I've got one of those here... nice case - mod for atx is going to be a shit though. Has room for 2 full height 3.5 drives exposed, and 2 full height 5.25 drives not-exposed.
It's made of solid aluminum and has a weight sticker on the top : 18kg or 40lbs - so you actually weren't all that far off compared to the average pc.
You might have to use a MicroATX sized power supply though.
You pay shipping (toronto, canada) and you can have it.
Find a local ISP to work with... (includes how-to)
on
Wireless Broadband?
·
· Score: 5
Please note: I run a regional semi-rural ISP - we do this kind of work every day.
The trick with wireless broadband is usually that you are in an area that is seen as "unfashionable" to the large regionals and nationals.
Find yourself a local ISP - somebody that has some bandwidth and a bit of a DIY attitude. The gear to provide a point to point 2mb connection including antenna, cable, lightning arrestor, radio and short mast is less than $1000. The demarcation on both ends is ethernet. Note that you do need visual and radio line of sight as this gear doesn't go around corners well. Here's a good shopping list / procedure guide:
find an ISP with an office or POP within about 5 miles of you - you need to be able to see his roof from your roof or you'll have to buy a tower
arrange with the ISP to purchase bandwidth delivered at his POP as ethernet
purchase equipment:
2 Teletronics 2mb 802.11 access points
1 Linksys etherfast cable/dsl router (1 port)
2 24db grid antennas
2 2.4GHz capsule type lightning arrestors
2 teletronics to N-Female jumpers
2 lengths LMR600 M-M suitable to reach from radio location to point where the cable leaves the building
2 lengths #6 ground wire to reach from lighting arrestor (mounted on outside of building where cable enters building) to the ground in a straight line
2 copper lug clamps to connect ground wire to body of lightning arrestor
2 8 foot copper clad steel grounding rods with clamps
2 10 foot sections 1" schedule 80 metallic water pipe
2 sections of LMR600 M-M to reach from the lightning arrestor up to the antenna
high quality electrical tape (Scotch 33)
butyl rubber fusion tape
UV resistant (black) cable ties
misc mounting hardware
Install gear on buildings
set one AP in AP mode, set the other in infrastructure mode
set up IPs
surf fast!
This will give you serious net connectivity at a very reasonable price (compared to a telco T1, you'd see payback within about 2 weeks) in a way that is easy for both the ISP and you to deal with.
Here's the connection sequence starting from the ISP running to you:
connect ethernet from ISP's hub/switch to teletronics radio
connect teletronics to N-Female jumper to radio
connect first length of LMR600 to the jumper
drill 7/8" hole and pass cable outside
attach cable to correct port on lightning arrestor (usually marked "to radio")
attach grounding lug to lightning arrestor and mount on building exterior
attach ground wire and drop to ground
hammer ground rod into the ground (this might take a while)
attach grounding cable to ground rod
attach antenna feed cable to lightning arrestor
wrap the lighting arrestor and cable ends completely in the scotch 33 tape
wrap the taped connection in the butyl rubber fusion tape - follow package instructions
wrap again with scotch 33 TWICE
mount mast to roof
run cable up on roof and up mast cable ties where necessary
mount grid antenna per package instructions (some assembly is required - these are usually 2 feet by 3 feet
visually align antenna with other site
fine tune alignment with AP software
once alignment is confirmed, tighten everything down and wrap the antenna connector as described above
At your end, follow the same instructions, just add the linksys in as a NAT connection between your network and the public IP you got from the ISP.
There are a few other little tips and tricks - if anyone needs help, email me.
There are other product offerings that will work just as well, but only the teletronics gear is this cheap and has been field proven in this kind of environment with no 'engineering' assistance.
Growing up in Ontario in the Eighties....
on
The Rise Of QNX
·
· Score: 1
I well and truly remember the ICONS... horrible beasts they were, but they got me hooked on the concept of true multi-user systems. When I was in grade 11 or so, they started changing them all out for PCs (IBM PS/2 model 25 and 30) and we lost the multiuser any terminal any time stuff. It wasn't until going to university and rediscovering multiuser through Ultrix that I was again in a "happy place". The ICONs were fabulously ahead of their time, however, as other posters have noted, the training for the teachers wasn't there... I remember helping the (nominally) gym teacher get through the manual, trying to explain to him why the administrative user should be called "root" and why he can't change it to "tree" - that's about age 14 or so. And then I found Linux (0.99pre14 or so - ahhh slackware) and the rest is history - strangely - macOS on desktop and Linux on all but two of the servers.
It's cheap in canada because the two sources of highspeed local loop (cable and phoneline) both hold the price artificially low. Any ISP that is using similar technology has to match price or bleed customers. Don't even get me started on the shite economics of providing decent 1100/120 service on $40cdn ($~27usd) a month - I'm an ISP, I'm living this nightmare.
Nope, I won't feel silly, I'll just pull fibre into each room via the conduit that I thoughtfully placed there.
Please note that I didn't say broadband, I said 3mb/s symmetrical connection to my NOC - yes, that means I own the ISP and therefore have access to bandwidth that you only dream of having in your pocket. By the time you've got broadband in your pants, I'm sure that my $0/month wireless link will have been upgraded so that it still represents a better connection than you've seen in your life.
As a geek who is finally purchasing new furniture to avoid the "college" look, I am finally able to say that I am embarking upon the adventure of a lifetime and building a geekhouse from the ground up.
My wife agreed (and has participated in designing) a very cool little house.
We purchased a standard issue suburban type semi-detached house (going up in an older neighborhood) and have worked with the builder to ensure that it meets our needs. It has the following elements:
- conduit from machine room to each room
- 19" 42U rack cabinet in the media room
- prewired for alarm
- prewired with dual cat5 and dual coax to a minimum of two locations per room in addition to the conduit
- prewired with coax+power to camera locations throughout
- media room set up with 2" conduit to projector location (full 1024 x 768 projector that does i1080)
- wireless (3mb/s FHSS) to my network operations building
- wireless (11mb/s DSSS) internal umbrella
- prewired with dual RG6 coax for DTH satellite service
I didn't have any issues with the builder (he asked if I would be able to meet the window for wiring that his project manager would supply, I showed him my company's ad in the yellow pages under Cabling Consultant). We've lived in several half done implementations of the geekhouse and I'm looking forward to having it done right. While you're building, you might as well throw everything in the walls.
One of these days, I'll stick up the webpage for it at http://www.100percentgeek.net/geekhouse.html
"Have Space Suit, Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein.
You can find it on Amazon, just do a search.
The prize was a trip to space, he won one of the consolation prizes - a space suit. He won it by sending in soap wrappers. The story is about his adventures around the solar system - escaping nasty aliens, roaming around the moon, etc. It 's a great read, highly recommended.
Actually, anything in the Heinlein "could happen" series of books about spaceflight is good, like Azimov and Clarke, he was a real scientist and actually knew about things like chemistry and ballistics.
And oh crap what I'd do to get on that show - even to just have a chance, however, I am not an American. My wife is, but I'm Canadian. Goddamn it.
We're running several of this model and have been very very pleased with it. We're just in the process of moving one of them to cover a community event for which they are ideally suited. We've got an Axis cam and a Breezecom SA10D connected up so that we can put a cam anywhere we can get about an amp of 120VAC. After the weekend, I can post more details about how it's going.
We're about ready to roll out residental DSL and this story seems timely. Here's my take on it (usual disclaimers apply).
We are a midsized regional ISP with a healthy and happy dialup base who are jumping ship to go with the damn cableco's (have I mentioned how much I hate monopolies that blatently lie in their advertising) so we are setting up with the only dsl wholesaler in town - the monopolistic phone company.
The deal they offer us is pretty raw - without disclosing things, I can tell you that they are selling their service for just slightly more than $10 over what it costs us. Leaving us to provide (a) bandwidth, (b) servers, and (c) support and administration in less than $10/customer. The telco hides behind a bundling arrangement that saves you $10 if you use their LD service and claims that should give us $20/sub to spend on the rest of things.
Given that a megabit of bandwidth still costs roughly $1500 - even in large quantities (this is for T1/T3/ethernet or fractions of) that means that to supply service under the price guidelines I have to have a bandwidth to user ratio of 1:150 which isn't so good. So... we back the land line bandwidth with some satellite caching (cidera skycache rocks my world) and then we start playing the bandwidth hog game...
I see a multitude of problems with watching for and shutting down bandwidth hogs... mostly that some guy will get cut off cuz he uses the internet to babysit his preteenage kid and that kid is a massive mp3 collector.
I wouldn't mind servers on residential connections - interestingly enough the telco says that if you are piggybacking dsl on a business line, you pay the business rate - so that makes it easier for me.
I don't mind servers for non-commercial purposes, but if you're making even a single cent from that server, you should pay for it. I have to pay suppliers for things that are used by my company - why shouldn't you? For example, my techgeeks tend to have domain names of their own and tend to run rather expansive servers at home (they are happier when they have constant fan noise and 60Hz hum) which doesn't bother me at all. But if I found that they had page upon page of banner ads, I'd expect them to pay for the bandwidth that they are consuming (I know it's only the HTML, but damnit, I had to pay for that bandwidth)
I guess my thoughts run all over the place on this stuff, but... it shouldn't be a big problem to pay for commercial use and be non-commercial if you are residential.
I bought one of these to replace my aging HP95LX, and although it isn't as cool as the 95, it's still the best of all worlds. It wont fit in your pocket easily (you'll have size issues with the palm/keyboard combo) but it is more "full-featured" than most other palmtop/handhelds I've seen.
It's got a 640x240 screen (half VGA) that does 64K colours (recent bios update over the factory 256 colours),the keyboard is large enough - not perfect, but survivable, the internal modem reliably does 42k to my servers, it has a bulky com adapter cable - I do the cisco thing too and would love to build a custom cable that is smaller and more lightweight than the current big cable, adapter, and powderblue RJ cable setup)
I have a 32MB CF card that gives me enough storage for about an hour of low quality mp3 storage - with no headphone jack you're limited to the 3/4" peizo speaker - so quality isn't a concern - but it's loud enough to enjoy something other than fan noise when you're deep in a room full of racks.
It will not come with much useful software, but a VISA card can fix that quickly - you'll need all the usual network utilities. On an interesting point, VNC is available for it and comes at a lovely price point!
I've filled the PCMCIA card slot with a cheap DLink 10baseT card which gets me functional on either a tp or coax network - useful to do diagnosis from ether as well as serial.
The battery life is substantial! With normal operations, you can really expect 7 hours life out of it - running the network card will cut it back to about 5, but I'm sure that a more expensive low power ether card would make a difference there. There is also an extended life battery that claims (and I believe it) 21 hours of use.
While on the road, I connect to the net either with a cable into my Qualcomm 2760 or with a RJ11 into my truck's analog cell phone.
All in all, it's a workable combination, and has freed me for the most part from a laptop. I still carry my Thinkpad, and I'm getting very very close to dumping the desktop machine out of my life - I'd miss the 20" sony glass, but it still might happen.
If you've got questions, ask and I'll do my best to answer!
You're going to have a heck of a time bringing up X on that terminal -- trust me on this one. ((Note to the wise, VT100 Terminals do text only, I repeat, text only))
The company bought one of these for my web-designer wife last week, and we had a blast watching DVD movies on our home (untheatre-like) setup. Beyond the fact that it's the coolest hardware out there today, it played several DVD movies flawlessly and output with the included SVid->composite adapter was still several times better than ExpressVu on the same setup. The audio was great (once I figured out that the DVD player sound control is a subset of the system sound level) and the machine says it can output Dolby to a compatible receiver. Remote control was simple - just put the powerbook on the coffee table! All in all, this is one really sweet machine for all round use, and excellent at several other things.
Now if only she would let me put Linux on it... sigh!
I've used this one for about 5 years. It's lived through about 4 laptops, has roomy document compartment, you can stuff the shoulder straps in if you are trying to look "business-like", the outside pocket is big enough for my phone, palmtop, and a can of coke. It's been on airplanes and fits under the seat in front of you, even when loaded with laptop, power supply, extra battery, two ora books, various papers, change of clothes, palmtop, phone, snack, portable cd player, etc..... I've worn it while riding a bike, it includes the back pad part so you don't feel the laptop. I've strengthened it with a pair of metal plates on either side of the laptop (just as a precaution). All in all, it's a good bag, just make sure to rip off the "targus" nameplate because it does mean "steal me" You can find it on their website here: http://www.targus.com/products/ccb1.htm
I have one of these (2700) and it's on the "Bell Mobility" network in Southwestern Ontario. It appears to the system as a pretty standard 19,200 or 14.4 modem. Most all AT commands work (well, not the ones that are unimportant.) Couple of "gotchas": 1/ Only works in digital mode. 2/ You -need- 4 bars on the signal strength meter. This is not so easy to find. Luckily, I live about a kilometre from a tower. 3/ There is a hefty CDN$0.15/minute surcharge over your normal minute rate (even on my plan - 700 minutes a month - you need the 1000 minute plan to escape the fee.) Given all the above, its a good deal. Not much for web-speed downloads, but sure is nice to telnet from anywhere. I've used it with my laptop running both win95 (job requirement) and Trinux (cool tool) with no problem. I've also used it with my nifty HP680 palmtop (the ultimate in portable sysadmin'ing.) It comes with some windows software to let you control the phone from your windows desktop (why?) and some useful software to load the phone's memory without typing on the number keys for hours. Out of all the gagety things I own, this one rates a 10 for utility and a 10 for gee whiz factor and a 4 for price.
Ahhh.... the Forminco Mouse Arena... Im sitting in a Forminco Chair right now, probably the most comfortable chair I've ever found, even better than a Steelcase. Forminco was originally run out of a little town just north of Montreal QC, however, I know that the original company went bankrupt some years back. The original address was: Forminco, 9610A Ignace, Brossard, Quebec, Canada J4Y 2R4. I really miss Forminco... I have (let me check) one mouse arena, one chair, and two footrests (heated). I should've bought the workstation (check http://www.homeofficedirect.com/fr1500.htm) but I found another one that seems to fit what I need - mostly. Could probably come up with an `Ask Slashdot...' for what people consider to be the idealized workstation. I'm looking for something with an even mix of open expanses of desk space, and the `command cockpit' that would seem to be ergonomically better.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got one of those here... nice case - mod for atx is going to be a shit though. Has room for 2 full height 3.5 drives exposed, and 2 full height 5.25 drives not-exposed.
It's made of solid aluminum and has a weight sticker on the top : 18kg or 40lbs - so you actually weren't all that far off compared to the average pc.
You might have to use a MicroATX sized power supply though.
You pay shipping (toronto, canada) and you can have it.
Please note: I run a regional semi-rural ISP - we do this kind of work every day.
The trick with wireless broadband is usually that you are in an area that is seen as "unfashionable" to the large regionals and nationals.
Find yourself a local ISP - somebody that has some bandwidth and a bit of a DIY attitude. The gear to provide a point to point 2mb connection including antenna, cable, lightning arrestor, radio and short mast is less than $1000. The demarcation on both ends is ethernet. Note that you do need visual and radio line of sight as this gear doesn't go around corners well. Here's a good shopping list / procedure guide:
This will give you serious net connectivity at a very reasonable price (compared to a telco T1, you'd see payback within about 2 weeks) in a way that is easy for both the ISP and you to deal with.
Here's the connection sequence starting from the ISP running to you:
At your end, follow the same instructions, just add the linksys in as a NAT connection between your network and the public IP you got from the ISP.
There are a few other little tips and tricks - if anyone needs help, email me.
There are other product offerings that will work just as well, but only the teletronics gear is this cheap and has been field proven in this kind of environment with no 'engineering' assistance.
For a good topical discussion on this, join-isp-wireless@isp-wireless.com be careful though, this is a high volume list.
Most of what you need can be had from www.wpcs.com or www.tessco.com.
I well and truly remember the ICONS... horrible beasts they were, but they got me hooked on the concept of true multi-user systems. When I was in grade 11 or so, they started changing them all out for PCs (IBM PS/2 model 25 and 30) and we lost the multiuser any terminal any time stuff. It wasn't until going to university and rediscovering multiuser through Ultrix that I was again in a "happy place". The ICONs were fabulously ahead of their time, however, as other posters have noted, the training for the teachers wasn't there... I remember helping the (nominally) gym teacher get through the manual, trying to explain to him why the administrative user should be called "root" and why he can't change it to "tree" - that's about age 14 or so. And then I found Linux (0.99pre14 or so - ahhh slackware) and the rest is history - strangely - macOS on desktop and Linux on all but two of the servers.
M
It's cheap in canada because the two sources of highspeed local loop (cable and phoneline) both hold the price artificially low. Any ISP that is using similar technology has to match price or bleed customers. Don't even get me started on the shite economics of providing decent 1100/120 service on $40cdn ($~27usd) a month - I'm an ISP, I'm living this nightmare.
Nope, I won't feel silly, I'll just pull fibre into each room via the conduit that I thoughtfully placed there.
Please note that I didn't say broadband, I said 3mb/s symmetrical connection to my NOC - yes, that means I own the ISP and therefore have access to bandwidth that you only dream of having in your pocket. By the time you've got broadband in your pants, I'm sure that my $0/month wireless link will have been upgraded so that it still represents a better connection than you've seen in your life.
As a geek who is finally purchasing new furniture to avoid the "college" look, I am finally able to say that I am embarking upon the adventure of a lifetime and building a geekhouse from the ground up.
My wife agreed (and has participated in designing) a very cool little house.
We purchased a standard issue suburban type semi-detached house (going up in an older neighborhood) and have worked with the builder to ensure that it meets our needs. It has the following elements:
- conduit from machine room to each room
- 19" 42U rack cabinet in the media room
- prewired for alarm
- prewired with dual cat5 and dual coax to a minimum of two locations per room in addition to the conduit
- prewired with coax+power to camera locations throughout
- media room set up with 2" conduit to projector location (full 1024 x 768 projector that does i1080)
- wireless (3mb/s FHSS) to my network operations building
- wireless (11mb/s DSSS) internal umbrella
- prewired with dual RG6 coax for DTH satellite service
I didn't have any issues with the builder (he asked if I would be able to meet the window for wiring that his project manager would supply, I showed him my company's ad in the yellow pages under Cabling Consultant). We've lived in several half done implementations of the geekhouse and I'm looking forward to having it done right. While you're building, you might as well throw everything in the walls.
One of these days, I'll stick up the webpage for it at http://www.100percentgeek.net/geekhouse.html
M
"Have Space Suit, Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein.
You can find it on Amazon, just do a search.
The prize was a trip to space, he won one of the consolation prizes - a space suit. He won it by sending in soap wrappers. The story is about his adventures around the solar system - escaping nasty aliens, roaming around the moon, etc. It 's a great read, highly recommended.
Actually, anything in the Heinlein "could happen" series of books about spaceflight is good, like Azimov and Clarke, he was a real scientist and actually knew about things like chemistry and ballistics.
And oh crap what I'd do to get on that show - even to just have a chance, however, I am not an American. My wife is, but I'm Canadian. Goddamn it.
M
We're running several of this model and have been very very pleased with it. We're just in the process of moving one of them to cover a community event for which they are ideally suited. We've got an Axis cam and a Breezecom SA10D connected up so that we can put a cam anywhere we can get about an amp of 120VAC. After the weekend, I can post more details about how it's going.
M
We're about ready to roll out residental DSL and this story seems timely. Here's my take on it (usual disclaimers apply).
We are a midsized regional ISP with a healthy and happy dialup base who are jumping ship to go with the damn cableco's (have I mentioned how much I hate monopolies that blatently lie in their advertising) so we are setting up with the only dsl wholesaler in town - the monopolistic phone company.
The deal they offer us is pretty raw - without disclosing things, I can tell you that they are selling their service for just slightly more than $10 over what it costs us. Leaving us to provide (a) bandwidth, (b) servers, and (c) support and administration in less than $10/customer. The telco hides behind a bundling arrangement that saves you $10 if you use their LD service and claims that should give us $20/sub to spend on the rest of things.
Given that a megabit of bandwidth still costs roughly $1500 - even in large quantities (this is for T1/T3/ethernet or fractions of) that means that to supply service under the price guidelines I have to have a bandwidth to user ratio of 1:150 which isn't so good. So... we back the land line bandwidth with some satellite caching (cidera skycache rocks my world) and then we start playing the bandwidth hog game...
I see a multitude of problems with watching for and shutting down bandwidth hogs... mostly that some guy will get cut off cuz he uses the internet to babysit his preteenage kid and that kid is a massive mp3 collector.
I wouldn't mind servers on residential connections - interestingly enough the telco says that if you are piggybacking dsl on a business line, you pay the business rate - so that makes it easier for me.
I don't mind servers for non-commercial purposes, but if you're making even a single cent from that server, you should pay for it. I have to pay suppliers for things that are used by my company - why shouldn't you? For example, my techgeeks tend to have domain names of their own and tend to run rather expansive servers at home (they are happier when they have constant fan noise and 60Hz hum) which doesn't bother me at all. But if I found that they had page upon page of banner ads, I'd expect them to pay for the bandwidth that they are consuming (I know it's only the HTML, but damnit, I had to pay for that bandwidth)
I guess my thoughts run all over the place on this stuff, but... it shouldn't be a big problem to pay for commercial use and be non-commercial if you are residential.
Have a wonderful day all.
M
We use internet secure and have found it (so far) to be an ideal situation - yes they take some fees, but they are worth it so far.
http://www.internetsecure.com
M
I bought one of these to replace my aging HP95LX, and although it isn't as cool as the 95, it's still the best of all worlds. It wont fit in your pocket easily (you'll have size issues with the palm/keyboard combo) but it is more "full-featured" than most other palmtop/handhelds I've seen.
It's got a 640x240 screen (half VGA) that does 64K colours (recent bios update over the factory 256 colours),the keyboard is large enough - not perfect, but survivable, the internal modem reliably does 42k to my servers, it has a bulky com adapter cable - I do the cisco thing too and would love to build a custom cable that is smaller and more lightweight than the current big cable, adapter, and powderblue RJ cable setup)
I have a 32MB CF card that gives me enough storage for about an hour of low quality mp3 storage - with no headphone jack you're limited to the 3/4" peizo speaker - so quality isn't a concern - but it's loud enough to enjoy something other than fan noise when you're deep in a room full of racks.
It will not come with much useful software, but a VISA card can fix that quickly - you'll need all the usual network utilities. On an interesting point, VNC is available for it and comes at a lovely price point!
I've filled the PCMCIA card slot with a cheap DLink 10baseT card which gets me functional on either a tp or coax network - useful to do diagnosis from ether as well as serial.
The battery life is substantial! With normal operations, you can really expect 7 hours life out of it - running the network card will cut it back to about 5, but I'm sure that a more expensive low power ether card would make a difference there. There is also an extended life battery that claims (and I believe it) 21 hours of use.
While on the road, I connect to the net either with a cable into my Qualcomm 2760 or with a RJ11 into my truck's analog cell phone.
All in all, it's a workable combination, and has freed me for the most part from a laptop. I still carry my Thinkpad, and I'm getting very very close to dumping the desktop machine out of my life - I'd miss the 20" sony glass, but it still might happen.
If you've got questions, ask and I'll do my best to answer!
M
You're going to have a heck of a time bringing up X on that terminal -- trust me on this one. ((Note to the wise, VT100 Terminals do text only, I repeat, text only))
M
The company bought one of these for my web-designer wife last week, and we had a blast watching DVD movies on our home (untheatre-like) setup. Beyond the fact that it's the coolest hardware out there today, it played several DVD movies flawlessly and output with the included SVid->composite adapter was still several times better than ExpressVu on the same setup. The audio was great (once I figured out that the DVD player sound control is a subset of the system sound level) and the machine says it can output Dolby to a compatible receiver. Remote control was simple - just put the powerbook on the coffee table! All in all, this is one really sweet machine for all round use, and excellent at several other things.
Now if only she would let me put Linux on it... sigh!
M
I've used this one for about 5 years. It's lived through about 4 laptops, has roomy document compartment, you can stuff the shoulder straps in if you are trying to look "business-like", the outside pocket is big enough for my phone, palmtop, and a can of coke. It's been on airplanes and fits under the seat in front of you, even when loaded with laptop, power supply, extra battery, two ora books, various papers, change of clothes, palmtop, phone, snack, portable cd player, etc..... I've worn it while riding a bike, it includes the back pad part so you don't feel the laptop. I've strengthened it with a pair of metal plates on either side of the laptop (just as a precaution). All in all, it's a good bag, just make sure to rip off the "targus" nameplate because it does mean "steal me" You can find it on their website here: http://www.targus.com/products/ccb1.htm
I have one of these (2700) and it's on the "Bell Mobility" network in Southwestern Ontario. It appears to the system as a pretty standard 19,200 or 14.4 modem. Most all AT commands work (well, not the ones that are unimportant.) Couple of "gotchas": 1/ Only works in digital mode. 2/ You -need- 4 bars on the signal strength meter. This is not so easy to find. Luckily, I live about a kilometre from a tower. 3/ There is a hefty CDN$0.15/minute surcharge over your normal minute rate (even on my plan - 700 minutes a month - you need the 1000 minute plan to escape the fee.) Given all the above, its a good deal. Not much for web-speed downloads, but sure is nice to telnet from anywhere. I've used it with my laptop running both win95 (job requirement) and Trinux (cool tool) with no problem. I've also used it with my nifty HP680 palmtop (the ultimate in portable sysadmin'ing.) It comes with some windows software to let you control the phone from your windows desktop (why?) and some useful software to load the phone's memory without typing on the number keys for hours. Out of all the gagety things I own, this one rates a 10 for utility and a 10 for gee whiz factor and a 4 for price.
Ahhh.... the Forminco Mouse Arena... Im sitting in a Forminco Chair right now, probably the most comfortable chair I've ever found, even better than a Steelcase. Forminco was originally run out of a little town just north of Montreal QC, however, I know that the original company went bankrupt some years back. The original address was: Forminco, 9610A Ignace, Brossard, Quebec, Canada J4Y 2R4. I really miss Forminco... I have (let me check) one mouse arena, one chair, and two footrests (heated). I should've bought the workstation (check http://www.homeofficedirect.com/fr1500.htm) but I found another one that seems to fit what I need - mostly. Could probably come up with an `Ask Slashdot...' for what people consider to be the idealized workstation. I'm looking for something with an even mix of open expanses of desk space, and the `command cockpit' that would seem to be ergonomically better.
J