global_jd

Fixing Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard sudden death

My keyboard died, but came back to life. The secret was re-attaching the PDA stand.

This folding keyboard from ThinkOutside (iGo Mobility) is great, particularly with the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. I had been using it for about six weeks, and finally detached the PDA stand, per the documentation, just a few days ago. Unit worked fine for a few days, then one day during a session it just became unresponsive... no keystrokes, no blinking green Bluetooth light, nada.

My best guess is that it's a subtle alignment issue in the plastic battery case. I've already entered and resolved an issue with ThinkOutside support. But I still wanted to lard this entry up with search terms, in case anyone has similar problems in the future, and tries to research it on the Web.

By the way, the N800 is currently just under $250 US... with keyboard, 16GB good storage, and an Apple Express you can get equipped for about $500. Can't beat it, particularly if you're a touch typist! I'm hoping the new 2008 OS has a more stable browser than the Opera in my OS 2007 (I do push browsers hard), and I wish there were an easy transfer method for a digital camera audio/video recorder. When I return from this long trip I want to research hacking the N800... maemo.org and related sites have a lot of exciting activity these days.

Blog pile-on

This is nominally about China, but more about US west coast tech-like bloggers, I think. Declan McCullagh has a CNET post, and I guess this is the money line:

In China, we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that's a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I've heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it's blocked. I'm sure I don't know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.

This is credited to "Chinese government official". No name, no transcript, no real elaboration of how this nameless speaker understands the world, and whether they intended the translation as it was heard.

And yet pundits immediately seize it as a chance to beat their breast, instead of trying to understand how someone might come to say such a thing. Pretty punk, I think.

Things I Liked About The Giants 2006

Watching Omar Vizquel play. I'm looking forward to his highlight reel.

Seeing Matt Cain and Noah Lowery come along.

Learning I could enjoy watching games without JT Snow at first base.

The catchers: Matheny such a hidden gem the first part, then Alfonso finally getting his run, and Todd Greene with such color and depth.

Bonds becoming the National League's all-time home run champion, too. (And hitting powerfully despite the asshats in the commercial press.)

Seeing Steve Finley in a Giants uniform. Moises Alou. Ray Durham's incredible season.

Matt Morris contributing to the team in different ways.

Pedro Feliz. The coaches. Having a season with Felipe Alou.

The broadcast team always makes it great. Greg Pappas talks too much, but they'll make this last week good. It's just too bad they're not covering the postseason....

9/11 conspiracy meme

Here is a newspaper column summarizing the best arguments, from a proponent. (Most of these essays are arguments-by-length; this one benefits from a wordcount limit.) If this is the best, it's still too weak -- best argument seems to be "it shouldn't have taken 'an astonishing 90 minutes' for 'air defense system' to mobilize against a hijacking."

These guys get a lot of press despite the vapidity of their arguments, but for a real, testable conspiracy, ask how Vincent Foster could have teleported past the White House gates and landed in woodland a half-mile from the nearest pavement without dirt on his shoes, with the small amount of blood found dripping in two tracks both uphill and downhill, first with two unknown guns and no car keys yet later one unknown gun and two car keys, and with the witnesses who saw unidentified menacing males in Foster's car in the Ft. Marcy parking lot, all ignored by the popular press. Or ask how witnesses saw someone other than Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols leave the rental truck before it blew up in Oklahoma City, in an explosion unlikely to have been able to produce the structural damage seen, after multiple other ignored witnesses saw McVeigh travelling with mideastern males in the previous days. Or how Ron Brown's plane could have been lured offcourse by an airport technician who had somehow adjusted an unadjustable radio beacon before surprisingly commiting suicide days later, and the remarkable inattention paid to Brown's financial arrangements in sales of US military technology to the PRC. Those are good, short, snappy, understandable, testable conspiracy theories.

The 9/11 stuff seems just a psychosis that the victims dare you to fix. The fact that this story gets big publicity, while stronger stories get ignored, seems in fact to point to its own conspiracy....

Noise levels

One thing that has clearly struck me the last half-year is the amount of distraction on San Francisco sidewalks. I keep my earbuds tuned to just above the ambient noise level, and need to ratchet this up in response to local traffic. (Cars with bass speakers and a certain style of motorcycle riders are painfully polluting.) It's really remarkable, the volumes to which we're actually exposed each day. More people lose hearing than suffer from "secondhand smoke", and yet the true health risk is ignored by our local political structure.

There's another type of noise which imposes costs on bystanders, and that's the lack of attention that many, particularly groups, use while walking. Trying to predict where some unaware person may swerve next removes attention from audio materials. Trying to study while walking city streets on Sundays is nearly impossible... people who don't pay attention to where they are require extra attention from those of us who do.

Audio learning materials always fade in and out of awareness while walking in San Francisco, due to loud noises and erratic traffic. Society will eventually improve, but it's still a great unacknowledged cost here in 2006.

Magicians, memory

Odd thing, about the way memory works... I've been watching classic magicians on DVD lately, and tonight I picked up some old moldy half-dollars I had and started doing sleights in front of the mirror. I pulled out moves that I was astonished I remembered... let's see if I have the verbals... I want to say it was a Victor Frankl move, but he was a WWII author I learned of subsequently and not the European VF I recall as the author... it was a coin, right-palmed, dropped to fingertips, swiveled around under *back* of upraised left hand to show both hands empty, a post-vanish feint... also a bunch of Ramsay moves that I wouldn't have anticipated I'd remember, some George Kaplan vanishes too.

The stuff just popped out, as I was having fun. I had wired that stuff in, 'way back, but didn't have any verbal tags to call it back up over the past bunch of years. Once I started running moves, though, the sequences came right back.

I'm working on Mandarin conscientously each day, with TV news and audio and pocket dictionaries and a textbook in my pack at all times... I'm just laying the groundwork now, though, I'm not wiring it in yet, and I don't have the same rote mastery that I had with coin moves.

And I learned I had good choice in moves, too... while watching some of the DVDs, particularly the Ramsay stuff, moves I had thought "how could that work!?" actually don't actually work. But stuff I liked, like the retention-of-vision swivel moves, really do work -- well, Vernon had physical capability that made *anything* look good, even after being partially incapacitated -- but those types of coin vanishes do work, and I did recognize that back then.

I do think I'm doing the right thing now, too.

China shutdown hoax

Wall Street Journal carries an article describing how some bloggers in China temporarily closed their sites with a sign saying "for reasons of which we cannot speak, this site is temporarily closed". The mainstream commercial press syndicators immediately took off with stories of how they were closed by Chinese authorities. There is a quote from a blogger that the western press lacks certain skills and has certain predispositions. The WSJ's links rot quickly, so I'll put the info in comments here so I can review it later.

Audio presentations

There are lots of different ways to structure a language-learning tape. Because of the way they're laid out, some you can listen to once, others you need to listen to dozens of times. Here are some of the different structures they use....

Audio cassettes

I use iPod and CD, but a good cassette player lets you take advantage of a lot of older, second-hand materials. Following are notes on various audio players and headphones....

Katrina sidenote

... but first, a digression... I've been studying the handling of Hurricane Katrina this week, and I've got to get this off my chest, and help vote these issues up in the common discussion. I'll write this in the "Comments" to this item, to get it off the blog's first page.