Blogcom in Antwerp was exactly what I had hoped it would be: an interesting mix of old acquaintances and new faces and lots of fun conversations. The event was organised by Jeroen and some 50 bloggers showed up. No speeches, but lots of mingling and chatting. We’ll have to remember that for the next Brussels blogger’s meeting.
Continue reading ‘Blogcom Antwerp – pings and comments’
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Page 2 of 3
Went to a DJ-set (Peaches @ Mirano/Dirty Dancing) yesterday and was not too impressed with the DJ skills of Peaches. Yes, she knew what kind of hard pumping electro the audience wanted to hear, but she couldn’t beatmix if her life depended on it. Lady Jane who played before her, now that’s a real DJ, and a cool chick too (as Ine and D&tC would probably agree).
We were standing at what turned out to be the exit of the subwoofers. Peaches seems to have issues hearing her lower frequencies, which she solves by turning the bass up. Way up. At one moment we almost got cardiac problems, when a merciless 120dB 20Hz bassline was amplified to what was probably the ‘eleven’ setting. On the way home, since I couldn’t hear anymore anyway, I was thinking about the power of basslines, and about the ones that made me start to play the bass guitar myself, the ones I found extremely catchy:
Continue reading ‘Pleasure from da bass – memorable bass lines’
A friend of mine, Kurt Deruyter, has just spent most of last year travelling around Europe taking pictures of the most idyllic golf courses. How’s that for a job? The result is not just any photobook, but the biggest coffee-table book on golf ever published. Funny detail: when you buy a copy, you actually get a coffee table with it. The book, when opened, measures 60 cm by 140 cm (22.6 inch by 55.1 inch).
Continue reading ‘Golf, a tribute’
As you might have read in my Migrating to Wordpress article, I am now the proud owner of both a Bluehost and Dreamhost account. These two shared hosting providers have similar strong offerings for a similar low price, but they’re nevertheless different. Let’s compare both:
The raw numbers
BLUEHOST.COM |
DREAMHOST.COM |
|---|---|
| PRICE | |
| $6.95/mon (2 years prepaid) | $7.95/mon (2 years prepaid) |
| FEATURES | |
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| ONE-CLICK Install | |
| CPanel/Fantastico: Wordpress, pMachine, Nucleus, Drupal, Joomla, PhpNuke, Typo3, phpBB2, OS Commerce, Coppermine, Gallery, PHPList, Advanced Poll, PHProject, SohoLaunch, PhpWiki, PhpAdsNew, WebCalendar, Moodle, … | Home-made: Wordpress, phpBB, Advanced Poll, osCommerce, MediaWiki, Joomla, Gallery, WebCalendar |
I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little as 25 euro, that is not a big investment.
I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public
- Description
- The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.
- PRO
- * both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network. - CONTRA
- * If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.
Continue reading ‘Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection’
If your (Belgian) parents or grand-parents want to buy a cheap PC to get started on the Web, tell them to hold back for a couple more days. The Federal Government – through FEDICT – has set up a program to sponsor a complete package of PC + software + broadband + training for a sharp price. The title of the project: IVI or “Internet voor Iedereen” – the launch is planned for next week, April 18th.
Continue reading ‘IVI: Internet voor Iedereen’
SWITCHING PHONES
Back in the old days, switching your mobile phone was easier: you just popped your SIM card out of the old one and threw it into the new one. That only works if your telephone numbers are actually stored on the SIM card. Since these cards still have ridiculously little storage space (250 numbers of max 16 characters) , you’re tempted to just use the phone instead for storing your data. My Samsung phone had a function ‘copy SIM to phone’ so that’s what I did. Unfortunately it did not have a ‘copy phone memory to SIM’. It took me a couple of hours, spread over 2-3 days, to figure out a way to get the numbers on the SIM so they turn up on my Nokia N91. The Bluetooth connectivity on the Samsung never worked great for synchronisation, but eventually I figured out a way to export and re-import my numbers.The Nokia, on the other hand, does not have a ‘copy the whole SIM to memory’ function so I have to do it one by one. Oh well…
Continue reading ‘Nokia N91 – first impressions’
I complained back in 2004 that Nokia didn’t have any model that pleased me. I had used 5 Nokia mobile phones at that point, wanted to buy a new one and did’t find anything suitable. Some months later I bought me a Samsung 720: a small clamshell phone with a nice design, lots of features and unfortunately one main flaw: voice quality. The number of people that have asked me: “are you in a tunnel or something? I can hardly hear you“. Those days may be over.
Beause Nokia now has the opportunity to return with a vengeance. I have been asked by the kind people of TheseDays to take the new Nokia N91 phone for an elaborate test drive. A phone with a 4GB hard drive and Wifi (802.11g) built-in, I wasn’t too difficult to convince.
Continue reading ‘Nokia N91: return of the Fin’
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