Simon Buckle's Weblog

Every now and again I keep coming across stupid acronyms / names for things. Here are a few that I have come across recently:

• The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons – came across this in some news article about boob jobs gone wrong. Nicely abbreviates to BAPS.
• Git – distributed source code control system.
• It seems the Sound class in ActionScript 3.0 supports an ID3 tag called TITS.
• PerfAnal – a performance analysis tool for Java.

I have been playing around with La Fonera, which I received the other day. When it arrived I installed the latest firmware (2.1.0.2) and got that working without any problems (so far). One of the things you can do with it is plug in a USB drive in the back and then mount it over Samba. This is a brief note that describes how to set-up the Samba share and access it as a network drive on Mac OS X. I couldn’t find anything on the FON wiki so I had to poke around but it didn’t take too long to set-up.

Firstly, plug in a USB drive into the back of the router. Login to the FON management console and from the dashboard select: Services > Network Shares. The first time you go to the page, you will be prompted to enter a password for the Samba user; the default username is “fonero”, which you can’t change. You can always change the password later on by clicking on the key symbol on the share details page. That’s all you need to do on the router.

To mount the share do the following:

1. Click the Finder icon in the dock
2. Choose Connect to Server from the Go menu
3. In the address field of the Connect to Server dialog, type the following URL: smb://FON;fonero@192.168.10.1/usb-discs
4. Click Connect
5. In the Authentication dialog enter the password that you chose when you set-up the Samba share on the router

If everything worked the USB drive should now be viewable as a network drive from the Finder window. All I need to do now is figure out how to unmount the USB drive from the router without trashing it

The other day I signed up to 3 and got myself a Skypephone. I have been playing around with it over the weekend and so far it’s pretty impressive. The phone comes with Skype, which allows you to make free Skype-to-Skype calls; you can also use Skype Out too, which means that it’s possible to make cheap international calls – much cheaper than making calls directly from the mobile! I called a friend of mine in Spain using Skype and the quality was pretty good; no different than if you were using Skype from a laptop. Best of all, it didn’t cost a thing! Skype instant messaging works well too, although it took me a while to get used to the predictive text feature as it works differently to the one on my previous phone.

With the package I got I also get unlimited Internet use. The phone uses 3′s HSPDA network that offers high data transfer speeds and so far the speed has been good when “surfing” the web; much, much quicker than T-Mobile’s Web ‘n Walk, which I was on before! I can use the phone as a modem too, which means that I can connect it to my laptop and get Internet access on my laptop (I haven’t tried this yet). There are a bunch of applications pre-loaded on the phone including Facebook, MSN Messenger and a feed reader. 3 provide you with a free email address; this is useful as I wanted to be able to take photos on my phone and automatically publish them to my blog. Unfortunately I couldn’t get this to work with WordPress so I set-up a photo blog here instead – I was able to retrieve emails from the email account I set-up but the body of the email always ended up being empty for some reason! I also had a problem when I installed the latest version of GMail but, as it appears lots of people were having this problem, somebody came up with a solution to the problem.

So here’s the deal: I’m at home waiting for my router to be delivered by UPS and I’m bored. I can’t leave the house until my package arrives because in the great tradition of all delivery companies, they only deliver during “business hours” and can’t actually tell you when they are going to arrive! Knowing my luck, if I was to leave the house for more than 10 minutes, that’s when they would turn up. Great! So here I am. I called to make sure that it was being delivered today but when told by the (annoying) automated response to “have your tracking number ready” I got cut off; twice. I finally did get through to a real person and was told that it was indeed being delivered today – no, I wasn’t given a time. Plus I have no food in the house so I may just starve waiting for it to arrive. I think I’ll go and make another cup of coffee.

Update at 13.30: I’m still waiting and now I’ve ran out of cheese!

Update at 13.40: How’s that for timing? It has just arrived.

… or anywhere for that matter! Went out to a Mexican bar on Kings Road on Friday night. On the menu – in the beer section – was something called a michelada. My friend and I asked what it was and were still confused after being told what it was. I decided to play safe and order what I had had before; he decided to try it. Hindsight is a wonderful thing It was disgusting!

Turns out a michelada is basically the same as a Bloody Mary but with beer instead of vodka. Highly not recommended! To be fair it’s quite possible the bartender put a bit too much spice in it but it was undrinkable! Generally, I like to try different beers but this is one case when I’m glad I didn’t.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago I ordered a Fonera (developer version) from FON. As of yesterday it still hadn’t arrived so I logged a support ticket asking where it was. Anyway, I got a UPS tracking number so I went to the UPS site to see where my router was. According to UPS the router arrived in the UK on the 4th November but “the receiver’s address is incomplete …” – they claimed to have tried to contact me but they hadn’t. So I called up UPS and got one of those automated responses instructing me to “say each character of your tracking number one after each other.” After several attempts and “that is not a valid tracking number”, I got put through to a real person – by the way, it was a valid tracking number. Why these companies persist with voice recognition systems is beyond me! They don’t work! 

After speaking to the person at UPS it turns out that the address they had been given was something like: Flat B, London. Well I don’t know about you but I’m guessing there must be lots of Flat B’s in London; not really surprising that UPS didn’t know where to deliver it! 

I am a bit disappointed with FON’s order tracking – and the fact that they don’t appear to be able to enter an address properly. There doesn’t appear to be any means of checking on their website what orders etc I have made and the details of those orders. I got a quick response from support to my question, which was good, and was given the UPS number of my order. You would think this information would be made available to me online so I can see what is going on. If I had had this information, e.g. the tracking number, I would have been able to sort out this problem a lot sooner!

Anyway, the good news is that UPS are going to deliver it on Thursday (after I gave them the proper address).

Just came across this trailer for a maze game (via kottke.org). Check it out. It’s pretty amazing!

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Yesterday I finally got around to purchasing a FON router. The idea behind FON is that you share part of your broadband connection with other people, who pay to access it, and you get a share of the revenue – although not yet in the UK it seems! The other benefit is that you get roaming access to the FON network – other WiFi hotspots – anywhere in the world. 

The version of the router I bought is a developers edition that allows you to develop applications for it. From the product description:

“The Fonera 2.0 is intended to be a Liberator of your desktop computers by being able to both execute applications that you usually need to run in background on your computers and to help you share USB devices between the notebooks connected to your Fonera 2.0, like USB Disks, USB Scanners, USB Printers or Webcams.”

This is great for, say, downloading podcasts, radio shows and other large media. For example, I regularly listen to a couple of different podcasts. I subscribe to most of them through iTunes which dutifully checks every now and again to see if there are any new episodes. If there are any new episodes, it starts to download them … and I sit there and wait for them to come down the pipe. With the Fonera I could push that functionality off to it and as it is always connected to the Internet, when I turn on my laptop, or my iPod Touch, my “media” is already there on my local network. No more waiting for downloads! Well, at least that’s the idea I intend to play around with when it arrives. It runs OpenWrt which is a Linux distribution for embedded devices; I guess I’ll have to brush up on my Linux skills, e.g. what exactly is firmware?

It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Time Capsule – I bought one of those a few weeks ago. The Fonera doesn’t have a built-in hard disk like the Time Capsule does but it has a USB port so it’s possible to connect something like an external drive or a USB fob to it; from what I’ve seen on the wiki it’s possible to mount an external drive over Samba (I think). Both don’t have a built-in modem. A big difference is that the Fonera is an open system as opposed to Apple’s Time Capsule, which, as one comes to expect from Apple, is closed. 

I’m looking forward to playing around it. Hmm! Maybe I should get out more.

I woke up this morning at 8.50am. A short while after – the time it took to change my clock – it was 7.50am. Some times it would be nice to go back several days or years!

Nothing to see here. I have just installed Disqus and am just testing it. Basically, I get a lot of comment spam. Most of it is handled by the current plugin that I installed but I have decided to try using an external commenting system to see if I can reduce the amount of bogus traffic that gets sent my way. Feel free to try leaving a comment on this post.

Update: Well that was easy to set-up! Seems OK. Doesn’t look great but it appears to work how I thought it would.