Systeme D

27 November 2007

Sent from my boatPhone

I finally took the plunge and bought a modem for the boat - the Huawei E220 on 3's Mobile Broadband deal.

(Calling your mobile network "3" is about the best example of search engine pessimisation I have yet come across.)

It's pretty nifty. The driver is shit, in the same way that all OS X drivers that aren't written by Apple are shit. There appears to be no way of finding out your total bandwidth usage, which is a bit of a bummer when you've signed up for 3Gb a month. But when it's connected, the speed is fantastic. Latency is noticeable but not too offputting, and it will occasionally break the connection and stop working, but that's not too much of an issue unless you're having a particularly involved IRC flamewar at the time. (As if.)

All in all I would be really chuffed about my new toy... were it not for Anna's latest purchase, which is black, shiny and has a touch-screen. Oh, but they're good. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to figure the idea behind the iPhone - never mind the feature-set, feel the UI - but until you've used one you don't realise quite how fantastic the UI actually is. I mean, it even manages to let you keep multiple webpages open in a kind of tabbed browsing stylee. There is, believe it or not, even EDGE reception in Chipping Norton.

Having a net connection here has meant I can finally get an OSM install running on the G5 (even with 10.3) and have enjoyed a happy-ish evening hacking the wondrous Perl module Imager to make it work. Imager is ridiculously good in itself - better results than ImageMagick and twice as fast - but the real secret is its incredible transform2 feature, basically programmable pixel warping which is ideal for... hmmmm... something like rectifying scanned maps. But, for some reason, this part alone wouldn't install on my Mac. After an evening's hacking it does, and I now almost understand Parse::RecDescent, though that might be two bottles of Frome Valley talking (mmm, Frome Valley).

Otherwise, I've been hammering this CD of Poulenc and Saint-Saens' organ concertos, which I bought at the fabulous second-hand book and record store in Bishop's Castle, and can't be beaten for sheer BAM BAM BAM organ power; and Underworld's latest, which is delightful because it sounds just like an Underworld album should do, and makes me smile every time something Underworldy happens. You can't ask for more than that.

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