More on desktops…

I also thought about this today.. if I had gone with a PowerMac, then that might have saved me from all my keyboard ordeals. I could have just gotten the real kinesis at both work and home and could have been done with it.
With a laptop, you have the added constraint that you want any external keyboard that you get to be at least somewhat similar to the builtin one. With a desktop, no such restriction. Plus, a smartphone is going to be so different anyways, that matching that doesn’t matter at all.

Nokia E70…

Still don’t hear much about it.. except that it looks like now its release date is Q2 2006

Programs I want to write…

I need to start keeping track of my ideas. That smartphone hooked up to my blog would be really good for that. I really need to start writing some GUI stuff for the mac. The one that would be somewhat interesting to me currently is a BDF (yes, X bitmap font) editor. But that seems like something who’s utility would diminish very quickly. It’s no wonder that the only good BDF editor out there right now (or at least the only one I could find) was a pro tool costing $500.
I also saw a OS X utility the other day that lets you graphically manage ssh tunnels.. interesting, but probably not very reliable. Also, I wouldn’t mind hacking a little bit to improve one of these OS X vnc clients. It’s sad that there isn’t really much that works very well as far as VNC clients on OSX.

Why do consumer router’s suck so much?

My Airport Express has been pretty good.. but once in a blue moon it gets confused, and I have to use the configuration utility to switch it’s configuration profile and then switch it back. A plain reset doesn’t work.
But why are these things so damn unreliable anyways? The basic technology (NAT, DHCP, static routing) hasn’t changed in the last 5 years. Every open source unix clone distribution could do it 5 years ago. Why is it all of a sudden too hard to do now?
I used to run my own router exactly because that’s the only way I could have it so that I didn’t have to reboot something once every few months. But that has its disadvantages.. especially when you don’t have the real embedded hardware to do it.. it means another loud machine that has to be kept on all the time.
It seems that wireless adapter support in open source kernels is finally starting to get good enough again so that if I buy the right hardware, I could build my own. There are lots of embedded platforms out there which can run Linux and don’t cost way too much. It’s definitely something to look into.

Keyboards…

I’m back to using the Apple wireless. Yea it seems to make me miss keys sometimes or type them in the wrong order.. but I don’t have to plug it in, and it has a lighter feel than the iceKey. I just wish there was a good mouse to go along with it. Does anyone know if bluetooth is just fundamentally a bad medium for a mouse connection? The keyboard — while I can detect a bit of extra lag if I compare it to a USB keyboard side-by-side — seems to have a latency that’s within reason. Are mice that more difficult?
Does bluetooth 2.0 make things any better?