I was channel surfing on my Dish Network system the other day when I noticed that I a whole block of new radio channels all prefixed with the name Sirius. Some research on their website and I discovered that I now have 61 commercial free digital radio channels from the Sirius network. And they’re not bad (some of the DJs can get a tad annoying). Almost tempting me into getting a unit for my car.

Sunday we took a trip up to Six Flags Marine World in Vallejo. Since we had a couple of young kids (6 & 8 years old) with us, the big roller coasters were of the list. Instead, we watched a few of the shows – the sea lions, the ski extreme water stunt show and Shouka the new killer whale (see photo).

The entry was half price thanks to a coupon, but it still cost just under $100 for two adults and two children. Even worse, not everything was included in that price – things like the go-carts required additional fees. Of course, the food was expensive and nothing more than fast food options (though they had a pretty good selection of cuisines to choose from).

Other rides? Well, there were the bumper cars, both the featured water rides (on the rubber tyre ride they managed to get me lined up with the waterfall and drenched) and the kids did most of the rides in the Looney Tunes kids area. We did a few more of the smaller rides along the way, and checked out the butterfly house and the walrus area.

While at the N+I show in Tokyo I got given one of the funny little RSA SecurID for Microsoft Windows tokens. Every 60 seconds it generates a new 6 digit number, but as far as I can tell from their website there is absolutely nothing I can do with this freebie.

Perhaps more amusingly, on the rear of the token there is a URL to go to if you find one of these tokens somewhere. That is an old URL, but it does redirect automatically to the new page. There they tell you that if you found it in your office, and your employer uses the tokens, return it to your IT department. If you find it in a public place, or at the office and your employer does not use them, then hand it in. If it is not claimed within a week destroy it!

A final thought… I wonder why people are so interested in making it difficult to login to ‘doze boxes, when there are so many flaws in the OS and the most commonly used MS apps, that really most attackers have no need to login; they just have to wait for the authorised user to do so, and then take over the machine remotely.

Seen two movies in the last 10 days: Shrek 2 and the new Harry Potter movie. The connection? Well, in Shrek 2 the voice of the fairy godmother character is played by Jennifer Saunders. In the Potter movie, the part of the “fat lady” in the painting at the entrance to the Gryffindor common room is played by none other than Dawn French. For those who are still puzzled, and who haven’t yet clicked through those links where the connection is made obvious almost immediately, Jennifer and Dawn first appeared in a TV comedy show in the 1980’s: French & Saunders.

A friend called me earlier this week to tell me that he had picked up one of the Dakota PV2 single-use cameras at a Wolf Camera here in San Francisco. Those who read here regularly will remember that I posted an article about the hacks possible with its predecessor; this one has a different chipset though. While it does connect to the PC using the same cable, and it is visible on the USB bus, it doesn’t respond well to any commands.

There is some information about it, including links to sites about the chipset and some photos of a disassembled camera at John Maushammer’s Dakota Camera page (look for the section with the yellow background).

So far, I have only made some very minor changes to the latest SMaL driver inside gphoto2 so that it will recognise the camera’s USB vendor/device ID and then tried talking to the camera.

All I have discovered so far is:

• Any write to the camera’s first configuration of greater than 36 bytes will timeout
• All the commands of 36 bytes or less that I’ve tried to send so far result in the camera refusing to accept any other commands

An email from John M. mentioned that the original camera required a special init sequence to authenticate the PC as a valid device for reading the photos. This was a simple hash of the camera’s serial number. Interestingly, one of the commands I sent it the other day seems to have zeroed my serial number (the hold all buttons down while switching on trick now shows my serial number as LAMSSMAL0000 whereas before it definitely contained something starting DAA…

Update:

More sites that are talking about hacking the PV2:

• cexx.org
• I-Appliance BBS

Sunday night of the long Memorial Day weekend found a group of my friends and I at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco for Lion King. Pre-show dinner at the nearby California Pizza Kitchen, getting to the theatre just in time for them to be rushing people to their seats (they need the aisles open for the first part of the show).

The show was, as expected, excellent. The intermission perhaps a little too short – everybody was lined up outside trying to get to restrooms or buy food and drink – which cannot be taken back into the theatre, so if you are near the back of the line you’d better be willing to knock back the drinks and swallow the food whole! I think that I laughed more at Mamma Mia!, but this is still a show well worth seeing, and the costumes are amazing.

Post-show dessert at Max’s Opera Cafe before heading home.

Yesterday was a ‘boys day out’ for one of my friends, Anthony, who is getting married later this year. The days’ events consisted of a Monoco style race at the Gokart Racer indoor go kart racing center in Burlingame.

After that, lunch at the nearby Elephant Bar, then down for a little bit of shopping at Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto (though none of us bought anything other than a drink in the in-store cafe).

Finally, dinner at Sushi Maru in Sunnyvale.

The girls spent yesterday up in Napa at a spa, followed by dinner at the Culinary Institute’s Greystone restaurant in St. Helena.

Moving on from previous bathroom furniture postings which concentrated on the toilet, the La Scala from Jacuzzi is perhaps the ultimate bath tub. To give you an idea of what we are talking about, here are a few of features (taken from the full list on the product’s webpage): DVD System. State-of-the art entertainment center, with a 43″ high definition flat screen television. Floating remote control. Underwater lighting. Built-in CD/AM/FM stereo with remote control. Surround sound system.

Notice the focus on entertainment there? Of course, the thing is also packed with water jets and all the other features one would expect in a top-of-the-line whirlpool bath.

The price for this experience? A little bit over $30,000, excluding iinstallation.

Seems that I’m not the only one who finds T-Mobile’s cellular support folks to be the best in the industry: check out T-Mobile USA’s Handset Unlocking Policy on the Operation Gadget site for another story of excellent customer service from T-Mobile.

While on the subject of cellular, there’s an interesting article about mistakes made by the the disaster called AT&T Wireless. Very interesting reading, and perhaps a clue to some of the problems they’ve had with customer support lately.