as far as I know.
I find it interesting that the Firefox browser wasn’t as good as that in Internet Explorer, but that the quality of the add-ons more than makes up the difference.
Fifteen years ago I had a good home entertainment system. I was pretty cool with my biggish-screen TV, four-head hifi stereo video recorder, five disc CD player and Dolby Prologic Surround amplifier and speakers. Sure, you could get bigger TVs and louder stereos but this was as good as it got (ignoring such fringe technologies like laser disc).
But the world has moved on – DVDs replaced VHS tapes, MP3s are replacing audio CDs, TV’s have got wider and shallower, we’re downloading TV programmes from the internet, and the analogue Dolby Prologic audio has been replaced by digital five channel plus a subwoofer systems. Then there’s the really big change – the integration of our computers into everything else to give us new ways to create, store and enjoy media of all forms.
I’ve been through a few system generations over the last 15 years but I got rid of it all when I went overseas last year, so now is a great chance to set up a new system from scratch. This article describes what I’m doing and why I’m doing it that way. It’s aimed at a general audience but you’ll need at least some IT skills or the help of a geeky friend for a few bits.
This is the second article in my “How I’m Doing It” series. The first one was Geek Backpacking in Central America.
Continue Reading “The Compleat Home Entertainment Network” »
Recently I have seen two semi-animated films for the second time – Sin City and Waking Life.
Waking Life is the sort of movie that makes me feel inarticulate just because everyone in it talks so damn much. As normal it has given me an urge to read some more philosophy, possibly starting with existentialism.
Sin City is great – I love the visual style and the brutal relentlessness of its pastiche of a script. Somehow it takes our shared understanding of the cliches of the 30s noir gangster movies, turns them all up to 11 and then adds a dash of eternal champion.
Next will be A Scanner Darkly.
Kim and I bought a car online and had to travel from Whangamata to Levin to pick it up. Just to make things interesting we decided to hitchhike – in the middle of winter, across the highest and coldest part of the North Island of New Zealand, the Desert Road. The 511km trip took two days.
John picked us up at just after 8am in Whangamata and gave us a lift to Waihi. He’s lived in Whangamata for 4-5 years after moving there from his farm. We passed the farm on the way and John told us he’d just sold it. His son had been managing it but can’t afford to buy it so now he’s out of a job. John is helping him get a quarrying business going on a corner of the old farm and was on his way to the hardware store to get some equipment so they can get the new 10 ton hammer crusher going.
Then a man from Blackpool who has been living in NZ for about 15 years gave us a lift from Waihi to Paeroa. He seemed to approve of what we were doing with our lives, and told told us that he used to run his own business in the UK until he had a nervous breakdown at the age of 35. Now he says he concentrates on what’s important – enjoying what he’s doing and keeping healthy. He said that money isn’t nearly as important as people think it is and he enjoys working in an op shop.
After a long, long wait in Paeroa, Ruby stopped and gave us a lift to Te Aroha. She was in her 50s and had just been to the gym – maybe having tired muscles explained her slightly wonky driving. I had a bit of a problem understanding her as she spoke very quietly and had a thick Maori/country accent. She knew of Kim’s parents – Te Aroha is a small town.
We were only waiting in Te Aroha for a few minutes. A young man had seen us waiting in Paeroa but didn’t pick us up there as he had a few errands to run first. Seeing us again in Te Aroha he pulled over and took us to Hamilton. He warned us that the vehicle might not last the distance as he was taking it in to have more work done on it – apparently you should never buy an Isuzu Trooper. On the other hand, he did like owning a 4WD as he could take his family to the forest in it. You could tell it was a real four wheel drive becuase it had mud both inside and out.
Shayna stopped in Hamilton because she thought Kim looked cold wrapped up in her green woollen blanket. Her kids are all grown up now and we encouraged her to go ahead with her plans to travel to China for four months. She dropped us off at an intersection in the middle of nowhere – but still on State Highway 1 so getting another lift wouldn’t be a problem.
Car number 29 was Henry’s little red Mitsubishi FTO sportscar. He’d already been from Napier to Auckland that day and was on his way back. A man of few words and a loud stereo, I did discover that he thinks that James Brown’s first album was the best. Henry is also a trusting type and left us in the car with the keys while he went for a toilet stop in Putaruru. He dropped us off in Taupo where after waiting for half an hour and, getting steadily colder, we decided to stay for a bath and the night.
The next morning we didn’t have to wait long in Taupo before a woman stopped for us. She was on her way to from Rotorua to Waiouru to pick up a relative. It was her day off from working in one of the resorts just south of Rotorua. We discussed how hard it is to learn a new language and how most tourists thankfully speak at least a little English.
Waiouru was cold cold COLD! The wind was being chilled by a snow-covered and very impressive Mt Ruapehu to the north. Luckily Matt in car number 12 took pity on us and stopped – after all, he’s done a lot of hitch-hiking himself. He was on his way to Palmerston North for a funeral and I made a mental note not to tell him to “have a nice day” when he dropped us off. Matt and his wife came back last year from spending five years overseas in the UK, Europe, South America and Asia. Apparently it took him a bit of time to adjust to living in the same country as his family again – he had to keep spending time with them. He dropped us off in Shannon and there wasn’t much further for us to go.
Matthias was an older German man in a campervan. His son failed to get into university six months ago and decided to go traveling in New Zealand instead, and Matthias came over to spend a few weeks with him and see around New Zealand a little bit himself. Apparently his son has taken advantage of the low male:female ratio amongst German backpackers and has hooked up with a girl from home. Matthias took the chance to ask a local some of the questions he had about his travels in New Zealand, such as whether we’d always had lots of Maori place names (yes) or was it a new trend (no).
And then we were in Levin to buy the car from Jim and Molly. They’ve been in New Zealand for 10 months and chose Levin because Molly got a job as a doctor there. Jim just took the time off and looked after their young child. I guess they couldn’t have liked it here too much as they’re heading back to Seattle the next day. I bet they were glad to get the cash for their car before they left!
On the way home we resolved to pick up any hitchhikers we saw – it just seemed the karmically correct thing to do. We’d given up on seeing any as it was getting dark and rainy, and then north of Taupo I just spotted a shape at the side of the road. Sharon seemed far too young to be on her way to visit her daughter in Tokoroa. We dropped her off in the rain and headed home in our new vehicle.
The book selling business is going slowly. We’ve now sold three military history books to a collector in the US for US$150 – plus a whopping US$65 in postage. Oh, and a copy of the Australasian Girl’s Annual of 1917 to a friend in Wellington.
We’re getting the books from my father who runs “Ohope’s Famous Bookshop on the Lawn” as recently seen on TV’s Close-Up show. You can watch the video here, click on “Leaves on the Lawn”. He goes through many, many books each year and picks out stuff that he thinks is rare or otherwise interesting to collectors.
We’ve got a few auctions up at Ebay and Trademe. My favourite is the 1919 copy of the Treaty at Versailles.
The odd thing is that I don’t really understand the book collectors. I see the point of owning books you wish to read or refer to, but owning books just for the sake of it doesn’t make sense to me.
Even weirder is the whole idea of valuing first editions over a later edition. To me the value of a book is in the words and ideas recorded in it, not the thing itself, especially for mass-produced items like books. I’m looking forward to Google scanning all the books in the world and making them available over the internet.
I’ve seen a lot of articles telling you what to do and take when travelling, but I thought it might be worthwhile writing one about our experiences with what we did take and how well it worked out for us.
Kim and I recently did our big trip around Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) and southern Mexico (Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca, Mexico City). Most of the time we were backpacking so were deliberately travelling quite light – I allowed myself one medium size backpack and one shoulder satchel.
Continue Reading “Backpacking Geeks in Central America” »
I just read an article asking “What game turned you into a gamer?” and I realised that I have been one as long as I can remember.
When I was a very young child in the 70s I used to be terribly excited to go to the airport. While I liked aeroplanes as much as the next boy the real attraction was the that they had a game arcade. I always made a bee-line for it (I can still rememeber exactly where it was!) – but only after begging for money from my parents.
This was pretty early on in gaming history and most of the games they had there weren’t actually video games. Instead they were electro-mechanical devices with gears and pulleys and little models on rails. One of my favourites was where you used a gun to shoot tanks and it used a red bulb to light up an explosion graphic whenever you got a hit. They did have some early video games too, such as Sea Wolf and Pong.
Then my local dairy (corner store for you damn foreigners) got Space Invaders and that was the end of any plans for saving my pocket money. If we didn’t have any 20c pieces we’d just stand around and watch others play, trying to learn the firing patterns to get 300 points when you shot the UFO.
Next up was Thru-the-Wall (aka Breakout) followed by Galaxian, Pleiades, Galaga and others. Sadly I never got the hang of the controls in Defender and I still struggle with games with too many buttons to press (yes GTA, I’m looking at you).
One of my favourites was Time Pilot and I must admit that this was partly because it was one of the few games I was actually good at. I also liked Phoenix and would play it with a friend hovering their finger over the shield button for last minute saves – and the inevitable arguments when they pressed it too late.
I wouldn’t really call myself a gamer these days. To me the term now implies that you’re part of the online role playing movement or heavily into killing your friends with first person shooters. I still play the occasional video game, mainly concentrating on the best car driving simulation I can afford which is currently Forza on the Xbox. Thanks to the generosity of Homagenz I’m also going to give Morrowind a try too.
Kim has finally launched her new food blog, What Kim Ate. It’s all about food and will have recipes and photos and other such things. Best of all, it’s New Zealand focused and will therefore have winter foods when it’s winter in the southern hemisphere (I’m sick of reading about the people in the northern hemisphere who are currently enjoying fresh asparagus).
I’ll be doing the occasional guest post as Kim isn’t the only blogging cook in our household.