Amiga

"The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodore's marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas.

— Byte Magazine, August 1994"

For those who wax nostalgic over the Amiga, you can run it in your favourite browser now!

History of the Amiga

Market down

Seeing that market is a bit jumpy today, shorts are doing OK finally I read up on sleeping better, while I was trying to find a way to keep warm since someone here doesn't believe in setting the thermostat at a reasonable temperature, rather simply overheating before going to bed, not a great strategy. I might need to find some kind of blanket tent, however that baby toy is a bit expensive. 

Sprint coverage at a better price.

Seems that Virgin Mobile phone will run forever since I am paying $25/month for it, and the service still works.  Who knows I might even be able to pay for it if others sign up with my https://refer.virginmobileusa.com/IYVzqk link.  Not a bad deal. I had to pay $200 for the phone up front, however it pays off over the years. Of course if you sign up and get others to sign up you also get $25/sign up, starting to be multi-level marketing by your customers, VM has gone the way of Amway. However it seems smart to let your customers make a small amount for signing up friends, it is much cheaper then the customer acquisition cost of the larger carriers which is about 170/subscriber.

finally a better router

Frys had a pretty good firmware however the lack up updates was unsettling. Today I installed DD-WRT for the first time on a router, took a few hours of finding documentation and trying several things. I started with http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/FR-300RTR currected the path to a newer release, but couldn't install it with Chrome on Win7, tried with a Mac, still no joy, strange thing the 100% couldn't be accived on the upload, been trying also to correct that wiki, yet I can't login to it. Finally corrected the path to ftp://dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2010/07-16-10-r14815/dlink-dir615e1/dir615e1-factory-to-ddwrt-firmware.bin http://192.168.0.1/index.asp and got it running after some configuration I had my devices working but the VoIP was poor so I thought, 3 year old firmware, and found the latest downloaded it installed and it works better then before :) I have my first DD-WRT router, too bad I bought a WiFi repeater already for $60 this works even better if made to do that. And I got it to work, I can, however most times I set it up it doesn't work right, I wonder if there is a better way without the menus.

How to save storage on an eMail system

It just dawned on me that a large email provider like Yahoo, gMail or Outlook could save lots of storage by just having a pointer to the email in the Sent and InBox, so if both are in the same email provider then you only store the message once, further if it has an attachment it could be lots of space savings. But then it gives further thought as to if the 3 major email provider federated operations, then one of them could pull the email out from the sending provider with a pointer, rather than storing it.

If you evolve that concept further, if the sender then deletes the email it would also disappear from the recipients inbox, which would be great for those drunk emails one sends, where you wish you hadn't sent it. Or it could also operate in a way that that can't happen on deletion copy it to the recipient provider.  Of course if you POP or IMAP then I guess you still have a copy either way.

I have been thinking lately about some of the systems we have built over the years with open source components that mostly dictate the behavior of the whole system and you can't innovate as much. Maybe if we wrote more things from scratch we could do interesting things.

Wireless calculator

For a while I have been spending time trying to understand the confusing pricing options for wireless plans, the WSJ made it easy. Seems that for my 2Gig data needs without SMS or Min. T-Mobile wins, although they are missing some of the cheapest options like VirginMobile.com, RepiblicWireless.com or MetroPCS.com. Seems that the best deals, prepaid are just completely missing.

Baby Swims Across Pool