I’m really quite angry right now: half at Blizzard, and half at myself because I knew that I was going to get something like this and gave them my money anyway. Starcraft II doesn’t support LAN play. This is not just a case of needing to be online and authenticated with Battle.net to fire up [...]
When I first started playing photography properly I was content to use iPhoto to do my basic post-processing. Now I’m in a mac-less environment and I like to use GIMP to edit things. Unfortunately I wasn’t really sure what iPhoto was doing with my photo: I would just tweak the sliders until I was happy. [...]
On a friend’s advice, this week I found at the library and read The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll. Wow. What a read: a true story about an astronomer-programmer who as a beginning system administrator finds evidence of an intruder and ends up spending the better [...]
The political battle of censorship in Australia has been relatively futile so far for those of us against it. By its proponents, issues have been muddled together, sensationalist terms like “child porn” have been bandied about and claims have been made that it’s safer for Australian children using the Internet. That last part is supposed [...]
Recently I was pondering on the Diaspora project’s one month report, wondering how exactly comments on status updates were being routed. Does the person who owns the status update receive the comment on their seed and potentially have the opportunity to review it before it is broadcast? That seems reasonable. Really, though, the comment belongs [...]
We have a tricky problem to solve as we begin to use the Internet on more and more devices: making our data available on all of them. These devices include desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, consoles which play movies and music, cars with telnet ignition interfaces, etc. I believe that the only tenable long-term solution [...]
Tonight I appeared briefly on ABC’s programme Q&A which was this week about Internet filtering. I asked of the panellists a question which read: (John Gilmore famously once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” However,) “The Net” is not some robot but the result of how everyone uses it. Since [...]
The University of Tasmania has student wireless Internet access, a network called UConnect. (Great pun.) This network has sucked by varying amounts over the three and a half years I’ve spent there as a student. It’s some sort of 802.1X beastie. Setting it up on GNU/Linux is mostly a trial-and-error affair. My current settings are [...]
Lots of people get units wrong. Please don’t be one of those people. This is a tutorial introduction to getting your computing units right. The history of these issues is covered in extensive detail at Wikipedia. File or Data Size Everyone knows that computers store things as 1s and 0s. These are called bits. (Short [...]
This is my newest radio. It’s called a Pixie II. It also happens to be the first amateur-band transmitter I’ve ever made. These things are pretty cool. It is a continuous wave (CW) (or morse code) transceiver operating at a fixed frequency determined by a crystal on an HF band. Mine’s configured for 80 metres [...]