Steal this box
What was Amazon thinking by packaging the Kindle Fire in a book-sized box with a distinctive clipped edge and “Kindle Fire” printed on the sides? It screams, “Steal this box!” and that’s exactly what happened to Maria’s kindle. It disappeared between the UPS departure scan of “Out for delivery” and, well, the actual delivery. It never made it our house for scan and signature.
Amazon made good on it and shipped another overnight that we did receive. A slightly belated anniversary gift but she loves her new ebook reader/entertainment device.
Amtrak Connect WiFi on Empire Service
My Empire Service intercity train had a newly applied sticker on the window reading,
“Your seat is now a hot spot.” So I figured I’d give the wireless a try. tl;dr version: free, just ok.
I’ve been using Verizon EVDO regularly for the past five years on the Albany to New York route. It’s barely usable north of Poughkeepsie. There are frequent dead spots, latency is high and throughput between stations is poor. However, my downstream bandwidth requirements are minimal: a steady 1-2KB/s for ssh, bursts of 48-128KB/s for Google news, Slashdot, a few blogs, and reading news and mailing lists in Emacs Gnus and I hit a brief peak of 225KB/s reading an image heavy site. Despite that, it’s sometimes impossible to even keep an interactive SSH session going. I hoped Amtrak’s service would be better.
The service uses the common captured portal scheme, which redirects to the agreement page. After accepting the limitations— 10MB on downloads, “objectionable content” blocked, etc.— you’re able to resolve names and things work normally. I didn’t poke around the limitations and I’m not surprised there’s nanny filtering but SSL, IPSec and SSH all work.
Unfortunately, it’s not obviously better than EVDO except near the stations where it’s remarkably faster. The dead zones, drop-outs and poor interactivity I see with Verizon along the route exist with Amtrak Connect. I suspect this is because Amtrak gets its service from the same wireless vendors and suffers the same weak coverage. Over-subscription of the on train service doesn’t seem to be a problem yet, a mid-trip wifi scan from my seat turned up eight Motorola access points on the train and twenty unique devices using them (half Apple, though only two Mac laptops including my own were visible in this car). I’ve attended conferences with more numerous and more active clients on a single AP so it’s likely the problem is the uplink coverage.
Frozen Synapse Bundle
Another Humble Bundle collection of indie games is available. Frozen Synapse is outstanding. Worth buying just for it alone.
I need an addicting turn-based strategy game like I need a hole in my head.
Woolgathering
The old Honda scraped its pegs as I gasped on adrenaline, cold tires and wild-eyed speed on an over-cooked turn. Giggle, go slower now. The smell of apples rotting on a fallow orchard mingled with an over-rich idle that I’d meant to do something about but never did because it ran so well up top. I couldn’t tell you why I got up in the dark, slipped out of a warm bed next to my wife, left good friends, to be alone in the pre-dawn wet. I pulled on my boots, zipped the suit, clucked to myself the preride checklist. Fetish against harm. In three hours the house would wake with hot coffee and good conversation. But I’m gone.
Fast forward, a triumphant super-ego and an empty garage bay. Swapping stories of great rides over drinks after work, a bullshit four corners plan for when the kid is grown.
You know you're a geek when...
You look at the postcard labeled “Expansion Celebration” and your first thought is, “What an odd pin layout for an expansion board” before realizing it shows an overhead diagram of the newly refurbished local gym.
Quick snapshot it:
Wordwhiz, a letter tile game
I’ve been learning Clojure and also wanted to learn a bit of the Apache Pivot UI. I am also a long-time fan of the Tivo Wordsmith game by Carl Haynes which I’ve discussed in older posts, so I decided to implement it as a first project.
A compiled snapshot is here. You’ll need Java 1.6 or later. if it doesn’t launch from a browser download it and try
java -jar wordwhiz.clj-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
I still have to look into making it run as an applet and I think the interface still needs a bit of work but it’s playable. The source is on github as “Wordwhiz” (git://github.com/rlonstein/wordwhiz.git).
Ross Lonstein
