If you haven't noticed yet, I'm pissed. Very much so.

What I tried to do today looked too good to be true (needless to say, it was) - I tried using Microsoft DreamSpark to download some free software for students (for educational purposes). The process includes a verification procedure that confirms that you are truly a valid student of any listed university. Allot of countries in Europe are supported, but not mine, nor does it look like it will be any time soon. It sucks not having an unified student filing system, like that's so hard to accomplish. Although loads more laws, decrees, important people, general democracy realizations in Serbia are on my "I will slice your spine in two" list, this made my stomack do a 360 degree spin. Thank you, oh so great country of mine...

They crossed the limit by exposing every one of their USB 3G devices in one of their project realizations in Belgrade, Serbia to the public by placing them inside small transparent boxes on benches... Users were expected to plug in the USB cord to their device (which obviously had to be a laptop) and start enjoying the online sensation while the local city folks passed by and stared in wonder.

Needless to say, the whole park was vandalized, all devices were stolen and their plexiglass outer "shield" was smashed into pieces only a few days after the grand opening. (I mean... what were the expectations? Turning an usual junkie hangout lounge into a Internet enabled location? In Serbia? Stupid.)

Here's how an "internet enabled bench" looks today in the very same park (image courtesy - B92):

The v2.0 of the box has a nasty sticker on it - "The presented devices have no material value whatsoever and can not function outside the limits of this park."

Hint: Why bother arguing with drunk people? Does any vandal give a damn if he throws his leg at that box? Or if he shoves the USB cord inside his burger just for the fun of it? Lose the boxes, and stick to plain WiFi. It can serve 99% of most Laptops, PocketPCs and high-end mobile phones... That way, morons who don't know what to do at 3AM in the morning can vandalize the radio waves in the air as long as they want.

Inspired by the Conet project, I found an old AM/LW Russian transistor radio that was lying around, attached 3 AA bateries to it (yes, TO it, because the battery leads inside it were corroded really badly), and got cracking!

It's interesting to see, uhm... hear that AM radio broadcasters still play radio talk shows, educational stories and radio dramas, even though probably very few people listen to them. In comparison FM stations are usually crammed with music, and nothing else. (which is pure crap, in my opinion, since local stations can and should do more than just broadcast music)

What's even more interesting is that I found some weird stations on both AM and LW bandwidths that emmit morse code signals. I placed the transistors near a 80m long wire that's hanging from my window over to my neighbors window, and maybe that's why I picked up more stations than usual.

One broadcaster was present on the ~620KHz frequency and was sending out ".- .-. -.." ("ARD" in Morse code) and the second one was present on ~300KHz and was sending out a long beep, followed by ".--. ...-" ("PV" in Morse code) and then a long beep again. I have absolotely no idea what these stations do or what they may be used for, so I'll just keep on checking.

Be sure to check out the "Conet" project that I mentioned earlier! You can download the whole CD pack for free, and if you are a radio nut, you will enjoy hearing all sorts of different number stations (most likely used by spies on foreign territory) which give out a warm "cold war" feeling

Attached: A quick walkthrough from the 600-1600KHz bandwidth, and the recordings of the weird stations that I caught.

Scan 620khz 300khz

Just for the sake of it, I launched MacOSX to see if it will at least try to recognize my Bluetooth device. Needless to say - it did. And the simplicity of the built-in solution for MacOS was so astonishing that it made me cry when I went back to that piece of crap that BlueSoleil is! It creates a Bluetooth icon next to the volume section on the title bar and contains a few basic options - Send, Browse, Options + some additional features... but certainly NO functionless bloat that BlueSoleil carries!

Why can't every hardware manufacturer create a software driver for their device that does not introduce 5 links on your desktop, a background service with so much bloat that it gobbles up tens of megabytes of RAM, at least 1 system tray application to advertise it's presence and all the instability, crashes and even bluescreens that you can imagine?

So, I managed to grab a Slackware 12 install DVD and slipped it in the server's drive bay. The greeting I got was certainly not as graphically pleasing as one might expect it to be with Fedora, Mandriva, SuSe etc. Only text based dialogs were letting me choose a font, keyboard map etc. The setup is started by running a command called (obviously) - "setup". Although the setup procedure it's pretty ugly (non-graphical), it's quick to do and is quick to finish (but I can't stand the fact that there is no progress bar while installing).

Eventually, the setup finished - telling me to reboot... After the first startup, a text-based login was waiting for me. Every successful login spits out a "message of the day" which are usually some quotes. So, how to go graphical? "startx" didn't do the trick, so I ended up running "xorgsetup" which got me going. KDE quickly popped up without the unnecessary bloat that most other distros put in - it was quite refreshing to see. But, I needed fluxbox, so I changed the default window manager to that and logged in again.

To give a hint about the ease of use for Fluxbox - here's how to change the default desktop wallpaper:

fbsetbg -f /home/me/.fluxbox/backgrounds/wallpaper.jpg

The conclusion? When using "KISS" distros, such as Slackware, allot of effort is needed to get things going, but once it's done, don't touch ANYTHING else! To be honest, although I feel a bit proud for configuring such a disasterous user-unfriendly (yet stable) Linux distro, I would trade it for OpenSuSe or Fedora any time! (if anyone asks, the server is a test HTTP server... it works.)

What really intrigues me is the relative calmness and total blissfull ignorance that cigarette commercials used to employ - it's very weird to see a whole industry get banned from the public today, but that's reality that no one was aware of back then - smoking kills... There's one thing though, I'm pretty sure that most people did not smoke as much as they do now - cigarettes were usually reserved for the end of the workday, or during a coffee break, not for making you lose hair over finding a smoker friendly area because you can't hold on much longer without one.

Nah... 'nuff bitchin'... Just watch:

Alright kids... Settle down, we're gonna watch a movie:

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