a brave experiment at a British northern university

Sometime ago in a hidden managerial office in a remote British northern university a brave but expensive attempt to produce the first grey (gray if you are American) macbook was attempted with only a firewire cable connecting a barely used white macbook and a brand new black macbook...

god bless the iPhone - well a future version perhaps

For my sins I'm looking at how we can simply set up a variety of mobile devices to access our eduroam connection. In doing this I've had to grapple with user-interfaces designed by people with very odd mindsets. I've used Apple OS's for ages so I'm very spoilt and only have to occasionally dip into the gui-from-hell which I run within Parallels on my mac - but mobile device interfaces are a whole new dysfunctional world. Nokia seem to be the simplest and you can use a free Windows-based utility to save some elements of a configuration and import it into another device but to set up 802.1x on a Sony-Ericson appears to be impossible whilst for Windows mobile 5 you need a lot of luck or a brain the size of a small planet.

I think I'm turning Japanese...

Not an entry about the pop song by the Vapors but about the photograph of the square black and white matrix to the right. It is a Datamatrix (DM) 'mobile-code', one of the two open-standard formats for 2D codes - the other is a Quick Response (QR) 'mobile-code'. I noticed this at the bottom of a roadside advert and remembered that my son had told me he had seen Japanese teenagers pointing their camera phones at these objects when he was in Japan some years ago. A quick Google search and the loan of a Nokia N95 camera phone had this rather useful technology working in minutes. The Nokia Mobiles codes page gives you the information you need. I downloaded the free i-nigma reader from here (lots of devices are supported including Windows Mobile), created a Datamatrix code for a URL link here, pointed my phones's camera at the code on screen and the phone's browser opened the appropriate web page. The software even managed with the rather poor quality photograph taken of the above-mentioned advert (but the N95 has a good quality camera).

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Now playing: The Pretty Things - Don't Bring Me Down
via FoxyTunes

Paris 2007

here's one of this year's holiday pics