… when my lovely new iPhone 4, untainted by carrier locking, arrives in a beautiful FedEx box directly from the Apple factory in Shenzhen, China.
My first legitimately-unlocked iPhone… and I already have a microSIM for it so I’m ready to go.
I will probably be too busy playing with it to post for a few days 
Yesterday, SaskTel launched its 3G+ HSPA+ network in Saskatchewan.
This is of minimal significance to a lot of people, but as a person who likes GSM and its 3G successors, it’s music to my ears. You see, until now I’ve had two choices for data connectivity at the cottage: dialup Internet at about 45kbps (not bad for data from a rural location, really), or 2G Rogers coverage. Well, 2.5G because it’s EDGE… but that’s still limited to about 100kbps most of the time . At times (when the fictitious Becky that my brother-and-law and I talk about, across the lake in Regina Beach, is on the phone) I get about 15-20kbps. And the latency is pretty bad.
So today, I signed up for SaskTel’s 3G data service (I already have an unlocked data stick) and I’ll give it a try at the cottage. $25 a month plus service charges (about $33 all in) for a gigabyte of data. Not as attractive as my Rogers flex plan, but not bad. I suspect that a gigabyte should be plenty for most purposes.
iPad plans are apparently coming (they call them “tablet” plans because Apple presumably won’t let them use the word “iPad” yet). I ordered this on their web page… we’ll see what comes of it. Actually, 2.5G EDGE isn’t terrible on the iPad, but for some applications the extra speed of 3G is pretty noticeable. Plus, in a few months the SaskTel network will have a much larger footprint than Rogers’ network. (Right now SaskTel’s is a little smaller than Rogers’, at least in the GSM arena.)
Rogers, if you read this… if you would upgrade all of Saskatchewan to 3G and add a few towers in targeted areas (Waskesiu, Kenosee, Cypress Hills Provincial park… that would be a nice start) you would be a lot more competitive. You’ve had a hardware advantage on SaskTel for a few years now, since you switched to GSM, but now you’ve lost it. With the economy booming year, the last couple of years would have been a great time to be upgrading your network, and I hope you haven’t lost your window of opportunity. Upgrades please!
My iPhone plan is up in a year… if we don’t see some upgrades on Rogers here in that span I might well move it. SaskTel has an interesting plan that includes US roaming at a very reasonable rate…
Apologies for not posting much lately.
I’ve been teaching again this semester (in addition to my full-time job) and the busy summer semester - which proceeds at double time compared to normal semesters - is really conspiring to fill up my schedule. Weekends at the cottage - which are always full of projects - are eating up much of the rest of the time.
Being busy like this puts me in the interesting situation of wishing summer would pass by more quickly, while wishing it would last longer.
I got my Saskatchewan Roughriders custom license plate this week - sports fan geekery at its finest!
Sometimes the morning at work can be pretty intense. On such days if the weather is cooperative, I often leave the office for lunch, grab some food somewhere and enjoy being away for a few minutes.
I’ve found some free WiFi (I can always use my phone and tether anyway) and here I am, making a blog post. One less thing to do at home in the evening now.
I’ve also had time to make a journal entry (I’m involved in two traveling journal projects - all written in fountain pen, of course - as well as keeping my own journal). There’s something that feels right about being in the fresh air on a nice summer day and putting thoughts to paper. Blue sky makes it easier to think, perhaps.
I’m somewhat protective of my lunch hour - certainly sometimes something will come up at work that requires attention then - but I find that my mind needs the rest and the break and that helps me to be more productive for the rest of the day. Being away from work for the hour guarantees that I won’t be interrupted (I suppose the office could call but it’s hardly worthwhile if I’ll be back in less than an hour).
A few minutes left and to the mayhem I return… here’s hoping for a productive afternoon!
After nearly three weeks away I’m home again. Returning from holidays is always somewhat bittersweet; it’s so lovely to be away but it’s also nice to have the conveniences of home.
I broke out my bottle of de Atramentis Sky Blue ink that I got at Laywine’s in Toronto in late May. It’s a lovely ink. “How lovely?” you ask, since I haven’t scanned an image. Very lovely, I reply! There is a review of it at Fountain Pen Network that will give you a good idea of what to expect. It’s not as turquoisy as I expected; it’s a little darker, at least with the Lamy Vista and M nib that I used to test it.
I still have some Mont Blanc Violet and some Herbin Vert Empire (I finally found some) to test, but I will empty out some currently filled pens first.
We just arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick this evening. I have been in Toronto for a week (including a couple of days at Niagara Falls). Mrs. PhotoJim came out to join me last Friday.
Everybody knows about Niagara Falls and almost everybody knows about Toronto so I will let you do your own research on those places.
New Brunswick, on the other hand, is a little off the beaten track as tourist destinations go. My first impression is that this is unwarranted. Saint John is beautiful. In fact, it reminds me in many ways of the much more popular (as tourist destinations go) St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador. (Yes, the two cities share nearly identical names but the New Brunswickers always spell theirs with “Saint”, never “St.”.)
We had a good pizza for supper just across the street from the apartment we are renting (yet another similarity with St. John’s; that’s what we used as accommodation there, too). We are right downtown in the thick of things, a couple of blocks from the famous Saint John market and two blocks from the harbour.
The Bay of Fundy is just metres away… and with it are found the world’s highest tides. We shall see them first-hand soon.
I find it difficult to decide what to take when I travel. On Tuesday, I’m heading to Toronto for some meetings and then, the following Tuesday, heading to New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island for some rest and relaxation.
Today I was going through my camera equipment trying to decide what to take with me and what to leave behind. Ideally, I’d like to take everything…!
I decided to take my Nikon F5, F100 and F3HP. The F5 is my go-to 35mm body. The F100 has an almost identical user interface, but is lighter and smaller, particularly if I remove the MB-15 vertical grip. The F3HP is a manual focus professional body from the 1980s, but without a motor drive (which I’m leaving at home) it’s quite small and very quiet. I took it to Europe a couple of years ago and found that I used it quite frequently.
Having three bodies will be nice. I can shoot Fuji Velvia in the two AF bodies and black-and-white film in the F3HP.
Now, to decide what fountain pens and inks to take…
I’ve been online since before there really was an Internet (I was on BITNET and before that I was both a user and a so-called sysop on bulletin board systems (BBSes). Users of those networks, and of the early Internet, were sophisticated users out of necessity because a certain amount of technical expertise was required.
The modern Internet is something entirely different. In some ways, it’s glorious: a world-wide network of computer users of all sorts of hardware, operating systems, and interests (in my own home I have machines running three different versions of Windows, plus Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X) - but along with that come varying levels of sophistication. In addition to computer hobbyists like me are grandmothers and children and all sorts of people who really don’t understand how computers work.
I’m not against “unsophisticated” users being online (and I hesitate to use the word because it has a derogatory implication that I don’t intend to make), but one issue with such users is that they are very prone to getting malware on their computers. Truthfully, it’s getting easy for experienced users to get malware, but at least they tend to recognize when it happens quite quickly.
I had our spare laptop at my mother-in-law’s place for a couple of weeks last month, and it got malware while it was here. A bunch of people were using it for a particular project everyone was working on. They weren’t reckless, they just weren’t informed.
So, how do you avoid malware? Aside from the obvious:
Unfortunately, the more sophisticated that users get, the more sophisticated that malware authors get, so this problem will get much, much worse before it gets better.
It seems that every week or two, someone on the Internet is proclaiming photographic film to be dead. I won’t bother helping the authors’ cause by hyperlinking the articles; it won’t be hard to find them if you really want to find them.
It turns out that they’re wrong.
First: I’ll unabashedly proclaim my addiction to film photography. Computers are a terrific hobby of mine, but I learned photography on film and I don’t want to spend my photographic time at a computer. (That, and I’d need to spend almost three grand to get a digital SLR that can shoot with my wide-angle lenses without turning them into boring normal lenses.)
I’ll cite this as some of the best evidence that film is still alive: Kodak, only months ago, released its newest colour film Ektar 100. After a successful introduction in 35mm, Kodak released it in 120 last summer and now has released it in sheet film sizes. (What? They still make sheet film cameras? Yes, and I bought a new one - one of theirs - only two summers ago.)
To be truthful, it’s getting tougher to be a film shooter. Local stores don’t stock film as much, and lab availability is decreasing. Why, my local lab’s E6 (slide) lab shut down earlier this year so I’ll have to mail my reversal films for processing (not that that’s a big problem).
But when so many companies still around why not shoot some of their silver products and get back to the basics? It’s fun!
I have this hobby (some in my life might call it a problem) of collecting old computers and keeping them running. I have computers from as long ago as 1981 (a Commodore VIC-20 if you’re curious, upgraded from its factory 5 kilobyte allocation to a whopping 40 KB of RAM!), and with a couple of exceptions, all of them are in running condition.
About a year ago my friend Tillman gave me a couple of Sun workstations because he was moving to a downtown apartment. A few years previously he had given me a SPARCstation 20 and this time, he gave me its twin plus a very similar SPARCstation 10. Until recently I hadn’t had time to get the new machines running, or even connect them to power.
Although I’ve been busy lately my brain likes a certain amount of diversion so I spent a little time getting my SS20 named mooloolaba up and running. (All of the machines on my local area network are named after communities in Australia.) I had long ago upgraded it to its maximum allocation of 512 MB of RAM (I think it had about 96 when I got it), installed a floppy drive (see previous post), added the uncommon low-profile 4x SCSI CD-ROM drive (for convenience more than anything; an internal drive doesn’t require a separate power source), and upgraded the dual 50 MHz SuperSPARC CPUs to a pair of 180 MHz Ross HyperSPARCs. It’s always been a reliable machine although the original hard disk was sensitive to corruption if the power were interrupted. The new, bigger hard disk seems much better. It’s running NetBSD 4.0.2 (5.0.x doesn’t support multiple CPUs on SPARC, alas).
Pleased with my progress from that project, I ordered some null-modem cables and USB to serial adapters so that I could connect the two “new” machines and give them some attention. Since it was a little different from mooloolaba, I dug out the SS10 that is now named cairns and connected a funky old external, caddy-driven CD-ROM drive to it (a NEC MultiSpin 6 that is so cool it has an LCD display and an external SPDIF jack; apparently music hobbyists love these devices for CD audio playback). Once I realized that my $5 USB-to-serial adapters didn’t support BRK (necessary to get some machines into boot PROM mode), I got NetBSD installed and I was off to the races. This machine has 288 MB of RAM. Because I thought that 4.3 gigabytes of disk space might not be enough, I poked through my pile of SCSI hard disks and found two that didn’t work and one that did. The working one only has a gig of space on it but it’s good enough to make a useful /home partition and take some of the pressure off the / drive.
This SS10 has dual Ross HyperSPARCs too, but only at 90 MHz. It’s noticeably slower than mooloolaba, but for most applications it’s still pretty zippy.
I got some of the obscure 13W3-VGA video adapters but I wasn’t able to get a video signal from the ss10. I’m not sure if my monitor doesn’t support Sun’s funky video resolution default (I can override that and see), or if the video on this machine isn’t working. Still, they are interesting even when run headless.
The serial ports are reverse-gendered (sort of like the original Amiga 1000’s was). Unlike the Amiga, the 25-pin connector supports two serial ports. The cables are uncommon but can be found, and of course, if you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build your own cable.
Although I have no idea what I’ll do with it, I’m pleased to have gotten cairns running. These machines are early 1990s vintage, and compared to what other machines of their era can do, they are amazingly powerful. (The very fact that they can take half a gigabyte of RAM speaks volumes; my retired Pentium 133 from that era, devonport, could only take 128 MB and my still-running 486sx, canberra, only has room for 32 MB).
Next, I’ll see if the other SS20 is running. It has a VSIMM so it might be fun to try to get X running on it…