Month: August 2005

Google have closely followed their launch of Google Desktop 2 with Google Talk.

And it works.

The Google client also integrates very nicely with an existing gmail account, although any XMPP/Jabber client can connect to the service.

There’s still the odd bug here and there, but yes, somehow Google just knows what people want and when they want it. It even supports basic proxy authentication, which is exactly what I used to struggle with on Skype and others.

Nice Google, rock on.

Don’t become evil.

First of all, thanks to the Accident Hash podcast for the (stolen) title to this blog entry.

So I get a call just after eight this morning – I was working the late shift and so was still in bed – and it’s my mom and she’s been in an accident. Obviously my first question was “Is everyone ok?”, which was indeed the case. Fortunately.

What happened? Well, a left rear wheel came off of a bakkie (South African for “pick-up truck”) which was traveling in the opposite direction on the other side of the central barrier on the highway to Pretoria. The central grassy barrier is easily twenty meters wide. This wheel then somehow managed to find its way across the barrier, which was to the right of the pick-up, and bounced up, coming down onto the top left corner of my mother’s car. Right above where my brother was sitting in the front passenger seat (left-side). And shit, it must have come down hard, but luckily nobody got hurt.

It did instantly turn me off of cabriolet vehicles.

Here are some pics:

So now its the whole insurance game once more. Painful in the least. I’m pretty sure the price tag is going to be hefty even if they choose not to write off the car. The real bad thing is that the pick-up the wheel came off (it turns out the axle broke, the whole wheel came off, not just the tyre)(tire??? spelling in head not working) belongs to what seemed like a decent, hard working yet poorly paid construction worker. (Which is the norm in South Africa.)

Although he was well dressed, one could see that he doesn’t have the money to pay for something like this. Sure, his vehicle was probably not roadworthy, and if someone had been hurt my opinion would probably differ greatly, but now the lawyers from the insurance company are probably going to go after this guy, who has no insurance, and clean out what little he has.

At a basic guesstimate of R30 000 it will probably cost something close to this guy’s annual salary.

That is sad. The guy is just getting by and now through really bad luck he could end up being destroyed financially.

And then of course we may have to find a way to afford a new car for my mother.

Nobody wins.

As I said, life sucks sometimes.

Oh dear. Musica has now illustrated to me in perfect clarity that they do not understand their target market and will never be successful with digital downloads.

From their (well kinda theirs) website (Firefox users don’t bother clicking – the site does not support you)

‘Please note – our downloads will NOT play on IPODs.’

WTF?

The digital music download community in South Africa is still relatively small. However, the digital music download community is also the group of people that is bleeding edge when it comes to techno-gadgets. The bleeding edge techno-gadget group is the group that will have bought iPods first because the iPod is really the mainstream portable music device. So we have this situation where there is a massive overlap between those people who are willing to download music over the internet and those people who will have bought iPods. They, in effect, are the same group.

Thus by eliminating iPod owners, Musica is eliminating their most likely target market.

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

Having seen others attempt to extend the range and power of their Griffin iTrip FM transmitters for the iPod, I decided to give it a go myself – it didn’t appear too difficult.

I had trouble removing the side rubber seal initially, so I skipped that part and took a knife to the seam on top of the iTrip, carefully wedging it apart. It took a bit of gentle persuasion but slowly it started to slide apart. By gently wedging apart the cover on both ends of the iTrip with a swiss army knife I eventually ended up with two plastic halves and a circuit board. This was not my intention – I had planned to try and extract the aerial without separating the iTrip completely, but it slided apart without breaking any parts so I was happy.

From that point I then carefully bent the aerial around to run through the side gap and outside the iTrip casing. I then closed the casing once more, the connector nodules on the one half sliding relatively easily back into their housing on the other half. Success!

The big question now was how this would now affect the signal of the iTrip. I started testing on my small bedside alarm-clock radio. The first test of course to make sure everything still worked on a clear frequency, which it did. I then tuned the iTrip to 98.0 FM, the frequency used by a large commercial station 5FM. My transmission killed the radio station successfully, although the constraints of my room prevented me from testing at a further distance. I then tuned in my Hi-Fi, and took a stroll around the house. I managed to successully override what is a very strong signal (that of 5FM) at a distance of about 5 or 6 meters. Not bad.

I also went outside to test with my car (my beautiful Citroen C4!!! I’m loving it) where I had excellent signal on a clear frequency and was able to override the radio station to 5 or 6 meters. Excellent.

All in all, it seems that extracting the aerial has amplified the signal a significant amount. Prior to aerial extraction I could not override the strong radio station signal in my car at all.

Another factor that must be influencing my ability to overshadow the radio stations is weather. Last night my iTrip seemed to override much better than it did when driving in to work this morning, although this could also be due to my proximity to the transmitter closing. Factors like cloud cover and air density definitely have a significant influence.

Below find photos of the operation – apologies for the quality, but they were taken with my MotoRAZR V3 in relatively poor lighting conditions.

iTrip plugged in with casing next to it – right side

iTrip plugged in with casing next to it – top view

iTrip plugged in with casing next to it – left side

Griffin iTrip circuit board top view

iTrip cover showing join nodules

iTrip circuit board

iTrip circuit board and aerial

Circuit board top view with aerial

Close up of circuit board

The end result

End result – side view