this is a jump
lots of text fsdjklafsjlad
fsdajlkfasd
jf;lsdak
fjasdlk
fdsjalk;
asdfjl;k
aslksdjf
adslkjf
asdl;fjfjksda
asdjkfl
asdlfkj
asdfjalk
asdlfkj
asdlfkj
asdlfkj
asdfljlksda
jfkldsa
jflkdas
jlkfdsa
jlfads
lkdfjafsdk
fjksaldkfjds
fdsajlkflsdak
to here
Useful Tips Section
okay
Holy Smokes Batman, Matchbox Cars Go Full Scale
Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images via IEEE Spectrum
I remember seeing a commercial about this a while ago and I thought it was just another CGI-Avatar fake-out, but, IT IS REAL. Check it out and then book your next trip to Wolfsburg, Germany and pick up a shiny new VW.
They say that the difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. Here’s the man-size version of the Matchbox car garage, which turned legions of lads into gearheads.Checkout the complete article and other cool geeky stuff on IEEE Spectrum.
Facebook Privacy: It's Worse Than You Think
I remember once upon a time ago when there was this new little social site. It was kind of cool. It was free and it enabled you to connect with your friends from your past and present life. You would tell them what was going on in your life and maybe throw a snowball or two at them. Somehow, the little social site morphed. It decided it wanted to be your identity and it would decide what little pieces of your identity that it would share. The best part is that every now and then it changes its mind about what part of you it wants to sell. Pissed off at your boss, we will tell the world for a small fee.
It is possible to protect yourself. Try out these sites for yourself.
It is possible to protect yourself. Try out these sites for yourself.
- http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ - does a quick privacy check of your Facebook account. Log in to Facebook and follow the instructions.
- http://youropenbook.org/ - Search for any ole' phrase and see what is public these days.
- http://zesty.ca/facebook/ - See what the world knows about you. Works best if you use it from a browner that is not logged into Facebook .
- 7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook - yahoo.com
- Facebook Privacy Setting - you pretty much have to go through every tab. PTA.
Send an email message from an Iridium 9555 Sat Phone
In my last post, I talked about how to send twits from the middle of the Atlantic ocean using the twitter email relay client twittermail. But there is still a bit of a problem. Sending emails from a wee boat can be a bit of a pain. Usually you have to pull out the PC and/or fire up the SSB and cross your fingers a bit. If you have tons of cash you might even have a live imersat connection. Well for 69 cents you can sen an email using the text message feature of the new Iridium Sat phones.
Many cell phone companies (as well as Iridium) allow you to start your text message with an email address followed by a space and then your message. The final message can only be 139 characters minus the length of your email message. Not a lot, put plenty of room for a tweet.
Using the Iridium 9555 as an example, you would first create your message, such as:
To create the @ symbol you have to press the * key and then select from the symbols. After your message is compiled you hit 'Send'. A new menu comes up and you select the 'New recipient' option. In the number field, enter +*2 and press 'OK'. Now press the 'Send' message and you are good to go. In our example, the text message got relayed to email which got sent to twittermail which relayed it to our twitter account http://www.twitter.com/indigoSV.
Sounds simple. It seems like it took us forever to figure it out.
From Indigo in the BVI … I am outa here!
Many cell phone companies (as well as Iridium) allow you to start your text message with an email address followed by a space and then your message. The final message can only be 139 characters minus the length of your email message. Not a lot, put plenty of room for a tweet.
Using the Iridium 9555 as an example, you would first create your message, such as:
mytwittermailid@twittermail.com Wow what a great day of sailing! 140nm under sunny skies.
To create the @ symbol you have to press the * key and then select from the symbols. After your message is compiled you hit 'Send'. A new menu comes up and you select the 'New recipient' option. In the number field, enter +*2 and press 'OK'. Now press the 'Send' message and you are good to go. In our example, the text message got relayed to email which got sent to twittermail which relayed it to our twitter account http://www.twitter.com/indigoSV.
Sounds simple. It seems like it took us forever to figure it out.
From Indigo in the BVI … I am outa here!
How do you Twitter from the middle of the Atlantic?
One of the things that I suppose keeps you up in the middle of the night is the burning question: “How do you Twitter when you are in the middle of the Ocean?” Good question and I’m glad you asked. It turns out the answer is relatively simple, but it took a long time to get to that answer.
ciao,
andy
View Larger Map
Why Twitter From The Ocean?
One thing that is good about Twitter is that it was designed to operate with very short messages. It’s bandwidth requirements are circa 1983. This just happens to be the bandwidth that you can expect out in the middle of the ocean. So it fits right in with our bandwidth availability. Another thing is that you can broadcast to many people at the same time. No pesky email lists. Your friends and fans can just check out your updates. They can even have their updates sent to their cell phone so they can always know what you are up too.Okay, You’ve Sold me, but how do I do it?
The devil is in the details. The first obvious thing you might think of is using a satellite phone to text message updates directly to twitter. Heck, they have an international number that you can text too, so it should just work … right? Of course, not. The problem is that twitter changed the way that you register phones with their service. It used to be that you just typed in your number on their web site and you were good to go. Now it requires a complex back and forth handshake between your cell phone and their servers. That’s great if you are in one of their supported countries, but doesn’t even come close to working for everyone else in the world. And what if I’m a cheapskate and only have a SSB connection?The secret is to use your email to post a twitter update. First you need to enable an email relay such as twittermail. Once you sign up they will give you a relay email address (foobar@twittermail.com). To twit you simple send an email message to your relay address. Make sure the message is all text.And finally
As an added bonus, you can send your location using this message-> L: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=18.426,-64.61. North Latitude is a positive number, South is negative. East Longitude is positive and West Longitude is negative. Click the link, and it will bring up the current location of Indigo.ciao,
andy
View Larger Map
Pre Game Time for the BVIs
For the past couple of weeks several of us have been preparing to move a boat from Tortola to Cape Canaveral. This boat was purchased by a friend of mine about a month ago and we are going to try and bring it back up to the Pacific Northwest via Florida (and stick it on a truck). Planing this event remotely has been kind of a bitch compounded by the fact that each of the four crew live at least on hours drive away from each other. To make things easier, we have been using Google Sites to coordinate all of our trip information - from meal planning to emergency contact information, it is all there.
My task has been setting the communications to the external world so that all of our friends and family can stay in touch.
The first trick is to figure out the medium to get all of those pesky ones and zero from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the internet. There are several solutions available, but for us it came down to a Satellite phone or using a Single Side Band (SSB) radio for email. The satellite phone has the advantage that it is easy to set up, you can call people on it, and you can send SMS (text) messages with it. The downside is that it is slow (2400kb) and relatively expensive (~1$/minute - 1$/15k). The SSB, on the other hand, is cheap and already installed on the boat. The disadvantage is that is is even slower (500b), complex to operate, and may not even work on this boat.
Because of the time constraints, we decided on using the satellite phone. I can get this solution working at home, with all of the benefits of the internet. The other good thing about this solution is that it gave us SMS messaging. This allows us to easily post updates to ... twitter. For about seventy cents we can text a message to twitter and easily send status update information to friends and family. Heck you can follow us right now at: http://twitter.com/indigosv.
The second way we are going to push location data out to a server called yotreps. This service was set up to help weather forecasters get a better picture of local sea conditions using boats as mobile weather bouy. You can access yotreps and our boat Indigo here and via google maps at shiptrack. The way yotrpes works is that you send them a rather cryptic email with your local conditions in it. Here is a sample entry.
My task has been setting the communications to the external world so that all of our friends and family can stay in touch.
The first trick is to figure out the medium to get all of those pesky ones and zero from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the internet. There are several solutions available, but for us it came down to a Satellite phone or using a Single Side Band (SSB) radio for email. The satellite phone has the advantage that it is easy to set up, you can call people on it, and you can send SMS (text) messages with it. The downside is that it is slow (2400kb) and relatively expensive (~1$/minute - 1$/15k). The SSB, on the other hand, is cheap and already installed on the boat. The disadvantage is that is is even slower (500b), complex to operate, and may not even work on this boat.
Because of the time constraints, we decided on using the satellite phone. I can get this solution working at home, with all of the benefits of the internet. The other good thing about this solution is that it gave us SMS messaging. This allows us to easily post updates to ... twitter. For about seventy cents we can text a message to twitter and easily send status update information to friends and family. Heck you can follow us right now at: http://twitter.com/indigosv.
The second way we are going to push location data out to a server called yotreps. This service was set up to help weather forecasters get a better picture of local sea conditions using boats as mobile weather bouy. You can access yotreps and our boat Indigo here and via google maps at shiptrack. The way yotrpes works is that you send them a rather cryptic email with your local conditions in it. Here is a sample entry.
YOTREPS
20/10/2009
| BOAT | WIND | SWELL | | | |
No| CALL |TIME| POSITION |Cse|Spd| | |Cld|Bar |tend|
| | UTC| Lat. Lng. | °T|Kts|Dir|Kts|Dir| Ht| % | hPa| |
---|--------|----|----------------|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|----|----|
1|WDAL7LO |2215|18 26 N 64 37 W|230|0.0| NE| 3| N|0.0| 30|1011| +|
Comments:
Waiting for BJ to Buy Me
The new Dell Studio 15 arrives
Today I just got my new Dell Studio 15. I always had meant to document what is was like using Ubuntu for the summer, but I never really got around to it. So what I'm going to do is document what it takes to get this Dell into a usable state. If something is really glaring, I will try and contrast it to Ubunto/Linux.
The machine came with a nice large stack of disks for reinstalling the OS/Drivers and anything else you can think of. It also had a little insert that instructed the user to head over to http://support.dell.com to update the existing files and drivers. So after turning on the machine and answering a couple of question and then waiting and waiting for the inital configuration, I point the browser to the support address. Now as many people have mentioned before, Vista has a really annoying habit about asking you before it does almost anything. And the Dell site in particular gets this message all of the time. Worse yet, after follow the instructions, you just get a list of a bunch of different drivers and programs. It doesn't even tell you which ones need to be updated. Huh? Score one for Linux on this one. Most programs are easily update via a simple command. I decided to skip this step for now.
This is not really a how to, but more of a reminder to me if I have to do this again.
Time elapsed: 40 minutes. Jeez.
Next time to install useful software and ditch some of useless MS programs.
That's it for now.
The machine came with a nice large stack of disks for reinstalling the OS/Drivers and anything else you can think of. It also had a little insert that instructed the user to head over to http://support.dell.com to update the existing files and drivers. So after turning on the machine and answering a couple of question and then waiting and waiting for the inital configuration, I point the browser to the support address. Now as many people have mentioned before, Vista has a really annoying habit about asking you before it does almost anything. And the Dell site in particular gets this message all of the time. Worse yet, after follow the instructions, you just get a list of a bunch of different drivers and programs. It doesn't even tell you which ones need to be updated. Huh? Score one for Linux on this one. Most programs are easily update via a simple command. I decided to skip this step for now.
This is not really a how to, but more of a reminder to me if I have to do this again.
Time elapsed: 40 minutes. Jeez.
Next time to install useful software and ditch some of useless MS programs.
- Download and install Firefox
- Install my favorite extensions: Firebug, Flashblock
- Download and install Thunderbird (not the greatest email program but better than some)
- Lightening extension for Thunderbird and provider_for_google. This does a real nice job of syncing up all of your calendars. I guess windows live supports this as well, but I am still trying to stay away from proprietary S/W when possible.
- Copy profile data from linux to vista. Vista puts things in an oddball place, but basically you copy ~/mozilla/.firefox/*.default to /home/{user}/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles. You then need to edit profile.ini to point to your mailbox. whew! For some reason my calandar didn't really come over correctly, so I had relink those with my Google calanders.
- Do the same for firefox.
- Install Stock Trading program - gotta be able to work tomorrow am!
- Install Backup/Restore Program
- Start Transfering Movies & Photos - I just let that run overnight.
That's it for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)