Macbook Wireless Problem

I love my MacBook, I really do (although I am rather tempted by one of these). However, of late I have been having a really annoying problem it and my home wireless broadband.

I generally turn off the router during the night, to let it cool down and whatnot, then switch it on again at about 8 in the morning. The mac gets turned on then to deal with with any email etc that has come in, then I get the lad ready and do the school run. When I get home, the mac is fired up again and I start work.

Then we get to around three in the afternoon, when the Mac suddenly gets disconnected from the wireless, and any attempts to reconnect are doomed to ‘time out’. There’s nothing wrong with the router, and when I start up my lumbering Acer Aspire, which runs Ubuntu, it connects fine. If I am lucky, the Mac will be talking to the router again by about eight in the evening.

This is profoudly annoying. Does anyone know what might be happening here?

Hacking domains

Domain hacking is defined by Wikipedia as:

an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

What does that mean? Well, it means taking the elements of a domain name (that is, the thing you type into your browser’s address bar) so that it spells out a word, or something similar.

For example, Delicious used to be found at del.icio.us – with the last element (known as the ‘top-level’) of the domain (.us, for the United States) forming part of the name of the site. Sadly, it’s plain old delicious.com now.

I recently registered a domain from the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands – which ends in .gs. The domain is vebrig.gs – can you see where I am headed with this? 😉

I’ve created an email address on my domain which is simple ‘d’ – so in full it looks like d@vebrig.gs which kinda spells out my name. I know this is very sad, but I like it!

By adding a sub-domain to vebrig.gs of da I can get the web address da.vebrig.gs which again is quite a neat hack. Not doing anything with the site right now though!

So, the main point of this post, other than making it clear to everyone what a total dork I am, is to let everyone know that the best email address to get me on now is d@vebrig.gs. My old one still forwards onto me, though, so don’t worry too much.

Now all I have to do is update all my social networks with the new address…

5 years of MySociety

I had an enjoyable time at the MySociety shindig last night at The Hub in King’s Cross. There were lots of cool people there, and I got the chance to bend people’s ears about digital mentors, which was fun for me if not for them.

David Wilcox has a great post about MySociety, including a video from Tom Steinberg back in 2003, pushing the idea of a ‘Civic Hacking Fund’. I think I prefer the name they ended up with.

Simon Dickson likewise muses on the impact MySociety has had on the development of government webby stuff in the UK:

You can do a tremendous amount of good with relatively little money, as long as you have good people involved. People who understand the context, who have a feel for the technology, and who have a passion for what they’re doing. That’s been the very basis of MySociety’s success, and (I hope) my own here at Puffbox.

I also got the chance to catch up with Amy Sample Ward, who works with NetSquared in North America helping non-profits get the most out of technology. She’s now based in London and will be doing her best to help UK NFPs catch up. It’s difficult not to be caught up in her enthusiasm to make things better, which is great. Again, David Wilcox has don the interview, which I’ve embedded below.

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Digital mentors are unorganising themselves…

To pick up on the thread of Digital Mentors – the role outlined by CLG to help disadvantaged communities find a voice online – I have started a new site along with a growing bunch of collaborators to develop the role online, gather stories and resources together and maybe to unorganise a tender bid when the funding for the pilot projects becomes available.

I’d encourage anyone interested to get involved: check out the blog, sign up to the mailing list and throw some stuff up on the wiki.

Opening the RSA

David Wilcox has blogged again about the efforts at the RSA to reform itself to meet the needs of fellows in the networked society. It would appear that the more forward thinking fellows are a little disappointed at the pace of change in the organisation.

[A] blog would provide a place for staff and enthusiasts, like those gathered last night, to carry on some creative exchanges and maybe highlight projects if they weren’t getting the attention leaders felt they needed. I can understand anxieties of RSA staff who, with a few exceptions, are not bloggers. They may be worried everyone will want a say, they’ll be swamped, conversations will be critical … and so on. If it were done jointly with Fellows, I don’t think that would be the case. It would be a low-risk test of the aspiration for the larger network site to be self-governing (scaling to that is a big issue, but building a core of champions is a good start whichever way you go).

A year ago, when Matthew Taylor first started to talk about renewing the RSA, a group of fellows started collaborating under the banner of OpenRSA, and it seems that the group is cranking up again.

Much effort has been expended on the RSA Networks platform, originally prototyped rather nicely in Drupal, and now being reworked to fit in with the wider RSA web offerings. The thing is though, everything that is needed techwise is already in place, set up using free tools by the OpenRSA mob. They have:

…and therefore basically everything you need to get the online discussion going. All using free tools, that people already know how to use and can access easily.

The harder bit will be getting the offline networking going, but as David points out in his post, Lloyd Davis has already showed the way this can be done in a way that is light on organisation with the Tuttle club, which has rapidly grown from an idea, to a meeting in a church hall, to a regular event above a pub and now at the ICA.

As I wrote in a comment on David’s blog, the danger for traditional organisations is that if they don’t start doing this stuff, someone else will – and those that don’t might get left behind. To its credit, the RSA is trying. But it is an august, 250 year old institution, with a turning circle that is considerably wider than is needed to loosen the grip on control and accept the messiness that is the inevitable consequence of opening up a bit.

This is an issue all membership organisations are going to have to deal with in the near future, which is why it is great news that The Membership Project might be getting a second wind very soon.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the OpenRSA splinter cell evolves, and how it fits in with the attempts by the RSA to reform itself. Hopefully the two will complement each other, and provide an example for other organisations to follow.