Matt’s Blog > 2008 > March

All of a sudden my Treo 650 locks up hard when I try to enable Bluetooth. You have to do a hard reset (wiping all data) to get the phone feature to work again. I was able to back it up before doing this, but… What gives? I can live without Bluetooth, but I kind [...]

I started a blog post about this, but it talked about terabytes NASs, HDTV DVRs, VoIP / SIP, LDAP, DNS caches, NTP strata, and a bunch of acronyms.
So instead I’ll be incredibly precise. This PC, seemingly sold only at Walmart, is really cool. It’s not that fast. Its specs are bad any way you look [...]

Now that Comcast has vowed to quit arbitrarily blocking services on their Internet service, they’ve decided to shift the degraded quality to their HD offerings. This article talks a bit about how Comcast is running some heavy compression to fit more HD channels into finite bandwidth, but it has lots of words. So check out [...]

Are you familiar with the Shotspotter system? I’d seen it on a National Geographic TV show, and remembered in the back of my head reading about it being deployed in parts of Boston. It’s actually very cool how it works — it essentially has a big array of microphones, and when it “hears” a gunshot, [...]

I’ve seen this suggested before, but only half-believed it.
When you’re stumped by a question, write it out. We’re hosting a video game tournament tomorrow, and I was thinking about scoring. I got stumped by some technical problems with the way the bracket would work.
So I decided to burn my weekly Ask MetaFilter question. Except, three-quarters [...]

One thing I find interesting about technology is that sometimes a trivial technological thing has huge differences to the end user.
I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto a bit in my spare time, on the Xbox 360. After re-arranging some things, I’ve run into a strange problem where, when I power it up, it loads older [...]

So my building here is one in a “set” of three dormitories. There’s a walkway, and another building on the other side of it. (And the third is to their side.) As I came back from class, I noticed a rope running from a room on the floor above mine across to the room pretty [...]

MetaFilter, the parent component of my beloved Ask MetaFilter, is quickly earning its place as one of the sites I check daily.
A post there today links to a priceless photo gallery, Nightmare Playgrounds. They’re photos of actual playgrounds, surely designed by people who had disturbed childhoods and wanted to ensure that generations of children [...]

It is widely assumed that there are no escalators in Wyoming.

It’s very common for spammers to create blogs on Blogger (something.blogspot.com). There’s a survey out there that found that 74% of blogs on the site were spam.
It turns out that you can report spam blogs pretty easily on Blogger: they’ve got a form for it here. You won’t find it linked to on their site [...]