Blog: 2010-01

In the Event of a Water Landing

Flight 1549 reconstruction video

Concept2 Arduino Project

After briefly considering making the Concept2 rowing ergometer more fun by hooking it up to Grand Theft Auto, I instead ordered an Arduino with the intent of hacking up some interval training aids and games that will run on the laptop.

Incidentally, the Concept2 Model B's shaft encoder unit appears to use a standard 2.5mm TS (2-conductor) plug. I decided not to try wiring the encoder to the laptop's microphone input, partly out of concern for my laptop, and partly because the Arduino gives more prototyping flexibility.

Stomping on Your Neighbor's WiFi When They're on a Tight Deadline

All home wireless routers should silently default to picking an unused channel, rather than defaulting to the same all the time or giving the user a chance to pick their favorite number.

Palindromic

Today's date, in the ISO 8106 (the international standard) format variant without separators, is 20100102.

New Year and Nokia

On this first day of the new year, my brain hasn't fully registered that we're now in the year 2010, and my phone isn't making the letdown any easier. I tried to search for a number in my phone, and this Asian character selector pops up.

(My phone, the Nokia E61, I bought so that I could use WiFi, since the US version, the E62, was crippled to try to force people into highway-robbery wireless data plans. I bought it used from a doctor, who didn't mention that it was an Asian version rather than a European one. After tweaking a few settings, and deleting the useless dictionary, this only results in a few quirks, like names on text messages being backwards. The firmware is based on Symbian S60 3rd.)

Perhaps I accidentally turned on this Asian entry mode, with New Year's Day fumbling, or perhaps it is related to 2010-01-01, due to firmware or an update by the carrier. Once I've come to grips with the new year, I'll find the documentation, so that I can search again.

Update 2010-01-01: Holding down the Chr key in the lower-right for a second will bring up a menu that lets you select Latin lower case input mode on the Contacts screen, in addition to a few other modes.

Update 2010-02-11: From that same menu, you can change the language to English, which settings persist.

Improvised Hot Cocoa and Coffee Flavorings

For flavoring coffee or hot cocoa for variety, things like candy canes and Ricola throat drops will dissolve in the hot liquid.

Long ago, I had little bottles of peppermint and vanilla extract for this purpose, but I always have throat drops on hand, and candies can be swiped from jars on people's desks at work.