I've gone analogue. Again. Frustrated by the short life span, poor sound quality, and dying battery in my digital cordless phone, I've disconnected it and replugged in my old analogue handset. Ahhhh. Comfortable handset, clear sound at the right volume, no additional costs. I can ask Eircom to provide free call answering services on my phone plan, so I don't even need to go buy an answering machine (the last one I bought before going digital was $20 in California from Costco... in 1988. Lasted 12 years. Never broke. Unlike crappy, misbehaving, expensive new ones).

For a decent cordless phone I'd be looking at the guts of €150. Then there are battery replacement costs. And the eventual phone replacement costs. And if the electricity goes, it doesn't work (like... in an emergency). My arm gets cramped holding those small digital handsets. The whole point of my home phone is that it is supposed to be a more pleasant speaking experience than using my (shudder) mobile -- which I prefer to regard as a portable answering machine anyway. I only realise now how much I have hated my digital phone for the last three years.

So: I've gone back to analogue, which beats out cordless digital in terms of price, comfort, sound and safety. What a Luddite I am. It sure is great to enjoy using a phone again, though.

2:21:30 PM  #   your two cents []

Slashdot links to another piece on the Computer History Museum (My Irish Times piece is here [with stupid headline not provided by me...], and will also have a different piece in the UK Guardian in a week or so). Re-Opened Computer History Museum Explored. There's some great commentary and tales coming up in the discussion, if you like computing history.

I liked this comment from one Slashdotter:

I am currently working on restoring a piece of the ENIAC at the University of Michigan - I know that when the piece was prepared for display, they literally put the computer in the back of a pickup truck and took it to the local do-it-yourself high-pressure car wash. Can't exactly do that with today's computers, eh?

I interviewed a guy who collects Commodore 64s a few years ago for a Guardian piece on Silicon Valley's Vintage Computer Festival (still have the 'geek' t-shirt!), and he told me that when he gets really dusty ones he takes out the circuit board, sticks the board in the dishwasher with no detergent, then puts it in an oven on low to dry out for an hour or two. Puts it back in and the PC works fine. Heh!

So many great stories start to surface when people discuss old computers or their industry experiences from the past.

11:39:24 AM  #   your two cents []

Paris Wi-Fi: Drizzle, Not Sizzle. "Despite free Wi-Fi service near and in Metro and train stations, usage was low: Esme Vos writes that only 1,700 people tried the free Wi-Fi in Paris during the first three months of the trial. A large minority only used it once (probably tracked via their MAC address). When Parisians return from their month-long vacations, they'll find it's now 10 euros an hour to use the service that they weren't using in large numbers anyway...." [Wi-Fi Networking News]
11:22:07 AM  #   your two cents []

Audiopad: Linux-based musical gizmo. "Audiopad is a musical composition and performance device that tracks the positions of objects on a flat surface, then converts their motion into music. Developed by MIT PhD students James Patten and Ben Recht, the system is is powered by Debian Linux. It consists of a set of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop, a matrix of antennae that track the objects, and an LCD projector which displays an animated UI." Link to QuickTime demo movie, Discuss (via LinuxDevices.com)
[Boing Boing Blog]

11:20:24 AM  #   your two cents []

Training molecules to draw chips. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have come up with a way to organize molecules through lithography, the science of "drawing" chip circuits. [CNET News.com]
11:18:55 AM  #   your two cents []

Security Experts: Electronic Voting Machines Threaten Democracy. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
11:13:52 AM  #   your two cents []

US to show corpse photos. [Guardian Unlimited]... Hmmmm. The US government considers it fine to show what it describes as "horrific" pictures of corpses to the Iraqi people as long as they are of Saddam Hussein's sons, but pushed hard to block the media showing pictures of the corpses of war dead in the US, and even abroad.
11:13:14 AM  #   your two cents []

MIT Technology Review: Don't Break E-Mail To Save It. Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist for Cloudmark: "My perspective on design of spam filtration solutions is centered around exploitation of the various constraints of the spammer. One thing we don't talk about enough is the fact that spammers have rather serious constraints." [Tomalak's Realm]
11:07:48 AM  #   your two cents []