james holden

Unboxing an Original 1988 Apple IIc

This lucky chap scored an unopened Apple IIc from eBay and, rather than sitting on it to accrue more collector value, decided to “unbox” it, 20 years after it left the factory.

I find it fascinating how there has been so little change to their approach to the first user experience, right from the “Open This [...]

Hacking Internal Bluetooth Into The Asus Eee PC

Frustrated by the ugliness of plugging a USB bluetooth adaptor into my Eee PC, I decided that the best thing I could do was gut a bluetooth adapter and install it internally.
Here are my accounts of the process.

Microsoft Didn’t Issue Takedown Notices For FairUse4WM

This has been the top-ranked download site for the FairUse4WM utility for some time now. It’s served up over 45,000 copies of the utility since I put the page up and there’s no sign of demand slowing down. Now, some months have passed, and it was widely reported in the media that Microsoft was sending [...]

MySpace To Trap Copyrighted Material With Audio-Fingerprinting

Macworld is reporting that MySpace will use ‘audio fingerprinting’ technology to automatically identify copyright infringing material at the point at which it is uploaded.
The system is provided by Gracenote, and appears to be a mixture of ID3 tag recognition and audio waveform matching.
Of course, there are many valid reasons to upload material that the system [...]

Nokia E60/E61/E70 Codes

Nokia’s E-Series phones have a few codes you can key in to access various hidden features:

*#06# – Show the serial number (IMEI)
*#0000# – Show the software version
*#7370# – Factory reset (the default lock code is 12345)
*#62209526# – Show the WLAN MAC address
*#2820# – Show the bluetooth address

Also, if the phone won’t boot and hangs on [...]

Ubuntu 6.10 Released

Ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ was released today. It’s available for Intel x86, AMD64, UltraSPARC T1 and PowerPC architectures.
You can get a copy from the download pages, or via their Shipit service.

Firefox 2.0 Is Out

The great open source browser, Firefox, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 2.0.
I’ve been using it for the last day or so and I’m impressed. There’s a spell checker for forms, which makes writing blog posts like this much nicer, there are also new tools for reporting phishing sites and sites [...]

Government Enforcement Of Software Licenses

The British government is being encouraged to help the BSA (the Business Software Alliance), who are the proprietary software industry’s kneecap gang, enforce the purchasing of software licenses by fining those who are found to be lacking the required licences.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m actually in favour of this.
For starters, the general procedure [...]

eBay Patent Challenge Tomorrow

Tomorrow, the patent infringement lawsuit brought against eBay will be heard by a U.S. supreme court judge. The case has been brought by a small company, MercExchange, and covers eBay’s ‘Buy-It-Now’ function.
The case is being closely watched, not only by the software industry, but by the pharmaceutical industries, who see it as an important reinforcement [...]

Belkin Doesn’t Encourage WiFi Security

I replace my flakey old D-Link wireless access point with a nice new Belkin 54g one this week. Now, I’ve noticed before that these ones are pretty popular. There’s certainly quite a few belkin54g APs in the general vicinity of my house (which makes me wonder who’s using who’s broadband, and if they even know!). [...]