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Monday, December 13, 2004
Into The iPod and Back Again

My wife's iPod (aka my old 15 GB 3G iPod) had a hard drive failure shortly after the one year warranty expired. I bought a new hard drive, thinking it would be a cinch to replace. Wrong. Getting into an iPod is rather hard. Some Googling turned up a method using guitar picks and it worked! Installing the new 15 GB hard drive was easy. The only problem now is that our music collection has grown beyond 15 GB (99 cents at a time)!

Categories: Music, Technology
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There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. --Richard Feynman


Sunday, November 28, 2004
How To Read RSS Headlines On Your PalmOS Device

I just upgraded to a Treo 600 from my Tungsten C. The always-on internet is handy, and I wanted to be able to read certain of my RSS feeds on the handheld during down time at work so I'd have that much less to read when I'm NOT at work because, like checking e-mail, scanning rss headlines is something that MUST be done before the day's end.

I'm an OS X user and I use the excellent NewNewWire as my RSS reader. After looking at several option, I chose Hand/RSS for PalmOS for $14.95. I chose it because I'm familiar with the company (which used to make Newton software). After installing it I must say I'm impressed with the app all around.

Hand/RSS comes with some channels installed, but I wanted to move my subscriptions from NetNewsWire over. Hand/RSS can import rss subscriptions that are in an OPML file. Although NetNewsWire 2 offers syncing via dotMac, it doesn't use an opml file to do it (it uses a 'SyncSubscriptions.plist.gz' file), so I had to export my NetNewsWire subscriptions as an opml file. The easiest way to import the opml file into Hand/RSS is to make it a memo. That method failed for me, probably because I'm not using the default PalmOS memo application (I'm using MarkSpace Memo Pad). Instead, I uploaded the opml file to my web server, from where Hand/RSS could fetch it via http.

It's a kind of labor intensive way to import the subscriptions, but my rss subscriptions list is mature and doesn't change too much anymore so it's not something that I have to do often.

Categories: MacOS X, RSS, Technology, Toys
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The shortest and surest way to live with honour in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice of them. --Socrates


Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Four Steps To A More Secure Wireless Network

CNN.com - Out of the box and into the ether - Oct 19, 2004:

"1. Change the SSID. That's the name that identifies a network. The default settings that come out of the box are well known. Use the name of your favorite song or something else you will remember. Don't use Social Security or phone numbers or any identifiable number. Also, if possible, use non-printable characters (for example, smiley faces or vowels with umlauts) in your SSID. Some equipment used to detect SSIDs does not recognize these characters.
2. Enable MAC address filtering. This lets you specify precisely which computers may connect to your network.
3. Disable SSID broadcast. The most common network scanner won't see your network if you disable broadcasting.
4. Enable encryption. There are two types of encryption technology for wireless networks: WEP and WPA. WEP is flawed, but it is much better than nothing. If your equipment is WPA compatible, make sure your password is at least 40 characters long and includes upper and lowercase letters, special characters (!,* and & for example) and numbers."

Categories: Technology
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In our civilization, and under our republican form of government,