Horrible, terrible freedom

I did a bit of poking around this evening, and I finally managed to get my prism54 card working with WPA in Linux. Hooray! No longer will I have to suffer with the blight of windows just to securely connect to the internets while on the go, and I didn't even have to use the ndiswrapper windows drivers.

I think I'm going to try dragging my lovely black boatanchor to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can surf the web without having to deal with the filthy lab computers. We'll see how long it takes before I get sick of the extra weight.

The miracles of technology

So this evening I was playing around with my Centro, mostly checking what part of the world is in shadow in the nifty world clock app, when suddenly my computer made this bizarre noise and an icon popped up in the task bar saying "A computer is near by, would you like to transfer files?".

This came as a bit of a shock to me, to say the least. I wondered if I had fallen victim to some form of malware or trojan, so I quickly googled the error code and discovered that it was windows itself popping up the message, in response to a successful connection via IRDA.

It then occured to me that both my laptop and my phone have IR ports on them, a fact that I had up until this point completely and utterly ignored (and/or forgotten).

After a little bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the palm hotsync to sync my Centro over the IRDA connection. I've never done that before.

It's funny to think about IR port: a barely noticed flash in the pan of technology that had come and gone almost ten years ago, nowadays completely and utterly replaced by bluetooth and other RF technologies. Now, all these years later, almost entirely forgotten and on the eve of its final demise, the dusty corpse reanimates like a silicon zombie to wirelessly fling my bits of contact information back and forth over an invisible link.

I wonder: if technologies were really alive, what they would think of their passing... For me, it just makes me feel old.

Spending the government's money

So I sent in my tax return this afternoon, and I should be getting about $2500 back, which is about what I was expecting.

To celebrate this, I put in an order for a new laptop battery, a new laptop hard drive (Seagate 5400 RPM 160GB), a box of rechargeable batteries (low self-discharge), a new mouse (Logitech G5), and a 50-pack of CD blanks (For $16 why not).

The whole pile came out to $315 including all the shipping, taxes, etc. Money well spent, with plenty left over for living and whatnot.

Magic Hands

So the other day I was reading the release notes for the latest linux kernel, and I noticed some mention of improvements in the piix IDE driver.

Now, for the longest time my laptop has been having these odd hiccups with the harddrive where it would seem to timeout and reset when reading arbitrary sectors, which was causing a huge performance hit. I was worried that I would have to get a new harddrive, a cost I could do without at the moment.

But then when I was reading the description of the driver improvements, it mentioned that earlier versions were having trouble with random bus timeouts, the exact same problem I was having!

So finally today I decided to give it a whirl, and compiled up a brand new 2.6.21.1 kernel. I resisted the temptation to roast some marshmallows over the CPU for the 45 minutes or so that it was churning away, and then finally installed it and rebooted.

And...

No more HD hiccups! Yay! My laptop is useful again!

Edit: actually, it seems the HD is still being stupid, but mostly before the kernel boots which is an interesting change, and pretty much rules out software bugs. Oh well, one of these days I'll just get a new one.