Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek Stuff, General

Drifting without a landline

Well, we jumped off the deep end today and dropped our landline connection. We got the Ooma Telo a few weeks ago, tried it out and thought it worked and sounded OK.  Then we requested to port our current phone number to Ooma. I figure that the Ooma will pay for itself in less than a year if we dropped Qwest.   Today I went out to the box on the side of the house and disconnected from the phone network. I plugged Ooma into the house wiring and now all the phones in the house are running through Ooma.

After a lifetime wired into the network, it will be interesting to see what happens. We are on a MMDS broadband wireless connection to the internet  so the only physical connection to the grid is the electricity. Ooma will redirect calls to our cell phone if the network connection is down so I am expecting a some redundant connectivity. Of course, if a power loss drops our MMDS tower, it may drop the cell phone tower as well, and then where would we be?  And all the electricity in the phone lines will be laughing at us.

If you don’t hear anything more from me on this then everything is going so smoothly I have forgotten all about it.

 

Geek Stuff, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Internet ‘kill switch’ bill reintroduced as Egypt remains dark

Sen. Collins said the bill would not allow the President to deactivate the Internet in whole or in part during times of political unrest or protest – just during a “cyber emergency,” according to Wired.com.

“My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,” Collins said in an e-mailed response to Wired.com last week. “It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”

via Internet ‘kill switch’ bill reintroduced as Egypt remains dark.

Any bets that a time of political unrest or protest won’t be labeled “cyber emergency”?

I think it would be more appropriate to up a domain where the folks afraid of cyber-terrorists can hide and if the cyber emergency happens then they can be unplugged, leaving the rest of us bereft of their presence.

Geek Stuff, General

4G, or not 4G – that is the question

Someone asked me this weekend about 4G Wireless; Wikipedia has a good basic description. (Plus I also watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet this weekend (OK, it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet – as interpreted by Branagh) Excellent DVD)

ITU Requirements

This article uses 4G to refer to IMT-Advanced (International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced), as defined by ITU-R. An IMT-Advanced cellular system must fulfill the following requirements:

  • All-IP communications.
  • Peak data rates of up to approximately 100 Mbit/s for high mobility such as mobile access and up to approximately 1 Gbit/s for low mobility such as nomadic/local wireless access, according to the ITU requirements.
  • Scalable channel bandwidth, between 5 and 20 MHz, optionally up to 40 MHz.[6][6][7]
  • Peak link spectral efficiency of 15 bit/s/Hz in the downlink, and 6.75 bit/s/Hz in the uplink (meaning that 1 Gbit/s in the downlink should be possible over less than 67 MHz bandwidth)
  • System spectral efficiency of up to 3 bit/s/Hz/cell in the downlink and 2.25 bit/s/Hz/cell for indoor usage[6]

Confusion has often been caused by some mobile carriers who have launched products advertised as 4G but which are actually current so-called 3.9G technologies, and therefore do not follow the ITU-R defined principles for 4G standards.

Geek Stuff, General

The Equation of Time

I was looking at my calendar and noticed that the Winter Solstice is coming up Dec 21. Then I noticed that the time of sunset on the solstice is not the earliest  amongst the days nearby. And the time of sunrise is not the latest. Indeed, looking over the various sunrise and sunset times, it turns out that the earliest sunset was in the period of December 3-10 – 16:37  in Colorado Springs – and the latest sunrise occurs from December 31 – January 10 – 7:18. But the Solstice is still the shortest day, longest night of the year. (9:26, 14:34 hrs). Most peculiar, one would intuitively think that the shortest day would have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset.  Something was wrong and I needed to find out.  So I went to Google.  

It turns out that others have noticed this phenomenon before and have an explanation of it. I like this explanation – he said analemma. The US Naval Observatory was not quite as detailed but did summarize it nicely- Declination and The Equation of Time.

I still have a hard time visualizing the spacial relationships. What I need is a picture – no… no…  doesn’t help…

Geek Stuff

Strike Through

I would like to be able to change the strike though character in HTML from ‘-‘ to ‘/’. I have not been able to find any way to do it and it isn’t even offered as a ‘text-decoration’ option.

Does anyone know how you go about getting W3C to consider adding that option to the HTML standards?

Geek Stuff

Cookie Monster

I hadn’t realized how insidious these trackers have become. This WSJ article discusses how cookies have grown since their Netscape days. There is also a link to a tool that tells you who has what installed on a domain site, about half way down the article.

Is there advertising on web pages? I should probably pay more attention and be less oblivious.