Perfect storm

Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to ( Read more... )

The spammers have decided that us little guys are not to be allowed to run our own email servers anymore. They didn’t do it via legal machinations rather, they did it the old-fashioned way; brute force.

This is the end of a 7+ month battle between spammers and myself. Until 3 months ago, I ran my own self-hosted mail server. All my domains were on ( Read more... )

At least. the ones on Twitter. Google Chrome can’t find them.

( Read more... )

Last June I wrote about my new phone, an LG Optimus 2x. For a few months I was quite pleased with it and then the performance started to slowly fall off. This is the very first dual-core phone to hit the market. However, it did not deserve its software. It was Android 2.2.2, Froyo, which LG had promised to upgrade to v2.3.n Gingerbread ASAP.

For ( Read more... )

A few days ago I wrote about the LG Optimus 7 and the Windows Mobile 7 experience. Basically, it wasn’t. Rather, it was a bad trip. It is every bit the customer lock-in experience that the Apple iPhone is and the Cloud Computing experience is all about parting you from your money through monthly tariffs and data charges. It is no wonder that the ( Read more... )

Last Friday, amidst other things (which I will discuss in another post), I had to go down to the SwissCom shop to deal with my Piece-of-Shit HTC s740. What I walked away with is this:


( Read more... )

Apparently, I can no longer edit existing posts due to a number of interacting issues. Worse, I can’t fix it on this server. I am in the process of building a new Web Application Server (WAS) and will fix it during the move to the new machine. My problem currently is that we are on Holiday and away from Nyon and the VPN is not quite good enough to ( Read more... )

Part 2 (methods)

There are basically only two forms of vehicle available today; Electric Vehicles (EV) and Fueled Vehicles (FV). Hybrids are a special case of Fueled Vehicle 1 . There is some very cool stuff on electric transportation at Jay Leno’s Garage.
EVs

What makes an Electric Vehicle (EV) unique is that it only uses energy. It does not ( Read more... )

Part I

This is actually the kick-off article for a series of articles that explore the ramifications of bringing electric vehicles into the realm of daily use. Specifically, this involves their impact on our ecology, our energy grid, and the sustainability of their continued use 1 .

There has been a lot of marketing hype, from the EV manufacturers, ( Read more... )

Still in Coppet,CH. The in-laws are now down in Aigues-Mortes because it’s warmer down there (7C v. -4C here). We stayed here to house-sit for a few days and will be going back on the 28th.

Zhinn is having a wonderful time even if it is damned cold outside. This is good as he isn’t completely an apartment cat. He’s now a 6 kilo adult male athletic ( Read more... )