Pissed off twice

Grrrr. I picked up my new PDA at Circuit City last night, a Sony Clié TJ37. Sony ships a CD that contains a special-for-Cliés version of the Palm Desktop, but it’s only a Windows app. I figured this only mattered for things like accessing the MP3 player. Nope. From hunting around on the web, I’ve finally discovered that any Clié with an MP3 player won’t sync at all with the ordinary Palm Desktop on a Mac.

There’s a solution — The Missing Sync, a piece of third-party software, which gives Mac users full access to the Clié. I eventually bought the download version (after waiting an hour because their store site’s server was down). I got my confirmation email, which was supposed to contain a download URL, but didn’t. I wrote to customer service, who’ll eventually get around to me by the next business day. Fuckers.

Update: Actually, they emailed me with an URL about seven hours after I sent the complaint. Still not as good as it could have been, but better than the next day.

Wasn’t Victorinox one of Asterix's friends?

This here looks like a pretty handy thing, and it’d fetch you lots of oohs and aahs at the next tech-geek get-together, but it’d be a serious pain the day your essential data got confiscated by airport security.

Keyless car locks jammed

From the WiFi Weblog: on Fri 20 Feb 2004, remote keyless car locks just stopped working in Las Vegas for a while. More from ReviewJournal:

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a defense and intelligence policy organization based near Washington, D.C., said military technology could easily be responsible for Friday’s phenomenon. One such operation is jamming, which involves the release of electromagnetic energy to interfere with an enemy’s radar detection capability.

Pike noted that particularly in Nevada, the military has a number of unacknowledged programs in jamming and radar and high-powered microwave weapons, any of which might have the potential to bring chaos to certain frequencies. [...]

News reports of a similar phenomenon several years ago in Washington state suggested the outages were linked to the arrival of military aircraft carriers to Bremerton.

In March 2001, the keyless entry failures began at the same time the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson returned to Bremerton. Then in April of that year, the outages began one day after the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln arrived at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.