Where in the world is the earphone plug?

I recently had the joyful experience of travelling on one of KLM's new Boeing 777 planes.
There are certain rituals you get used to when travelling long distances.... you find the plastic bag marked "not a toy for small children", open it, draw out the headset, spend a few minutes hunting for the headset socket, then sit back and listen to the music.

This time, the first parts of the ritual successfully completed, I encountered a problem: I couldn't find the earphone socket!

To make a long story short: I found it at last - inside the back of the armrest, next to where the seatbelt is attached.

There are two ways to get a plug into this socket - the more conventional one seems to be:

• Hold the plug in your right hand.
  
• Place your right elbow at the level of your knee.
• Twist your arm so that your lower arm is pointing straight back, and a little to the left.
• From that position, move your hand slightly up and away from the body, underneath the armrest, so that you can insert the plug (no peeking!) into the socket so conveniently placed at the back end of the armrest, an inch from your hip.

The alternative (and slightly less painful) procedure is to get up out of your seat, kneel down in a position appropriate to worshipping the god of hangovers, make eye contact with the socket, and insert the plug with a straight jab - hoping that the contortions required to get back into your seat won't dislodge it.

Now, KLM had obviously realized that this contribution to in-flight exercise wasn't going to endear them to all its customers - so a short extension cord (about 20 cm) had been attached next to the socket. But the installation instructions had left something to be desired.... the extension cord wasn't in fact plugged into the socket - it was looped back on itself, creating another puzzle that needed untangling.


Just to add insult to injury, I had to ask for a new headset in order to get sound in both ears.... twice. It's not a high quality device.

Sometimes I think that certain designers deserve cruel and unusual punishment. In this case, I was thinking that "those who design airplane seats..... should be condemned to travel in them".

One ray of light in an otherwise depressing experience: Their in-flight system DOES run Linux.


Postscript

A few weeks later, I made another trip on a similar plane, with the same kind of seat - this time with Northwest - and realized just what the designer had been thinking.

Northwest varies the ritual of the headphone - when you arrive at your seat, the headphone is already resting in the armrest compartment, plugged in for your use. And when you leave the plane, your headphone is not collected - you leave it, ready for the next passenger.

I'm not sure what they do for ear pad hygiene. But it's clear that the seat designers and the procedure designers had had a talk - just a pity that that the seat designers did not talk to enough procedure designers.

Oh well. I know how to find the earphone plug now.

The Continuing Story of Laptop Screen Resolutions

I have a new laptop. It runs linux (yay!), and it has a screen (duh).

The screen is 1440x900 pixels, and approximately 30x19 cm in size (that's 12" by 7.5" for you non-metric folks). Some elementary arithmetic gives a screen resolution of just about exactly 120 dpi.

Now, DPMI (or something) happily rattles this information on to the X server, which then duly loads up all my tools with 120-dpi fonts. All is wonderful, yes?

All is not wonderful.

The problem with this shenanigan is that the screen is SMALL. I want maximum information - and I usually sit close to the screen (unlike with my gigantic at-work monitors). And there is LOTS of software that has only ever been tested at 96 dpi resolution - the 120-dpi fonts simply don't fit into their dialog boxes, which conveniently have their sizes specified in pixels. (BLETCH!)

There's help to be had - deep in the KDE menus, "Control Center / Appearance & Themes / Fonts", there's a choice that says "Force fonts DPI", which I can toggle between "Disabled", "96 DPI" and "120 DPI". That fixes the issue for KDE-aware programs, and a seemingly random selection of other programs. Not all by any means!

But - why oh why is it that I have to go through this rigmarole to achieve the desired result, fixing only part of the problem - when it would be SO much simpler if I could just tell the X server to lie to the software about the screen resolution?

Ours not to wonder why.... that's the way it is.

Of course the RIGHT solution is to make people stop specify dialog boxes in pixels, and make them resizable to the font size. And pigs should fly, too.

Sigh.

OpenWRT: A Better Way to do Wireless

In my house, I have a wireless network. Big news - everyone has one.
The unusual aspect of this one was that occasionally, the access point didn't want to talk to one of my PCs. Headache? Lack of appreciation? Missing upgrade? I'll never know....

So I decided to pull out a spare Linksys WRT54G (old model!) I had lying around, install OpenWRT on it, and put it up instead. Worked like a charm...

NOTE: The docs at OpenWRT are NOT good. Stuff like this installation guide, where "getting started" consists of mostly empty space, is somewhat hard to decode. So why not write down some steps, like so many have before?

• Core. Having done this before, I went for the 2.4 kernel for the WRT54G (last time I tried, wireless didn't work on 2.6). Downloaded the right image from the download directory, got connected to the box, and upgraded. No problem.
• Find the router! Being not completely naive, I did this without connecting the box to my network, because it came up listening to 192.168.1.1 - the same as my home network's router. Fun would have resulted....
• Telnet to the found address, and set the password. Then, log out, and ssh to root@192.168.1.1. Note: If you have ever done that before, to a different 192.168.1.1, you're in trouble - luckily, OpenSSH's ssh client shows you exactly which host key to remove from your .ssh/known_hosts file.
  
• Reconfigure. Move it to a different IP address, turn off DHCP for the LAN, enable the wireless, set the SSID.. all done in /etc/config somewhere.
• Cross your fingers and reboot. It works!

The OpenWRT actually comes with a running web server. But on Kamikaze, there's absolutely nothing in it - all URLs give "URL not found".

Being a sucker for pretty pictures, I found X-WRT, which tries to make a web interface. But it says Kamikaze is a "work in progress". Danger?
A quick visit to #openwrt on irc.freenode.net reassured me: "Yes, but it works fine for some!"
Instructions are on the Wiki, NOT under "installation instructions" on the front page. But they're clear, explicit, and they work!

For now, Kamikaze is plain sailing. If I learn something more, I may say more. Until then, let's see if THIS one stays up for long...