It’s been a busy last few weeks, so I thought I’d do a quick update before heading off to work (yes, working 7am on a Sunday should be illegal!).

I’ve decided to splash out on the radio front and replace some of my aging PRM80 radios with new SRM9000 series units from TMC Radio. The specs on these units are great! They will even do radio to radio SMS messaging on simplex or duplex channels :) Should be a heap of fun to play with.</p></body></html>

Now this is cool. I have to say that this is a relief from all the news stories about the DCMA screwing away consumers rights in favour of the mega-corps. The Australian IT is reporting that the High Court of Australia has unanimously ruled that mod-chips are legal.

As this is now the second case to rule this way, a nice legal precedent has been set for any type of modchip for any system - ranging from Xboxes to DVD players. Of special mention in the article is this:

However, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) intervened in the case and argued that region-coding was detrimental to consumer choice. It said that mod chips created artificial trade barriers between Australian and overseas games and DVD markets.

I wonder what long term implications this case will have - especially with the ACCC’s view on region coding…

Update: This has been covered on Slashdot</p></body></html>

Yay. After 5 weeks under repair, my BenQ LCD monitor is back! :) Man it’s nice not to be doing everything off a laptop! The size and high res is just a relief. Now if only Apple would give me some relief and give me some kind of feedback about the SuperDrive issue…

Well, I’m still waiting on getting my 20” BenQ monitor back. It’s been in under warranty since 29/8 - and still no word on when I’ll get it back (it was supposed to be back on my desk weeks ago!). Maxtor sent me a ‘refurbished’ hard drive for the warranty replacement of a 160Gb SATA drive - that just fills me with confidence. The Digium TDM400P is back in the Asterisk VoIP server and running nicely.

Hopefully, it will be the last thing I have to warranty in quite some time - of course the whole Apple Superdrive screwup will guarantee that it isn’t - but I won’t be surprised if I have to sit down when they finally get their act together and tell me what they plan to do.

Never, ever go see this movie. Unless of course you want to see Paris Hilton die :). If you do happen to come across this movie, save yourself a whole heap of time and sanity and just skip to 72 minutes into the movie, and watch the next 5 minutes. It really is the highlight of the movie!