May 2008 Archives

On Christmas 2006 (so, two years ago, basically) I bought the 7897 LEGO Set: Passenger Train. Although it was bought on 2006, it was closed for these two years, and just built it yesterday.

As a Lego set, it is not as good as I expected. It have a very basic build instructions, that are similar for each part of the train.

The really nice thing is to make the train run. A bad thing is that it needs 9 1.5V batteries (6 for the train, 3 for the remote control). I think it is just too much. But, in any case, the train motor have an interesting power. If you put just the motor wagon running around at maximum speed it will not take long to get off tracks.

Now the bad news: I think I want some more tracks and wagons. This is a bad vicious.

MBNet is a nice service available in Portugal. I am not sure if it is a Portuguese idea or if it was stolen from elsewhere. But I am almost sure it is a Portuguese initiative.

Now, first what is MBNet? It is a virtual VISA card. You access the web, with your login and password, and ask for a credit card with a specific amount limit, and the website returns you the card number, the expiration date, and the control digits. Of course you have to go to your bank before and sign in for the service. It works quite well. Each virtual card lasts for one month and half (or something like that), and can be used just once. This means it is quite safe for use on the Internet: there is an amount limit, and a limit of usages.

Unfortunately, PayPal doesn't know MBNet and, worst, do not read customers emails. Why is this bad? Well, If I use PayPal with MBNet, it works. If I use it again, it works. But after ten usages (not sure about 10, but near that value), I receive an email complaining that I used too much credit cards, and so, my account will be closed. They send me an email to complain to, but they do not answer me. The solution was to create another account on PayPal.

Now, I received again an email from PayPal. I think I need a new e-mail address to create a new PayPal account.

What do you do when a computer crashes? You do a reboot. How do you do that? Normally pressing some kind of Ctrl+Alt+Delete, or a power button. On some cases, I really needed to remove the battery from the laptop. But every time I had to reboot an electronic device, I was able to do it... until yesterday night.

My iPod Classic crashed. There isn't any kind of hole for a hardware reset. There isn't a power button. There isn't a battery I am able to remove. There aren't keys labeled Ctrl or Alt or Delete. Instead, there are five buttons, and a touch wheel. What do you do in these cases? You start guessing. If we press one button for seconds to shut down the iPod, probably we can reboot it pressing two or more buttons for some seconds. But, which buttons? OK, I could get up from the bed, and search for the documentation. But I am lazy. Thus, the result was using combinations. First left and right at the same time, then play and the center at the same time, then others, and others. After a few tries, the iPod stopped beeping when I touch any key. When that happened I understood I screw it up. Continuing being lazy, put the iPod to the side and got to sleep. Today morning took it with me to the work. Now, that I wanted to connect it to the Mac and see if I could reboot using iTunes, I found out that I did shutdown the iPod... because the battery was over!...