25 Years Of PCs

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. It gets you thinking about how quickly technology advances and how it has changed our lives in so many ways. I find it difficult to imagine life without computers everywhere, and this puts everything into perspective. We've only really had personal computers for roughly 25 years. There were others before the IBM PC but the PC was the one which became the world standard and popularised personal computing. For some more info on the history of the PC etc check this out: Twenty five years of the IBM PC

SiRFstarIII & Static Navigation

I've recently had the pleasure of playing around with a Bluetooth GPS using my phone. The unit was based on the new SiRFstarIII architecture and performed extremely well in all sorts of conditions. However the one thing which bugged me about it was that it had "Static Navigation" enabled by default with no easy way to change it. This feature drops the small changes when the GPS is near stationary to prevent "track wander". This is great in a car but when on foot it makes for very jumpy and low-res tracks because you are under the motion threshold most of the time.

I knocked up some PyS60 scripts to enable and disable "Static Navigation" from my phone. They're up here: Python Apps for Series 60

General Update #5

It has been a while hasn't it? A week actually to the day, its scary how busy I think I've been. I say "I think" because I don't actually seem to have been doing much. I think it's a case of settling into the usual daily grind after having forgotten about it...

I have to build a boat! Yay! Only a toy one though... I'll post more details some time soon.

I've also just posted my first post (quite a mouthful) on wingnuts. Go and have a look at: Waffle's Place.

I handed in that MATLAB project too; I'll stick the code up when it can't possibly be of any use to any of my fellow students anymore :)

Nokia Wireless Keyboard Review

The Nokia SU-8W Wireless Keyboard has turned out to be an excellent purchase and has proved its usefulness already. The keyboard is well built, feels solid and is well designed. Its key response is good and it works well with my 6680. It is also well priced here in South Africa and comfortably competes with other wireless keyboards (R780 approx).

The Nokia Wireless Keyboard (SU-8W)...

If you have a compatible smartphone, I can only recommend this keyboard. It makes all sorts of tasks much easier and provides much simpler text entry on the device. Whether it is for typing quick documents or notes, sending e-mails, using PuTTY or FTP on remote systems or programming using Python the keyboard is great.

By the way this review was written using the keyboard in some of my rare free time at Wits :)

For my previous posts on the keyboard see: Nokia Wireless Keyboard & Nokia Wireless Keyboard Update. For more info on the keyboard see: Nokia - Nokia Wireless Keyboard.

General Update #4

Do you want to go on a spacewalk? Now for the small total of $35 million you can! For more info on the most expensive 90 minute walk ever check this out: Space tourists offered walkabout. Me I'm quite happy to stay at home, I don't know about you?

Anyway I wouldn't have time for the 6 months of training to maybe get to walk... I'm realising how much I actually enjoyed the break, I had forgotten how much work I actually have to do on a daily basis. It's quite depressing...

I just yawned, did I catch you?

Comics!

Just a quickie, here are my two favorite web comics:

• Questionable Content
• PhD

Enjoy...

Make A Wire Wrapping Tool

I spotted this one on hackaday: improvised wire wrapping tool. This has the potential to be really useful in the slightly unlikely situation that you desperately need to do some work using wire wrap, & don't have any ideas on how to "make a plan". It is however a quick and interesting read which makes you think a bit about what you can knock up using commonly available bits & bobs.