Simon Buckle's Weblog

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.

Seems that Apple are finally going to announce new versions of their laptops this Tuesday, 14th. Although they are announcing them on Tuesday I have no idea when they will be available in stores. Any ideas?

I’ve been holding off buying a new laptop because it seems that every time I buy a “new” laptop, the next generation gets released the very next day (this did actually happen when I bought the laptop I am using now!).

What is particularly interesting is that the casings for the new laptops are rumored to be carved out from a single block of aluminum using 3D lasers and water-jet cutting. Not being much of a manufacturing expert I’m not sure what benefits that will bring but it sounds funky.

It’s over! Build something useful.

Today has been a lazy day. I have had a heavy cold since Sunday so haven’t really been on form the last couple of days. Today was no exception. I woke up just before 9am, which is late for me, had breakfast then spent most of the morning in a coffee shop reading my (freshly signed) book.

In the afternoon I got a couple of quotes from the usual high street banks about opening a merchant account for taking credit card payments online. The transaction costs aren’t too bad, it’s all the “extras” that they throw in. For example, here’s a quote I got from one bank based on the volume of transactions that I gave them:

• 150 GBP joining fee
• 25 GBP per month
• 2.43% per transaction cost with a credit card
• 23p per transaction with a debit card
• Additional charge of 2% of total turnover per month

Ouch! I am still waiting for a quote from WorldPay but based on the prices on their website, they appear to be even more expensive. Needless to say after doing a bit more poking around it looks like PayPal has the best rates.

I also listened to this episode of The Gillmor Gang where they interviewed some of the Chrome guys; it’s worth listening too.

Oh, and I also managed to free up 3GB of space on my laptop – this was important as I only had just over 2GB available at the time and I’m not buying a new laptop until Apple release the new versions of their laptops, which, if you believe the rumors, should happen in the next couple of weeks. 

I even went to Whole Foods to buy dinner as I couldn’t be bothered to cook anything! I have a cold so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Update: I’m listening to the Arsenal game on Radio 5 and a player has just come for Porto called Hulk! Probably best not to make him angry.