The Entropist Manifesto

The history of the universe is a history of entropy liberation, which means, simply, that entropy increases. But what does that mean?

Many sources will tell you that the increase of entropy is dissipation[1], degradation, and dissolution, and they're right, but they're not entirely right. It is a glass half empty/full sort of situation, for along with the dissipation, degradation, and dissolution comes everything else.

MiFi 2200 + Ubuntu Jaunty = Continuing Relief

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 13:25 — rec
I've been using the MiFi with Ubuntu for over a week, from Seattle to Santa Fe on a road trip, and it's been great. Particularly nice when you pull into a hotel that claims to have network access but can't explain why it doesn't actually work. And it worked while driving down the road, too, well enough that I needed to discourage video viewing.

The device is a black rectangle smaller and thinner than an iPhone with a power switch, micro USB connector, status LED, a battery compartment, and a sticker identifying the network SSID and password.

MiFi 2200 + Ubuntu Jaunty = Relief

Sun, 05/17/2009 - 18:47 — rec
It was with a little trepidation that I bought the MiFi 2200 this afternoon. I told the salesman that I was using Linux and he said it wasn't supported. So I booted up XP and went through the activation dialog and rebooted into Ubuntu to see what would happen. Not to worry. The MiFi, still plugged via USB, shows up in the NetManager menu as "Auto Moblile Broadband (CDMA) connection" listed in the "Mobile Broadband" section. Picking it logged me in and lit up the broadband connection icon. I'm posting through that connection right now.

X200 Tablet Accelerometer

Thu, 03/19/2009 - 13:03 — rec

Getting the accelerometer to work on my Lenovo Thinkpad X200 Tablet was complicated enough that I've forgotten how to do it more than once. Here's the scoop.

The first step is to go into synaptic, find the tp-smapi-source 0.40-1 package and install it. This will leave a source archive in /usr/src. You will also require the module-assistant package, so check to make sure it's installed, too, before you leave synaptic.

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