2 Bit Hacker

Happy holidays to everyone and all that. Delia and I just got back from her aunt’s house after eating far too much tasty food. I’m now the proud owner of a number of shirts courtesy of Delia’s family, a few more t-shirts, a neat mug, and PixelBlocks from Delia (in addition to the EV mode kit and floor mats for the Prius she already gave me on the solstice,) and a Garmin nüvi 250W from my dad.

Over the weekend Delia and I got the new TV hooked up, and it’s looking good. I also decided to go ahead and get the Xbox 360, and I’m rather glad I did, as the TiVo HD turned out to be dead on arrival. For some reason it was stuck in a reboot cycle and couldn’t get past it’s initial welcome screen. TiVo support was pretty cool about it and are doing an advanced ship RMA on it, so hopefully I’ll have that soon. The Xbox has been filling the time we would have normally spent watching TV, so it works out, I suppose. For games, we picked up Assassin’s Creed for me, DDR and Katamari for Delia.

Unfortunately my bad luck with new devices has extended to the Garmin my dad sent me. It powers up then complains that it has no maps and is therefore useless. Garmin’s online support is equally useless it seems, as they try to load pages from RFC1918 private address space, or try to redirect you to hosts that don’t exist in the DNS. Their phone support is, of course, closed for the holiday. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

All in all though, I’m happy. I still think Delia spent too much on me, and I feel bad that I didn’t get her more, which seems to happen every year.

It’s that time again, when I get bored waiting for Delia to get out of work and I don’t feel like doing anything productive, when I decide it’s time to update ye olde weblog. As usual, I don’t think much is really going on in my life, I continue to work, my left leg is still weird from my last back problem, my car is still running well, though the mileage is hurting in the cold.

One somewhat interesting thing is that I finally broke down and ordered a shiny new HDTV last week. It’s an LG 37LB5D, which is a 37″ widescreen LCD at full 1080p resolution. To go with it, I also ordered a TiVo HD so I’ll have some HD content to watch. They should both arrive tomorrow, at which point I’ll get to have fun getting CableCARDs from Comcast. Oh yeah, and if anyone out there is interested in a used 27″ Sony WEGA tube, let me know. It’s too big to really go anywhere else in my apartment.

The new TV has also got me thinking about picking up an Xbox 360. I haven’t really been doing a lot of console gaming lately, but it looks like there are some decent new games out there, and the whole online thing looks interesting. I think Delia wants one too, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll just get the PS2 hooked up again, and if we actually use it, I’ll get the newer thing.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Some people have asked what I want for the upcoming holiday, so I’ve started tagging some things as “want” on my del.icio.us. Nothing terribly fancy. I’m trying to get the apartment cleaned up and presentable so that people can actually come over. If that project gets complete soon, maybe we’ll have some people over for a holiday party of some sort.

It appears Palm has released a new update for the Verizon Treo 700p just a couple of days ago. I find it odd that they didn’t change the version number of the update, instead adding an underscore to the version string to differentiate this version from the last. I’ve installed it on my Treo, so we’ll see if it clears up the error I’ve been getting.

I’ve been giving some thought lately about the mobile devices that I carry with me on a daily basis. This currently includes the Palm Treo 700p and the Nokia 770, but I’m considering ditching the 700p and replacing it with a more conventional phone, perhaps the LG-VX9900 aka “enV”.

Why ditch the 700p? As much as I love Palm OS and the integration of PDA and cellphone, it’s fairly buggy. Before the latest firmware upgrade it had a tendency to freeze up when receiving text message, which was frequently infuriating while trying to hold a conversation via text. After the upgrade it likes to report an “Error 3000″ when you try to use data services, which requires turning the radio off and on to fix, a process that takes about 30 seconds, but gets annoying when you wanted to hop online to check something quickly. There’s also a problem where the 700p will go into a continuous reboot cycle, which can only be broken by performing a hard reset (wiping all data from flash, requiring a restore from backup.) I’ve only been hit by this problem once, a couple of days ago, but Delia’s 700p has done it on an almost monthly basis.

But for all it’s faults, I still like having a Palm OS device. I’ve accumulated a decent amount of paid software for it over the years, stuff like Pocket Quicken and Highway Manager, which I use on a fairly regular basis. If I decide to switch to the enV and the 770, I’ll be giving up some software I’ve been using for years without any good replacements.

I’ve considered a few solutions to this. There is a PalmOS emulator available for the Nokia 770/N800 OS. I haven’t tried it out yet, but if it’s usable, it might be enough to satisfy my appetite for Palm apps. If not, then I’m stuck either trying to find, or trying to write, replacements applications. I don’t think that would be hard in the case of a mileage tracker, but something to sync with Quicken might be harder to come by.

Of course, I could pick up another Palm device. A Z22 would suffice, though I think I’d prefer an E2, as it could tether to the enV for data access. Or perhaps a Zodiac, though discontinued and the company out-of-business, would make a good addition to my pockets. But with any of these, I’d be up to three devices, which gets to be a bit cumbersome. I think I’d have to carry either the 770 or the Palm; carrying both would be annoying.

Not sure what I’m going to do yet. I could just keep the 700p and deal with it’s issues, wait for another firmware upgrade, or maybe hope Verizon releases their version of the Treo 755p and hope that it doesn’t have the problems that the 700p has.

For the past week or so I’ve had a brand new toy, a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It’s a pretty slick device, 802.11b, Bluetooth, an 800×480 touch screen, running a Debian-derivative Linux. I haven’t done a lot of hacking on it yet, but just the built-in apps are pretty nice. I have installed Kismet, and it makes a nice little wardriving platform, though I’ll need to get a Bluetooth GPS if I want to track where I see APs.

I’m also planning on getting a Bluetooth OBDII adapter, so I can run Carman, a pretty nice looking application for monitoring vehicle information. I think with a GPS and the OBDII adapter, I’ll be able to use the 770 in place of a car computer for a while. A second cover for the device could be mounted to the dash relatively easily to give it a stable place to sit while I’m driving.

There are a couple of slight annoyances with it though. For some reason Nokia decided to go with RS-MMC flash cards for it, which are probably the rarest of the sub-SD flash card standards. But that’s not too big a deal. The on-screen keyboard requires two taps to get to some oft-used symbols, like hyphen, which makes it a pain when I’m doing stuff on the command-line. I’m considering trying out a Bluetooth keyboard with it, maybe even a Frogpad, though I’m not sure if that would make text entry more or less of a pain.

I do like the built-in apps though. The e-mail and RSS feed readers are usable, though not terribly special. The default web browser is Opera, and does an excellent job of rendering pages for the small screen. They included a Jabber client, which works well for Google Talk, but can’t handle multiple accounts online at a time, and refuses to connect to our internal Jabber server at work.

Here are some gratuitous screen shots:

After a couple months of being offline due to a bad power supply, my home PC is operational again, so hopefully I’ll finally get to play some Supreme Commander and whatever happens to be on GameTap. The old power supply was causing weird problems for a while until it finally got to the point where the system wouldn’t boot. Shipped the defective back to Antec and got my replacement yesterday.

I think I need a new naming scheme for 2bithacker.net though. Final Fantasy enemies is getting kindof old, and I just don’t feel like it fits anymore. I like jtn’s scheme of disasters (hindenburg, titanic, etc) and work’s scheme of elements (titanium, chlorine, and so on) but I can’t seem to think of a decent non-overused system for 2bithacker.net. Any suggestions? (Don’t suggest anything Tolkien related, that’s done to death.)

I finally got around to setting up a donation page for Hindenburg. Since we (read “me”) are paying for hosting now, we’re asking for people who use Hindenburg to help out with the hosting costs. I’m not all that worried about it, but for the past few months I’ve been paying the $90/mo out of my pocket, which is kindof annoying.

I’m pretty happy with how the bar graph turned out. I hope people keep donating enough to fill it out with some nice looking data.

Also, we’re starting to re-enable accounts that were on Hindenburg before the move, so if you had an account before and want it back, shoot me an e-mail or drop Jason a line. If you didn’t have an account before, but would like one, do the same thing, I guess.