Hardware

I have been mulling over technological convergance and specifically my outlook on the same with respect to Personal Digital Gadgets.

No, I do not think that is an actual term. By Personal Digital Gadgets, I mean the music player, hand held communication device a.k.a mobile phone, cameras (still and video), gaming devices, and similar 'consumer gadgets'.

Looking at the gadgets I have owned, I have realized that I have a friction with the technological convergance that seems to be happening in this area. The first cell phone I had was a Nokia 3315, a variation of 3310 model for the Asian market. I used it for a good two years before taking another fancier model.

I do not even remember the model number - because inspite of more features, I just used it for making/receiving calls and for SMS (called 'texting' in US).  During that time, I was seeing a lot of my collegues and friends craving for better models that served more than the purpose of calling and SMS. They wanted it to be their music player. They wanted it to serve as a camera - and the industry seems to heed to such a demand, providing ever increasing mega-pixel capability.

About two years back when I came to US, I realized that due to more constrained telephony market, my friends seemed to be constrained by the carrier on which cell phone model they could use. The difference between Indian and US telephony market is a different discussion all together. Anyway, I ended up having a BlackBerry 8700g. That is when I got introduced to the another concept of PDAs - where you used such devices to do rudimentary internet browsing, and email communication. But I ended up using it just for making and receiving calls.

Bottom line of my rant - do we really need all these different features crammed into a single device? In my opinion, a separate still camera provides better results than those pixelated images you glean out of a cell phone embeded camera. Isn't the music player (iPod, Sony, Sansa, Archos) better than what the cell phone can squeal out?

I would rather have separate devices that do their own job well. Perhaps I am more influenced by the *nix philosophy of having smaller programs that do only one thing, but do it well.

After looking around for a wireless router, I got myself a Netgear Wireless-G Router.

It was a breeze setting up the network. As simple as, disconnecting the modem from my laptop, connecting it to the Netgear router, and that to my laptop, and running the setup wizard that came along with the product. After that, it let me setup the WiFi network too. I set it up with some security, and verified it with my iPod Touch. The whole process took me around 20 minutes, but most of the wait time was for my ISP to assign the dynamic IP to my modem after I had switched it off and then switched on. 

The router, other than having capability to setup a WiFi network, has 4 points for having wired connections. It seems to be good enough for home use. I don't think it can be used for large networks in corporate settings. That would call for larger capacity routers.

I got a iPod Touch for my birthday! Posting this after setting up the WiFi.

Why can I not have more than one birthday in a year?

Oh boy.  I would have been more than a happy chap if I had come across this blog when I was studying engineering.

HackedGadgets.com

Now, I do not have the energy or time to pursue this path along with others.  But as a result of flashback, I sarted the Journey Of Code series at Splat.