Flying in Europe
I'm planning a trip to Barcelona, Spain and Birmingham, UK right now and figuring out the best way to get from one to the other is surprisingly difficult.
If money doesn't matter, then it's relatively easy to find a flight on any of the major airline booking websites. But be prepared to 1) spend 4-5x as much money and 2) be stuck with weird, long connections as there aren't many direct flights from Barcelona to Birmingham.
The answer is to fly one of the myriad discount airlines. The problem though is that there's no centralized website that lets you search the tickets of all of these discount airlines from one place. A few different websites try (e.g. www.wegolo.com, www.sidestep.com, www.skyscanner.com), but none of them have complete coverage of all airlines (or even complete coverage of any one airline it seems). Furthermore, even with the discount airlines, there's still a dearth of direct flights. So you end up planning a flight to a nearby city and connecting by train. But now you have to start scouring the map for all of the airports within 1-2hr train ride of your destination. And there's no website that's designed for that.
Is it so much to ask for a comprehensive and thorough multi-modal transportation website that will tell me the fastest, cheapest, and most hassle-free way to get from point A to point B anywhere in the world using whatever combination of airplanes, trains, buses, ferries, etc. is most suited to the task and within my constraints of departure/arrival times?
Nokia E51 + OS X + T-Mobile
i got my new nokia e51 setup to access the internet from the phone, paired it with my mac, and got the mac setup to connect to the internet via the phone over bluetooth. but every time i tried to connect the mac would complain about not being able to contact the ppp server.
it took me a bit to figure out the one extra step needed. the e51 (and probably other series 60 3rd edition phones) requires you to enter the access point name to be used for tethered connections (i.e. computer via bluetooth) separately from the access point name to be used for connections originating on the phone. even though in practice both of these names are going to be the same.
in short, after everything else you need to do to configure the phone and the laptop for tethered access, go to "Settings > Connection > Packet data > Access point" on the phone and enter "internet2.voicestream.com" (or "internet3.voicestream.com" or whatever access point you're using). this should be the same string as what's under "Settings > Connection > Access points > T-Mobile Internet > Access point name".
6to4 IPv6 on OSX 10.4 is a no-go
you'd think something like this would've been caught before release, but it turns out that all current versions of osx 10.4 have a byte order bug that causes 6to4 tunnels to be setup with the wrong address. when the machine's ipv4 address is converted to an ipv6 6to4-style address, osx incorrectly reverses the bytes, resulting in a useless address :(
more info at apple's ipv6 list
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