Over on my ACME blog, I’ve written about using charts and infographics to explain complex or hard to visualize ideas, concepts, and relationships.
Instead of cross-posting that here, I thought I’d just provide a link and a teaser chart:
My three favourite Internet radio stations (the first two thanks to Winamp and SHOUTcast Radio) are:
ABC Classic FM is also nice, though I don’t listen to it all that often. Also, it’s only 64kbps.
That is all.
One of the reasons I bought a tablet PC was so I could be truly mobile in my computing. An important part of mobile computing is to have Internet access wherever you go. And the obvious and most reliable way to get that access is to have your own mobile broadband connection.
Last year I got that connection from 3. I bought from them a USB mobile broadband modem and signed up for a prepaid month-to-month data plan.
[Source: PC World]
This year I went one better. I bought and got Lenovo to preinstall an internal broadband modem (the Qualcomm Gobi 2000) when I bought my tablet PC.
I did that because I didn’t want to carry around a USB modem that I’d have to plug in every time I was out and about and wanted to connect to the Internet.
My plan was to transfer my existing 3 connection over from the old modem to the new one. I considered going to a 3 store and asking them to do that for me but then realized that, being a technology geek, I could probably do all that (i.e. the SIM installation and network configuration) myself. And I was right :)
So, here’s how you do it…
If you don’t already have a mobile broadband connection it’s pretty easy to get one from one of your local mobile carriers.
If you go with 3 in Australia, for example, you:
Do read the BYO Modem page on their website before you go ahead and do that, though.
In my case all I had to do was take the SIM out of my USB modem.
Inserting the SIM card into your laptop (or tablet PC, as the case may be) is really easy.
In the Lenovo ThinkPad X210 tablet PC – as in other ThinkPad X-Series computers – the slot for the SIM card lies behind the battery bay (click images for larger photos):
Take the card, orient it according to the etching on the metal plate below the slot, and push it all the way in:
Then put the battery back on and you’re done.
Assuming that you actually have a broadband modem installed in your computer and that all your drivers are up-to-date, you now need to turn your modem on.
To turn it on, use Lenovo’s Fn+F5 keystroke to bring up the ‘ThinkPad Wireless Radio’ window and press the ‘Power On’ button for the Wireless WAN Radio:
That should change the colour of the ‘Wireless WAN Radio’ text to green and should also light up (again, in green) the WWAN status indicator light just below the screen:
[Source: Laptop Mag]
If this doesn’t happen you probably don’t have a modem installed (check in Device Manager in Windows) or your modem isn’t configured properly (run Windows Update to get its latest drivers).
Next, you need to set up the connection to 3’s mobile network.
Since I use Lenovo’s Access Connections utility to manage my connections that was pretty straightforward to do. All I had to do was create a new Location Profile by clicking on the ‘Location Profiles’ tab:
And then pressing the ‘Create’ button:
Since I already have a Location Profile for my connection – called ‘3 Mobile Broadband WWAN’ – I’ll show you what its configuration is by clicking the ‘Edit’ button instead.
Under the ‘General Settings’ tab I’ve:
Under the ‘Mobile Broadband Settings’ tab I’ve said that this is an HSDPA/GPRS network that requires ‘Custom Settings’:
These ‘Custom Settings’ (which you get to by clicking the ‘Edit Settings’ button) are:
There’s no need to change any advanced or additional settings. Click all the ‘OK’ buttons and you’re done.
Go back to the ‘Connect to the Internet’ tab and you should now have ‘3 Mobile Broadband WWAN’ listed in your Location drop-down list. Select that and click the ‘Connect’ button next to it.
In this screenshot I’ve already clicked ‘Connect’ so that button has changed to ‘Stop’:
It should take about 10-20 seconds to connect…and off you go!
If the connection doesn’t take place then something hasn’t been configured properly or your account with the mobile carrier hasn’t yet been activated. I can’t help you with the former (because I’ve already told you all I know) and the latter you should already have worked out with the salesperson at the mobile carrier’s store.
If further tweaking fails and you can’t find the answer on the Internet then you should take your laptop to the mobile carrier’s store and ask for help (or, alternatively, call them up and get help over the phone).
But if all this has worked then you should now be connected to the Internet via your mobile broadband connection. Yaay!
Nadia and I have maintained our website at insanityWORKS.org since 2004. It was overhauled once (in 2007) and is past due for another major upgrade.
This time, though, the plan is to move it on to a Content Management System (CMS). Much as I love getting down and dirty with HTML code (via Dreamweaver, of course) a CMS-based site will be much faster and significantly easier to maintain. At the very least we won’t be stuck managing it from only those computers that have Dreamweaver installed on them.
The question then becomes: Which CMS do I choose? I’ve been using both proprietary and open source systems since 2001 so I know a lot about a lot of them. That means I can use pretty much any one that’s out there quite effectively; though I do plan to use an open source one for this site.
Fortunately, my choice is limited by the ones that my web hosting provider, E-Starr, provides automatic support for (specifically, installation and upgrade support). I’ve used a bunch of these CMSs in the past, too, so I’m already quite comfortable with most of them.
What’s also good is that my personal website needs aren’t what they used to be three years ago. For example:
What’s left, then, is mostly text content and a couple of archived websites. Any old CMS can handle the former and latter will remain the way they are so, all told, my CMS requirements are actually quite simple.
What I think I’ll do now test a bunch of the CMSs available to see which one I like the most. I do have lots of options, including:
Not to mention WordPress, which can be tweaked to make a pretty good CMS itself.
So, if all goes well, I will report back in a few weeks, by which time I hope to have the newest version of insanityWORKS.org up and running.
Wish me luck!
I’m done with the first phase of my comprehensive data backup plan.
In this phase I backed-up all of my data (about 180GB of it) and all of Nadia’s data (about 60GB) to our network attached storage drive. That got completed last night.
For those of you who missed it a few blog posts ago, I bought the awesome 1TB My Book World Edition hard drive from Western Digital to do our our local backing-up. The best part of this solution is that it comes with Memeo’s WD Anywhere Backup software which automates backing-up over the network. Not only is this software really easy to use, you get five licenses for it so it’s a great solution for networked, multiple computer households (it works on both PCs and Macs).
The next phase will be to organize online backups for both me and Nadia using Carbonite. I’ll probably start that over the coming weekend. I won’t backup all my media online, of course, so hopefully it won’t take more than 2-3 months to get done. (It’ll take this long because my Internet upload speeds isn’t all that great and, besides, I don’t want to use more than, say, half my monthly bandwidth cap on this initial backup.)
The final phase — which will kick off once I get a tablet PC — will be to use Live Mesh to sync my tablet PC to my desktop PC. That way I won’t need to install any backup software on my tablet PC since all its data will always be replicated on the desktop and, thanks to Phase I and II, all that desktop data will be automatically backed-up both locally and online.
I feel safer already, but there’s still more to do. On to Phase II…
In case you don’t keep up with the news, there are two major Internet-related issues being considered in Australia right now. The first is the National Broadband Network (which I’m not going to talk about here) and the second is mandatory national Internet filter that Senator Stephen Conroy wants to introduce.
So what are people saying about the filter?
It’s Not Going to Work
Nina Funnell, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (and quoting Kathryn Small), makes a very good point’. She says the proposed filter will not be censoring the Internet, it’ll be censoring the people who don’t know much about the Internet (i.e. the people who won’t know how circumvent the filter):
Small says anyone with a vested interest who knows enough about software design will be able to circumvent the system. “The real problem is Conroy will create a two-tiered system [with] a massive disparity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ of computer literacy.”
The irony is that it is children and young people who will be most likely to get around the blocks.
Children are more computer-savvy and literate than any other generation, precisely because they have grown up with computers. This was demonstrated in 2007 when a 16-year-old, Tom Wood, took just 30 minutes to crack the Government’s super-filter that cost a whopping $84 million to develop.
What a shame the Government hasn’t learnt from that embarrassing bungle.
Funnell’s whole article is really good, by the way, and I suggest you read it.
It’s Politics, Not Child Protection
Another good article to read is Stilgherrian’s ‘Evidence-based policy? Not on this filter!’ on the ABC’s The Drum Unleashed website:
Politicians use the term “evidence-based” quite differently from police detectives or scientists.
Senator Stephen Conroy provided a glorious example earlier in the week when announcing that Australia will indeed get mandatory ISP-level internet filtering some time in…well, maybe in 2011.
For politicians, “evidence” isn’t something to be gathered with forensic precision and preserved through a documented chain of custody. Nor it is something to be compiled transparently, justified through meticulous research and refined in the purifying fire of peer review.
No. For politicians, “evidence” is something to be plucked from wherever it can be found and sprinkled to justify a previously-chosen policy like so much magic fairy dust.
The Rudd government’s internet censorship proposal is not about protecting the children. It’s about politics.
If the plan were really about protecting the children, and if it were really evidence-based, the government would have first have figured out what risks children actually face – online and everywhere else. They’d then figure out the best methods of countering those risks. Then they’d figure out the most cost-effective ways of implementing those solutions.
If we did that, we’d probably find that the risks are the very same ones that child protection experts keep banging on about. Bullying by their peers. Abuse from within their own homes and families. Poverty and its associated health risks. Obesity.
But this is politics, not child protection.
Google & Kirby Weigh In
Finally, two more opinions worth reading are:
What Next?
Well, Conroy has released a discussion paper on the topic so, hopefully, people will submit in response to that excellent, well reasoned reasons for not using the filter (of which there are many). Ideally, our policymakers will then look at those arguments, realize the filter is useless (indeed, it’s a case of minimal effect for maximal cost), and will stop wasting our time and money on it. More likely, though, they will forge ahead for a while longer. That’s politics for you.
And if, despite all reasonable counterarguments, the filter does get implemented then two things will happen. The first is the broader “epic fail” of not, for example, making any difference to the sharing of child pornography. The second is the creation of whole new industry devoted to providing filter-circumvention services to people living in Australia. Certainly the latter is a service I’d pay for and I’m sure many others will as well.
So, basically, we’ll be back to where we are now…though with a few key differences:
All so a bunch of politicians and self-appointed keepers-of-our-morals feel better about themselves and all the “good work” that they’re doing to “PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!“.
Further Reading
Most of you probably know that I love LOLcats and everything else on the Cheezburger Network.
What you might not know is that, in response to the LOLxyz meme, there is the brilliant AverageCats:
AverageCats is a site that has pictures of cats.
Pictures of cats on the internet are not very new or exciting things. In fact, seeing cats on the internet is an incredibly average occurrence. They practically live here.
As you may have noticed, nearly all cat pictures include captions. And these captions usually personify the cat in some way or another.
What the internet fails to realize is that most cats do not think like people. They think like cats. AverageCats seeks to remedy this misinformation by providing a helpful, pictorial primer on cats.
AverageCats uses the accepted lolcat style to explain simple truths about cats. Any humor that arises from these pictures is coincidental.
So what is an AverageCat picture like? It’s like this:
Or like this:
:)
Check out the site make sure you read the text below the pictures as well.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that, just over a year ago, I moved all of my e-mail to Gmail. I wrote about this in some detail in these three blog posts:
I absolutely love Gmail and making this shift is one of the best technology, usability, and productivity decisions I’ve made so far.
However, switching to Gmail wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do – particularly since most of my e-mail was stored locally on my laptop (in Thunderbird) and the rest was distributed across various e-mail accounts. (You can read more about this in the blog posts listed above.)
Things have changed since then and, as announced today on the Gmail Blog, importing contacts and e-mails from other online e-mail accounts into Gmail has just become a lot easier because the whole process has been automated. This won’t help you if all your e-mails are stored locally in Outlook or Thunderbird, of course, but it will make it easier to switch from services like Yahoo! and Window Live Mail.
If you’re still using one of those services, I suggest you try Gmail for a while to see how you like it. Indeed, one of the new import features is that you can have your e-mails forwarded to Gmail from your other accounts for 30 days while you try Gmail out. I’m confident that many of you will like it so much that you will want to switch over permanently.
I can now officially say that I have been blogging for two years because on 24 April 2007 I published my first post on this blog. Woo hoo!
On the other hand, today I went and deleted my old GeoCities website because Yahoo! is closing that service down by the end of the year. Here is what the home page of that site used to look like:
I created this site on the free GeoCities web hosting service back in 1999 when I graduated from LUMS and realized that I would no longer be able to host my personal site on the LUMS ACM Chapter’s Student Sever (which, by the way, I was the administrator of). I’d had a site on the Student Server since 1997.
Want to Take a Look?
You can see archived copies of my very oldest websites thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:
Make sure you check out my Ameel’s Page o’ Links page from February 1997. Yep, that’s what the web was like back then. I still maintain that page, by the way, except it’s now called Ye Olde Page o’ Links :)
A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane
1997 was also when I became head of TeamWeb, the group of students responsible for maintaining the official LUMS website. There were many first for me in that year: my first job interview, my first professional website management job, my first website re-design project, and the first time I installed and started administering a UNIX server. Good times.
The late 90s, meanwhile, was a time of change with regards to how websites were designed and laid out. For example, when I started managing the LUMS website, the web design ethos was textured backgrounds and not too much colour. By the time I left, however, it was fill colours and information categorized into tables. Ah, the good old days of the web.
Back to the Topic
I stopped maintaining my GeoCities site when Nadia and I got the insanityWORKS.org domain in 2004. And now my old site – which was a very important part of my life on the web – is gone for good. Well, except that it’s still archived in the WayBack Machine.
But still, the shutting down of GeoCities will mark the end of the free website hosting era that began with sites like Angelfire and Geocities. These days, of course, the free web hosting sites of choice are blogging sites like Blogger and WordPress.org in conjunction with media hosting sites like Flickr and YouTube. Times change, eh?
Leaving GeoCities behind, though, I now move into my third year of blogging, my fifth year of running insanityWORKS.org, my thirteenth year on the Internet, and my twenty-fifth year of using computers.
How time flies.
Last week SBS launched the much-acclaimed television show, Mad Men, in Australia. And because this is the awesome SBS, you can watch all the episodes of Mad Men online on the SBS website :)
.jpg){kind=avatar}