The future of Wifi and portable entertainment devices?

WiFi the new gadget must-have – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK


Is this a joke? In the fast moving world of portable communications, these people are predicting that in FOUR years time a mere 20% of portable entertainment devices will have wifi? I would suggest that in less than 2 years the majority of new devices (including phones) will have wifi. In 2012 who knows how they’ll be communicating! Perhaps 3.5G’s successor’s successor will be the main portable device communication protocol. Certainly I rely now on my phone’s 3G connection in order to get email rather than looking for a wireless point. Unless you are sat in a place where you know there is free wifi, 3G is cheaper and more reliable. When data prices come down, especially for roaming, then 3G will be the best way for all mobile connections (i.e. not fixed in one place). Of course if your idea of an internet connection is one way fat pipe for Torrents, then no. But if your idea of an internet connection is email, IM, rss, browsing, with a reasonable (not hires) amount of gratuitous (purely entertainment) video then 3G is sufficient now.

On the train from Cambridge to Kingscross recently I noticed that, at least on my network, it’s 3.5G (HSDPA) most of the way.  Since the train line goes mostly through fields, I can only assume that the intended market is the commuter. That is pretty nice. Last time I did that journey with my laptop (4 months past), the connection was pretty shoddy. Even maintaining a IM conversation was hard (admittedly using iChat the most tempremental IM client there is).

Springtime is here?

It must be spring for real today. I spent a good amount of yesterday sat in a park, and this morning the amount of weeds in the garden was enough to make me actually do something about it. That and after the gardening there was still time to sit on my deck (constructed last summer, but too late to ever use it) with my MBP and squint at the screen.

Weeds are like rust on old cars. You only notice a little bit until you start doing something about them. I thought an hour should take care of most of them. In reality it took an afternoon and a full green wheelie bin. The garden looks nice now though. I also feel quite proud of that fact that i dug deep to the roots on most of the particularly large weeds and hopefully this will help next year.

I even spent an hour upgrading WordPress and doing a bit of spring cleaning here. No weeds, but I’ve hardly spent any time writing, nevermind maintaining it.

History Meme

Ok I give in. After seeing this on many blogs over the last 48 hrs I have to give in.

history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head

Macbook Pro
98 ls
96 cd
30 ping
29 ssh
26 du
22 sudo
20 rm
19 cvs
18 top
18 sed

Linux box:

88 ls
63 cd
33 ssh
31 su
30 vi
24 du
17 exit
16 ./Encode2flv.sh
13 rm
13 mv

Even on my Mythtv box:

33 ls
23 df
22 su
19 sudo
12 firefox
9 mplayer
9 cd
7 killall
5 vi
5 tail

Not that informative, but a good laugh! Although I do have to ask myself.  Why do I need to look in a directory so many times?  Another question that comes into mind is that I think I do too much stuff as root.  There’s a lot of commands that I know I run, that are missing there.