Well surprise, surprise, Sat Nav is once more being blamed for the idiocy of a driver who blindly follows it into a dangerous situation. This 20 year old student narrowly avoided being nominated for the Darwin Awards.
Sat Nav is no different to a road atlas, both have map errors, but no-one hears of them being blamed for the driver deciding to follow a back lane across a railway level crossing, so why do people follow Sat Nav instructions without question? If the Sat Nav told you to turn left, half way across a bridge, would you comply?
It’s just another example of ‘not my fault’ attitude.
My iMac lost its network connection this morning. The system.log was full of these:
May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: bootp_session_transmit: bpf_write(en2) failed: No buffer space available (55)
May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: DHCP en2: INIT transmit failed
which is odd, because the iMac only has two ethernet interfaces: en0 (wired) and en1 (wireless), so what is en2?
It seems that 10.4.9 introduced something called ‘Bluetooth PAN‘ and when I paired up my new Nokia 6300, OS X enabled this. Unfortunately, it is this which causes the DHCP issue shown in system.log.
The solution (thanks to Jonas Salling’s comment on Justin Williams’ Blog) is to disable Bluetooth PAN in system preferences.
Google Analytics have come up with a flash new interface, but have made one glaring error – They have lumped the ex-Soviet Union into Europe, not Asia. Click on the thumbnail below to see.
BBC Have Your Say has recently started showing statistics about the posts made to a topic. Look, however, at the figures on this post. Out of 1138 posts, they have only got around to posting a measly 57. That’s only 5%. If you haven’t got the staff to moderate it, then they should make it reactively moderated or don’t bother including the topic. Very soon, people will realise there’s no point in bothering.
The implementation also fails to allow proper threaded conversation. People often quote others but because of the disjointed nature of the post order, it is not possible to see the original quoted post.
As well as recommending a post, it should also be possible to mark it negatively. A more conventional forum or newsgroup style would work better and should be adopted.
While moving house recently, I found an old Sony portable radio which my parents had given me back in the 70s. The model number is a TR-3550. It is Medium Wave only but is still working. The only repair I had to do was replace the battery connection. It is interesting to note the complete lack of integrated circuits. All components are discrete components. Click on the pictures below for some views.
According to VirginMedia’s own website, they have started to automatically reduce the broadband speed of people who they determine are using too much bandwidth. It would appear that downloading an ISO image is enough to trigger this throttling.
When I first got my TomTom Go 500, I tried the 1 month free traffic trial and found it to be next to useless, failing to warn of two major traffic jams. I later changed phone to a Sony Ericsson k750i which fails to provide wireless data for the TomTom (it worked OK with my Powerbook and Palm T|X).
Now that I’ve got a new phone which provides wireless data again, I decided to try the traffic function again. Unfortunately, the system remembers that I’d used my free trial, so I had to pay €39.
1st May
The first thing that showed up was ‘lane closed at Blackrod – delay 0 min’. Now there have been roadworks on the A6 at Blackrod since mid-March, but they finished last week. I presume this is still showing because they’ve got some roadworks data which is out of date.
Read more…
Ever filled in a form on a website where they insist that you provide your postal address, but you’re thinking “what the hell do you want that for? It’s not needed and it’s none of your business”?
You could always use:
23/24 Leinster Gardens
London
W2 3AN
What’s special about this address? Take a look.
If you need a phone number, try here.
Here’s some footage of Professor Stephen Hawking enjoying a flight on the ‘vomit comet’.
Having changed from a Sony Ericsson k750i to a Nokia 6300, I was amazed that the Nokia did not support the wholesale copying of my phonebook by Bluetooth, so I had to find another way round. This was to set up a temporary account on my Mac and use iSync to synchronise the two bluetooth phones. (It also has the benefit of making a backup copy of my phonebook on the Mac).
Unfortunately, the Nokia 6300 is too new to be listed as supported by iSync, but Koos Kaspers has a post on how to modify the iSync files to include it in the list of supported phones. This worked a treat, and my phonebook was copied over in no time at all.
