Missing the Strangest of Things

I missed Twitter over the weekend. I’ve barely been using it for two weeks and when it’s not working, I’m sad. It looks like it is finally almost working again, but I don’t want to get too attached or it will go away again. The RSS to the right of this post that has my Tweets in it just started double posting, so things aren’t fully righted quite yet, it seems. This doubling might be Twitter’s fault, or it might be mine because I changed the theme of my blog, but in both cases the services are free to me so I can’t really complain, so I won’t. This is not a complaining post, but rather just an observation of humans interacting.

Tonight is a big night for Barack Obama supporters. I don’t think we actually expect him to win outright in Pennsylvania. We know better than to hope for that, but if he comes close at all to victory, then it should be over for Hillary. She will probably hang on until the end, but I think we all know that this would be one of those blows that results in internal bleeding which really should be looked at by a doctor as opposed to trying to fight on.

How does this apply to Twitter? Well, because events/happenings like tonight or what sounds like happened at SXSW earlier this year are what Twitter seems perfect for. Maybe Twitter was fixed just in time, maybe not. For a site which has no visible business model, we can be thankful it exists at all. Twitter is a strange beast, but even people’s reaction, or lack thereof, to it being wonky, has been the most fascinating part of all.

Run free, little mouse, run free!

The place was infested with mice. What, oh what, to do?

There are several options out there, few of them humane, for trying to deal with little visitors.

A company called Greenfeet has come up with a nifty solution that has worked well for me, at least.

Here is what it looks like in action:

From Flora and Fauna

The little mouse can’t get to the cracker until you let him and ideally you reveal the bait outside far from your home. So far, the mice I have caught haven’t been the smartest ones ever, or were scared out of their minds as mice like to get, and I had to remove the cracker every time before they would leave the green house. They are supposed to chew their way through the cracker when you reveal the exit and run away, or as they seem to around here, hop like miniature kangaroos.  The menagerie gathered so far is up on Picasa.  I sure hope they aren’t all the same mouse!

So, if you don’t like the idea of filling up the landfills with dead mice, then you might want to give this device a try. It takes a little extra work and attention than the other options out there, but the exercise gotten when freeing the little buggers is certainly worth something.

Wires Are Not So Bad Part 2 (or Alls Well That Ends Well, as Long As It Doesn’t Take a Lifetime)

As a follow up to my previous whine-fest and rant about my WiFi woes, I thought I would document what I’ve done in the meantime to solve most of the problems. This will clear the air for a relatively glowing review of the Zaurus Personal Mobile Tool both with the updated Sharp ROM as I am currently exporing with it, and then <a href=”http://www.openzaurus.org/oz_website/content/news”Open Zaurus when I get the guts to take the plunge with that.

Okay, so I was having problems with the D-Link DCF 660W compact flash slot wireless card I had been trying to use with the Zaurus. It had worked just fine at first with an ad-hoc wireless solution I was trying, but then decided to stop working. I had been changing things around, updated my dsl router to include wireless, etc, that I was unsure where the breakdown was occuring.

In parallel with this I had also been trying to install a wireless PCMCIA card on an older Compaq laptop that I was able to rescue from the corporate dumpster a few years ago. I had horrendous luck with both a D-Link (DWL-650) card and a Belkin (FD something) card. Turns out I had picked what I have come to realize were the two worst possible cards to start out with, but I suppose I did learn quite a bit during my driver installation trials with those cards, but I would not wish that particular brand of fun on anyone. I actually tried to do my research after I wantonly picked up the D-Link card, but was still burned by a chipset switch with the Belkin. All I can say is that you will much better off if you are not restricted to the 16-bit offerings and have a laptop that can support 32-bit CardBus and DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING. Don’t buy one of these if you plan to throw it on the shelf for a couple of weeks. Be ready to return things and don’t waste a lot of time if things don’t work right away.

Of course, I had the benefit of everything I learned during the bad times, but once I had a supported card, it was amazingly painless to get wireless working under linux. The PCMCIA card I ended up with was from Netgear (the MA401) and of course from the store I should have gone to right at first. Live and learn, I guess, but read more horror stories like this one before you begin.

The piece of good news is that after sending my Zaurus unit back to Sharp and receiving it back with more scratches than repairs and no change to the failure of the D-Link cf card, I gave D-Link tech support a try. It had been longer than 30 days, so I could no longer return it to Tiger Direct, plus they require you to go through the manufacturer for an RMA#, regardless.

I want to actually commend D-Link in this regard. I first called them in the middle of the night. The guy tried to help me, but he was clueless: Zaurus-what? What operating system is that? Hehe. Well, at least he got a ticket opened for me before he tried to escalate me to upper-eschelon support where I ended up in phone llimbo. I did not call back right away, because I assumed I would be in for a repetitive nightmare of useless troubleshooting on an item I was sure was defective.

To confirm this in the meantime, I borrowed an HP Ipaq from a coworker. Of course, this has builit-in WiFi, but that was OK, since I wanted to see if I got the same before upon insertion of the CF Card, ie the link light did not stay lit as the card was recognized. And lo and behold, I did get the same behavior!

Armed with this, I called D-Link back and was able to browbeat a low-level tech into understanding that this was not a software issue. That is could not be and that he needed to get me an RMA number right away. He “consulted with his manager” and converted my case to a return for replacement. Yay.

D-Link has a fairly nice setup where you can return an item to them while they are shipping the replacement to you. This is at no cost to the consumer, unless they want the replacement back faster than a week, which I did. I spent a few bucks, got the replacement back before the weekend and magically it works and wonders of wireless are mine.

Lessons learned (with wireless tech specifically and for the whole troubleshooting process, of which I am always trying to hone my skills, in general)? One: research, research and more research, with the least amount of assumptions possible. And two: replace components first, (especially when on a timeline for refunds/returns) and then turn to the main unit itself.

That done, I can now talk about the good stuff (in a later entry) that the Zaurus can bring while comparing it to both my previous PDA (a Handspring Visor Prism) and to a full-sized laptop. And then later moving to Open Zaurus which does seem to maintain the PDA aspect of the Tool, but seems to leave even room for expansion and delight.

Wires Are Not So Bad

Over the last month or so, I have been experimenting with various 802.11b wireless hardware devices and options. For various reasons, I just plainly got the bug to try out wifi. So far, because I am not lucky enough to currently have a job that would give me a centrino laptop to use, but have rather gone the less traveled route of trying to use old Pentium 90 laptops running linux tempered with a newly cosidered and purchased Sharp Zaurus PDA (which also runs linux, of course) which seems to like to eat CFio cards, I have only had fleeting glimpses of the wonder of wireless.

The experience with both machines has been very educational, as I have tinkered with them an hour here and an hour there over the previous weeks. I knew better than to run out and grab the nearest wireless pc card and expect it to work out of the box with my laptop. For one thing, I was almost positive the kernel I was running didn’t even know what wireless was. I was smart enough to get a 16bit card, even though 90 percent of the pc cards sold for wireless these days seem to be 32bit cardbus, which is not surprising since the price leader is 802.11g and I don’t think isa could handle g speeds very well. My first forays into wireless as far as brand was concerned had more to do with who had a 16bit pcmcia card on the shelf when I walked in the store. In hindsight, probably not the least frustrating way to go about such a venture.

I ended up getting a D-Link pcmcia card and a D-Link PCI card to run in a Windows XP machine for some ad-hoc experiments. I figured I might lessen some of the frustration by the fact that XP has some, on the surface at least, decent support for wireless cards built in. In that supposition, I was correct at least, hence the XP was relatively simple, as expected. But, it turns out the pcmcia card I chose has had the dreaded chipset switcheroo performed by the manufacturer at least twice with the same model number, so I had a heck of a time at first even figuring out for sure which chipset I had. Turns out it was prism2 variant, but, of course, too new for wlan-linux-ng to support.

In the meantime, since going the ultra-cheap route was not resulting in any satisfaction, I decided to take the plunge and jump on a $300 (thank you tax refund) Sharp Zaurus 5600. What a nice machine! (gushing about this device in specific detail will mostly be left for another day) I did not realize that it would be impossible to find a CFio wireless card in a brick and mortar store, but found a great deal online and went with D-Link again. My luck with D-Link being so mixed in that their card prices were low but their consistency in labeling even lower, I am since hoping that the whole attachment to a D-Link chain of cards was not a mistake on my part, since either something is wrong with that particular CF card or is wrong with the CF slot on my Zaurus since I had to hold the card in place at an odd angle of pressure in order for it even to be recognized and keep assocation with either a card in ad-hoc mode or an access point. This, of course, after a few days of it working perfectly.

The poor device is on the way back to Sharp to be looked at. As much as I like the Zaurus itself, I was not too happy with their hardware support. I felt like I was being accused of not knowing how to use a CF slot, but whatever. I will reserve judgement, for now. Hopefully they will be able to remove the huge piece of dust which has been backlit in annoying glory while they are looking at the thing. With my luck, it will come back with huge glowing dust bunnies running around under the touch screen tantalizingly just out of reach and certainly unwilling to hide like good dust bunnies should.

So, I am currently stuck in a wired world until my zaurus comes back. Woe is me. Somehow I shall survive. After a brief dalliance with a non-Dlink pcmcia card (a Belkin model which ALSO turned out to have chipset issues, plus a lack of desire to run in ad-hoc mode), I have returned everything I could for a refund and am realizing that the zaurus will make a perfect “laptop” for me. It is more than powerful enough in all the right ways. This would not work for everyone, since some like their big screen and their full size keyboard and the ability to play dvd’s or cd’s. I will surely be content with less as befits my nature.

Sometimes I wish I were still working a job where I was given a nice laptop to use, but all of this has made me take a deep breath and realize that the Zaurus would definitely make a perfect laptop replacement, especially when replacing one laced with so much frustration. I am definitely one to eke the last bit of use out of most of the hardware I own, but am beginning to learn when to call it quits. I already had an ir keyboard that turned out to work just fine (with the creative use of mirrors) and out of the box (sans wireless) the usb wired connectivity to the desktop and the network beyond is very nice. Being able to vncview the zaurus screen from any other computer is the clincher. Like I say, more detail on the Zaurus itself, once it gets back from its already too long trip to Romeoville, Illinois.