kstruct

All I want for Christmas (I figured I’d get in really early) is a mobile phone with a built in GPS receiver which I can program. I’ve seen the GPS modules you can use with some phones, and even some phones which have GPS built in, but nothing which looks to approach the level of quality I would want (Mac users are trouble).

One of the big sticking points is that I haven’t seen anything much about programming with the GPS reciever, which makes me suspect it’s not exposed at that level. Apparently unlike the rest of the world I really don’t care (perhaps just because I’ve not tried it) about having maps or driving directions on a phone.

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(See email from inessential.com)

I was pleased to find, a while back, a bit of a rundown on the PVR situation in Australia. I’ve read a lot about TiVo in the US, and even remember hearing about some of the ANU staff’s efforts to hack them back when I was in my first year there. (I was lucky enough to be in a small Advanced CS tutorial with Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame back then. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, but what the hell.)

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HomeScreen is one of the Australian NetFlix clones, and the one to which I used to subscribe (See my review). Anyway, HomeScreen had a nice enough web interface, but annoyingly the login cookie exipres one day after it’s set, which for me meant logging again every-time I visited the site.

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The title being inspired by Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss which I’ve not read, but bought for my father last Christmas.

An office in the same building as mine has a sign just about a door bell saying “Please press if our reception is unattended”. For whatever reason, reception is quite often unattended which is what I assume prompted the door bell and sign to begin with. While it probably makes me one of those jerk programmer types, the idea of pressing the door bell every time I walk past and notice the reception area empty keeps rolling around in my head. Afterall, they did ask so politely, and I wouldn’t want to be rude.

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For those outside Australia, HomeScreen is one of our NetFlix clones

About a month ago I discontinued my subscription to HomeScreen after over a year on the three disk at a time plan. I was never really able to find much info about the Australian NetFlix clones, so I guess this is a bit of a contribution. What’s really needed I suppose is a comparative review, but I’m not planning on signing up with any of the others (Quickflix, BigPond Movies, others?) in the near future, so this will have to do.

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You would think an empty little text box would be somewhat less intimidating than the old blank page cliché.