[	mood	|	cold	]
[	music	|	Grinspoon - "Killswitch"	]

Bloody hell, it is cold tonight. I'm sitting here wearing my hat, scarf and jumper indoors, while I get some work done on the laptop. I'd be in bed, but I've wasted the last few days and feel an urgent need to catch up with myself. I'm quite warm in this getup, the only real omission is gloves - my fingers are chilly but if I put gloves on then I can't type properly. Still, I might go grab a duvet from upstairs in the hope that making the rest of me even warmer will heat the blood before it gets to my hands...

And everybody's buggered offline on IRC and IM too. This is technically a good thing, but a lack of conversation is tempting me to go to bed instead of doing the reading I should be doing.

Update: I have given up and retreated upstairs to bed, not so much because of the temperature but because the wifi got extremely sensitive to minor movements, and in particular the position of my hands; I had a terminal open which was pinging the other end of the wifi link and packets were getting through when my hands were in laptop-shuffling position but not when in typing position. I wonder if this is temperature related? Anyway, if I am going to use wifi to link a machine downstairs on a permanent basis, then I will need to acquire a better aerial I think. Fortunately the Gigabyte card I bought has a standard external aerial connector. However, being in bed is making staying awake very tricky...

[	Tags	|	geek, unnecessary cruelty	]
[	mood	|	amused	]
[	music	|	Little Match Girl - "Victim"	]

I am sitting downstairs in the front room with greyeyedeve's laptop (I must get my own laptop. It's not until you start using one that you realise how nice being able to wander around the house is). The freedom of wireless means that I have a nice view of the street outside, the frosty gardens opposite, and flooks' cats sitting on the windowsill. Looking at cats. Who are, in turn, looking at other cats. And it occured to me that there is a suburban network of cats, each with line of sight, each no more than 50 metres from each other.

If each cat were fitted with a low-power minicomputer (something like a Gumstix Linux device perhaps) it would be pretty easy to set up wireless mesh networking in my neighbourhood, meaning that I could take my laptop to the park. It's a bit cold for it today, but would be great during the summer. The hard bit would be recharging the mesh nodes, unless they could be adapted to work off the cat's bioelectricity. This would tire the cats out more quickly meaning that they would need more food to recharge, but it's a small price to pay. And they'd be lying around more, which means a more stable network. Perhaps the devices could be subcutaneously implanted, and the cat's ears or similar used as aerials. Or you could go for the Gibson-style cybercat, with a small 802.11g aerial poking out of the skull behind the ear. You know it'd look good.

This might be cruel to cats, but frankly I don't much care for cats. And hey, wifi mesh!

Update: Bah, LJ has a limit on tag lengths, and "aesthetically pleasing unnecessary cruelty to domestic animals" is too long. Sulk.