Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

As usual, I'm late to the game with these things.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

When an IP datagram is to be sent out an interface, if the size of the datagram exceeds the link MTU, fragmentation is performed by both IPv4 and IPv6. -- UNIX(R) Network Programming, vol. 1, 3rd ed. The Sockets Networking API.

This book lives on the leftmost edge of the bookshelf above my monitor. It recently survived a near-tragic incident involving a mug of tea and a power cable. It fights for 'nearest' with the other Stevens bibles on the shelf.

Of the many hundreds of (no doubt exciting) features packed into my Nokia N73 phone, there are only three I use on a regular basis: phone calls, text messages and the alarm clock. Every now and again, I'll also do the Bluetooth and UMTS/EDGE/GPRS thing -- if I didn't ever use them, I would be buying much simpler phones.

Generally speaking, I am not at all unhappy with the phone. It could probably be a bit more responsive and the user interface has clearly been approved by the userfriendly police so I can't ever find my way. Since I really only use simple features on a regular basis, none of these things bothers me.

What does bother me -- drives me completely barking mad, as a matter of fact -- is the bloody blue LED blinking not-quite-continuously at the top! Working on embedded stuff myself, I know that a device can never be complete without at least one blue LED. It is my understanding that the people who sell these gadgets can't sleep at night without comforting thoughts about perpetually blinking blue lights.

As I mentioned however, I like to use the phone as my alarm clock and the damned light keeps me awake at night. It's bright enough to illuminate my whole bedroom and if I were but a couple of kilometres closer to the airport, pilots would probably mistake my rooftop window for the ILS outer marker.

Nuts!

Does anyone know how to turn that ridiculous thing off, without voiding my warranty and cutting the trace on the board?