Blog entries tagged with "internet"

April fool’s day pranks annoy me

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 01:31pm

Today is the first of April. To many that means April fool’s day pranks.

I have to admit that I don’t actually mind a good prank (the PTUA one made me chuckle), but they don’t work on the internet.

First is the timezone issue. To me it is early afternoon on April 1 and I have seen some good pranks from local sites. But by the time it is April 1 in the US, it is April 2 before I see their pranks, they are then just stupid as I am back to expecting legitimate content. This is compounded by the tradition of pranks in Australia only lasting until noon, while in the US they last all day.

Second is how the prank is followed up. If it stays available (eg as an archived post/article) then it must be modified to make of clear that it was an April fools prank. It is not reasonable to expect that someone finding it in the future will notice that the date (often in fine print) was April 1. A follow up post/article handles the regular readers, but does nothing to help those who go straight to the prank post/article.

It’s about respecting your audience, they may not be from the same area (also extends to other cultural things) or they may not be viewing the content until some unknown point on the future.

Update: Once I got home it was actually April 1 in the US and I started seeing some more. I have to agree with Dan that the dead-pixel pandemic is quite good.

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Tether Nokia 6120 classic to OS X for data

Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 07:41pm

When I am on-call for work I am required to remain within 30 minutes of a suitable internet connection. I am on-call this weekend, but I was planning to go for a ride along the Federation Trail.

That would be a problem, until a mobile broadband card was suggested and I remembered that we had data enabled on the on-call phone. So I could just take my PowerBook along with me.

The steps to get online through a Nokia 6120 classic on my 12″ Apple PowerBook (running OS X 10.5.6):

  1. Connect phone via an A to mini-B USB cable
  2. Phone should be in ‘PC Suite’ mode
  3. Open System Preferences > Network
  4. Two Nokia 6120 classic interfaces were detected. (each time I connected it is detected two more…)
  5. Select the first of the new interfaces
  6. Click Advanced
  7. Set vendor to Nokia, then the only model available was GPRS (GSM/3G)
  8. I entered Telstra.wap as the APN after looking at the existing phone settings, and left CID as 1.
  9. OK, Apply, and Connect
  10. Browse the intertubes

One caveat for these instructions is that data was already setup correctly on the phone, I did not have to do that.

It should also be possible to set this up over Bluetooth instead of USB, but I know this works and it’s not as if I will need it very often. I just need to remember three things: the phone, my powerbook and the USB cable.

The connection was surprisingly responsive and I have to say that the Telstra Next G network does appear to be quite nice (they sponsored StixCampNewstead last weekend with a connection), although I would never pay for it myself.

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