I just finished replacing my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with a Linksys-by-Cisco WRT-160N wireless router.

Q: why a new router? Wasn’t the old one working? Yes. But I have a project that will require a WRT-54G — yes, it involves DD-WRT — and Amazon had a good price on refurbished WRT-160N‘s. (Whoa: it’s $4 better than when I bought mine three days ago! Curse this Black-Friday madness!)

I was astonished to see there was an automatic configurator for Macs. Things have sure changed since I bought my iBook in 2003.

After that, configuration went about like I expected. The automatic installer just assumed 192.168.1.* was available, and grabbed it to use as the LAN. Instead, it should have been a nice little DHCP client and asked the DSL modem what network it was on, and learned it was on a 192.168.1.* network. So of course, nothing worked.

But I’ve been through this before, so I didn’t take long to figure out the problem. I deleted the automatic configuration and started over, telling it to use 192.168.2.*. After that, it only took a couple of minutes to set everything up.

An unexpected bonus was figuring out how to delete old WiFi networks on the Windows Vista box. (That feature was there all along, seemingly, but when I’m doing Windows administration, I can’t find my backside.)

Man, Dell really has dissatisfied this customer. I’ve documented some of this on Twitter, but the gist is that I bought a refurb display and it arrived missing a cable.

The packaging didn’t include any bill of materials, nor a phone number to call if anything was missing. Every time I phoned one of Dell’s many 800 numbers, I would be shunted around by representatives with poor English skills. (Sorry, that’s a stereotype. Specifically, it’s a stereotype invented to describe Dell’s phone support.)

At one point, the phone rep told me that a DVI cable wasn’t included in the purchase price. I told him it explicitly said on their web site that it was. He went away for awhile to check it himself, then came back on to say that nevertheless, I couldn’t have one. I asked to speak to his manager. He went away again for a few minutes, then came back on to say I could have one after all. It wasn’t clear if they’d ship it in time for me to have it before Thanksgiving.

In the past 12 months, I’ve bought a laptop from Dell and a desktop system, besides this monitor. I’m in charge of purchasing a new computer for the secretary at church later this month. I expect that to cost between $500 and $800 depending on whether we buy any preloaded software from the hardware vendor.

Let’s assume the phone support is free. (And with quality like that, it should be.) I priced DVI cables on Amazon and it looks like they run anywhere from $3 up. So Dell can probably get them for 50 cents. Or a quarter. But my time is free, so they wasted 47 minutes of it last night and another half hour today.

Where do you suppose I won’t buy my next computer?

I’ve had a strange problem occur with my new MacBook: it fails to recognize when my headphones are in the audio port. The result is that the sound continues to come out of the laptop speakers.

This has only happened a couple of times, all in the last week. (Since i upgraded to the 9.02 (25) version of iTunes. Possibly a coincidence.)

I can fix it by rebooting, but … good grief. If I wanted to fix things by rebooting all the time, I’d have kept my Windows computer.

The second time this anomaly occurred, I asked my research assistant, Mr. Google, to find out if it was just me. Apparently, it’s not just me.

In a couple of years, the doctor will tell me that I’m old enough for a colonoscopy. When that happens, I hope this new technology is ready:

A new way to scan for diseases, including cancer of the stomach or colon, using a remote contol ‘spider pill’ camera with moving legs, has been hailed by scientists in Italy.

Experts believe the device, which is swallowed by the patient and controlled by doctors using a wireless connection, could transform the difficult and invasive process of diagnosing serious conditions.

The pill, which contains a tiny camera, is also fitted with tiny legs that can be activated remotely once it is inside the colon or intestine.

The Telegraph, via Slashdot.

I’m not a fan of the healthcare reform proposals, nor cash for clunkers, or the economic stimulus program. In fact, if there’s anything this administration has done that I would approve of, it has escaped my notice.

Until now. I just looked at data.gov, and I have to say, I’m impressed.

My mother-in-law sent me a link to this video. It’s pretty impressive: Stephen Wiltshire takes a helicopter tour of Rome, seeing it for the first time, then draws a panoramic view of the city from memory.

I managed to find a buyer for my Inspiron 1525 laptop. (No thanks to eBay and the Nigerian crooks who have made it useless for selling computers.)

But then my buyer tried to install software on it. And he ran into two problems. The first is that the battery seems not to hold a charge for very long. That one is news to me, but, then, I rarely used the battery except as a UPS; mostly I ran the computer off wall-current. Anyway, the buyer (we’ll call him Mr. X) was installing some software into his new computer, when it powered down because the battery went south.

That’s when problem two occurred. It’s called “Vista”. Somehow the crash (I’m told) clobbered the system so he got the NTLDR.SYS message. That means the HD is corrupted. I don’t know if the OS is susceptible to corruption when it crashes due to a power failure. (Poor design, if so.) Or possibly Mr. X was installing some virus-ridden L337 W4REZ and the virus clobbered NRLDR.SYS. I don’t know.

So here I am now, with a laptop I’d allowed myself to hope I was done with, and the task of reinstalling Vista. (So I can figure out what to do about the battery.) What fun that is.
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In preparation for selling the laptop, I wiped the disk and reinstalled Vista. And, you know what? Vista is halfway pretty. Maybe it only feels that way because I was getting rid of Ubuntu Linux. But, honestly, doesn’t this look better than Windows XP?

Anyway, there are currently about 8000 laptops for sale on eBay, and mine doesn’t show up in the first couple of hundred listings. If you search for a used “Inspiron 1525,” though, you will see it. But search quickly: the auction expires in 1d 03h.

There’s barely enough time for me to be depressed by this article from Bruce Schneier about how hard it is to sell a laptop on eBay.

So far, I haven’t been scammed. On the other hand, I haven’t gotten any bids yet, either. People are running up the prices of similarly- and less well-equipped machines, while the clock runs out on mine. I don’t know what’s up with that. Also, there are 17 people watching. (Really, 16: I’m watching it myself.)