I now have a large number of 15dBi parabolic grid antennae sitting in the lounge. They've got N-female connectors.
I'd be happy to sell a parabolic grid + pigtail to RP-TNC or RP-SMA for NZD145. Less if you don't want the pigtail.
I've had a couple of largeish things (over NZD1K) shipped from the US to New Zealand. One was a set of 3 Kinesis keyboards (combined order with friends, to save on shipping). The other is some WiFi antennae.
As these packages both cost more than NZD400, GST on them is greater than NZD50, and thus Customs care about collecting it. But the experience in paying this differed greatly.
The keyboards came via USPS Global EMS. This seems to be handled by NZ Post here. Who charge extra fees, and require you to get a NZ Customs client code. Their extra fees were about NZD80 on top of GST of NZD150, and required a flurry of faxes between me, NZ Post and NZ Customs. And a delay of a few days.
The antennae, which should arrive tomorrow, were shipped with FedEx International Economy. This seems to be a much simpler process. Their track-and-trace works, and they're fast -- I ordered last Thursday, and the antennae should be here tomorrow (Tuesday). And paying GST was ludicrously simple. They rang me, and I told them my credit card number, and that was it. No faxes. No extra fees. They may be a bit more expensive, but the shipping process was so much less hassle, I know who I'm using next time.
Which reminds me -- if you're interested in a 2.4GHz 15dBi parabolic grid antenna, complete with pigtail to male RP-TNC or RP-SMA connector, I'll have a few spare :-)
It would appear that there are some Debian Xorg packages. They work! My Radeon 9200mumble now happily does 3D and dualhead with them! Now the only problem I have is that I don't actually use 3D for anything other than screensavers most of the time.
If you point your 2.4GHz antennae at the right bit of Percy Dyett Dr, you should see a wireless network with that SSID. Which means that the first KWIX node is up, attached to the back of our flat. I've got most of the silicon sealant off my hands, found the IP address of the AP (which I'd managed to forget), and we've verified the visibility from Wrights Hill and Woodhouse Ave.
We'd hoped to attach the antenna to the front of the house, but the extension ladder borrowed from Neil wasn't long enough, and the sloping driveway would have made it difficult anyway. So it's on the side. And hopefully still fairly visible.
There was a short segment about Skype on Morning Report yesterday, fairly positive but with added Telecom FUD.
Standard Disclaimer: you should all use open protocols like SIP and RTP, not closed proprietary stuff like Skype.
But it's interesting nonetheless.
Um.
Not a good thing to do in the wrong terminal.
At some point, I'll post the bits of Perl I'm writing to resurrect my INBOX from the IMAP caches on a few machines.
Update: It's mostly back; the Thunderbird offline cache on my Mac had almost all the old mail, and the Sylpheed IMAP caches on my desktop Linux box at home, and those at VUW seem to have most (all?) of the rest.
According to Patrick's notes on the WWDC keynote, Apple are switching to Intel x86.
So how long will it take someone to hack OS X to run on commodity hardware? This could turn out bad for Apple, depending on how PCish their new x86 Macs are. But it would be nice to run OS X as another Xen partition...
Update: looks like x86 Macs won't have Open Firmware, according to Apple's developer documentation. Which means they'll probably have normal-ish BIOSes, again making OS X run on commodity hardware simpler.
Rather late, on Saturday evening, a bunch of NZWired people decided that they had nothing better to do than drive around looking for wireless networks. Eventually, they ended up at a lookout on Wright's hill, where they tried connecting to the AP at Richard and Donald's flat. This turned out to be quite successful.
The AP we were connecting to
This is where we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into the Matrix
Me, discovering how to freeze your hands off by holding an antenna
Richard decided to upgrade his Debian install off the flat's mirror
Damo taking a turn holding the antenna
