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Bad industrial design. Insanely bad industrial design…
Just got a Kingston USB keyring flash drive – very useful, very fashionable. Keep lots of data with you at all times. Cringely can even boot Linux from his and get back up and running if his house in Charleston is destroyed.
Just one snag – instead of putting the keyring on the unit itself, they put the keyring on the cap that goes over the USB plug – so if the cap falls off, instead of just losing the cap… you lose all your data.
Doh!

Got my iBook back now. John Lewis had lost it – and they were going to give me a brand new one.

But then they found it.

I think I could have lived with the loss of data…

I’ve been without my iBook for half a week now – back at Apple having the inevitable screen flicker fixed. So I’ve been forced back to my old Bondi Blue iMac, my old 233 mHz friend, and it’s been like putting on a comfy pair of old shoes.

I’ve neglected the beastie a bit, so I spent a happy hour updating some key software, getting the last version of Internet Explorer, Flash, RealPlayer… and AvantGo.

I’d completely stopped using AvantGo since we were stopped from using the Palm Desktop at work, and since they have – incredibly – not released an OS X version of AvantGo nor do they seem to have any plans to do so.

This is a real shame – I only subscribe to a few channels (Wired, Media Guardian, The Penge Daily Examiner Pocket Edition), but there’s always one or two little gems tucked away that I’d have missed otherwise.

Too bad I can’t get WiFi on my Palm M125…

My eldest son Henry, 3, continues to amaze me.

His mum’s been in hospital on and off (mostly on) over the past two weeks, sometimes both his parents vanishing in the night, he awakes to find his grandmother in charge.

He’s taking it all remarkably well, even if he does come out with some startling things when he’s playing. The other day he was playing with his toy bus and said matter-of-factly “my mum’s dead” – now even I realised this was a slightly worrying remark that needed putting right, so I stopped watching Channel 4 News or preventing his baby brother eating E45 Cream or whatever I was doing and had a good chat with him to make sure he understood his mum wasn’t dead, just not very well.

Tonight I tried to get him to settle down for a story, but he was making up his own story so elaborate and exciting there wasn’t much on our bookshelves to compete. He has a transparent plastic case that he pretended was an aeroplane, he told me where he and all his friends and family were sitting, that we were all going to the seaside on it, everyone gets off except Henry who gets left on board, and it takes off again, Henry parachuting back down to the seaside where daddy says “brave boy, Henry” – the plane then crashes, all the passengers get off alive, but Henry is a cruel author as he killed off the pilots, or the “driver mans” as he calls them. “Driver mans dead. Ambulances and fire engines come. Police knock baddies over”.

Eat lead, Miffy.

I went for an actual pukka wardrive today – iBook on the passenger seat covered by a jumper, Macstumbler running, audio line out connected to a cassette adapter on the car radio, cruising around… car radio chatting away, so HELLO Wireless and Womble1, you’re using encryption, well done, but why not hide your base station ID? And then Roxley Road – is that the BT Broadband kiosk near the Loft Shop? But why are they using an Apple base station? And who the floop is 344309? Until now, driving was never such fun…