Kindle’s and DHL

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It seems like me being bored is not a good place to be, as while studying for my last exam last week, I got bored and convinced myself to buy a Kindle. It was fairly sudden, although I had been contemplating it for quite a while. I thankfully do not regret the decision at all :) I’ve also loved the e-ink display since the moment I first saw it.

img: images-amazon.com

The choice of Kindle is fairly straightforward. There are 3 main choices. All 3 versions come with WiFi standard. The cheapest of the lot (6″ screen) goes for $139, then there’s the one up version which comes with 3G connectivity extra for $189. Then there’s the Kindle DX, which has a larger screen (9.7″) also with 3G which goes for a rather high $379.

A friend recently bought the DX and figured it wasn’t really worth it for the extra area, and at that price I wasn’t too keen to get it. Comparing the other two I decided I’d get by with only the Wi-Fi and decided to spare myself the $50.

There’s one other choice. The two smaller Kindles can be bought “with special offers”. This basically entails you getting a $25 discount at the cost of having some adverts shown on the screensaver and the home page. Reading some reviews, it seems the ads aren’t that intrusive, so I figured I’d get that. At $114 I felt it was the best choice.

So I happily went online put it in the basket along with a cheapish cover. Unfortunately, as I find out, non-Americans can’t buy the versions with Special Offers. If you plan to purchase one, you also need to select the international version, comes with a USB cord in place of the wall charger.

You, like me, may also pick a very nice case, on special, from Amazon, and then when you try and buy it get told you can’t buy it because you’re South African. Certain products on the store are only for the American market so you can’t be assured you’ll be allowed to purchase a product.

So in the end I left the nice leather case, and just picked up a cheap cover from E-Bay. I also decided to just go for the plain Kindle for $139.

You aren’t given any choice with postage, which is fine, you are forced to select priority postage. This means you get your Kindle in about a week and it only costs about R150. This is less than what certain local retailers charge for postage.

There are several places you can get hold of a Kindle. Locally I’ve seen adverts on Gum Tree, wantitall also advertise them as well as digital planet. However all these offerings end up costing you at least R300 more (on the base model).

The final price I paid was roughly R1250, including postage, including import duties.

img: enterpriseirregulars.com

The next fun part is DHL. I’ve ordered things locally and had them couriered by different people, mainly Speed Services, and have always been happy with the service, DHL however were almost flawless in their Delivery, and their tracking website is just great. It would appear that every single time the package gets scanned, it gets logged and is visible online.

I went to sleep that night, and by the time I had woken up the next morning, my Kindle had already travelled the width of America. That night it was in England where it sat around for a day before it ended up in SA, went through customs on Sunday and was all set to be delivered to me on Monday. This is where the almost flawless comes in. They somehow managed to send it to the wrong DHL centre in Cape Town, which delayed my delivery by a day. This wasn’t too much of a concern though, as you can subscribe to email updates, which meant I knew this at the beginning of the day, and the following morning I received an email to say it had been dispatched. Ordered Thursday night, arrived Tuesday morning.

DHL also have some fairly cool webpages relating to the logistics and things to do with their sorting and transport etc. If you’re bored, have a look here.

img: expertreviewnow.com

I had expected the process from here on out to be fairly pain free, however this was not to be. It’s not that it shouldn’t be, it’s just that Stellenbosch University’s internet and network structure isn’t managed that nicely. The Kindle appears to have a complex way of connecting, before it allows one to connect to a Wi-Fi network, it checks whether it can get through to the internet, this was fine and I managed to connect my Kindle to my personal Wi-Fi AP, and surf the internet from my Kindle, but it refused to register itself.

I tried all kinds of things, and took it to a friend’s house who did some WireSharking but couldn’t really figure out what was going on, the Kindle didn’t appear to be trying to connect, and that traffic it did generate didn’t appear to have any issues, but it just wouldn’t work.

Anyway, I took it home and used the Wi-Fi there and it worked immediately, registered itself and downloadedthe messages that were waiting to be downloaded. It now also works fine with my Wi-Fi at the university.

— EDIT — 15 June

Makro today announced that they will be selling the Kindle locally. At a quoted price of R2500 for the Kindle 3G, it sounds kinda ridiculous. You should be able to import the same Kindle including postage/taxes for about R1700.

Window’s network sharing

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On the university network here, we’re only allowed to plug one computer into the network points in our rooms. If you try plug a hub in, or bridge connections to other computers the network detects this and blocks all the computers on your network point until the problem is rectified. I’m sure the varsity has several reasons for doing this, one of which being that they assign every computer a unique IP address, and there list of addresses is limited, as well as it being a way to keep track of what computer’s are on the network, as one is required to register your computer’s mac address, so they can assign the same IP address.

In any case, this makes life difficult for people with more than one computer, or with a computer and a console. One way to get around this is to setup a NAT. You plug your registered computer into the network, and then plug other devices into that computer. By setting it up correctly, those devices are hidden from the network, and all traffic is just routed via your main computer. I made use of this last year, but this year invested in a MikroTik Router Board 750 which effectively does the same thing.

In any case, from Windows, the easiest way to do NATing is to make use of Windows built in Network Sharing. It’s a fairly straightforward setup. All that’s required is two network cards. And you can plug a hub into the 2nd network card if you require more devices. I recently put together a step by step guide to setting it up which can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

It gives instructions for setting up Windows Network Sharing in both Windows 7 and Windows XP. One example is with sharing an internet connection from a WiFi network to a LAN network, and the other is LAN to LAN setup.

If you are wanting to setup a wireless AP, that is use a WiFi card to share a network connection, I advise making use of a program such as Connectify, which I have used on several occasions to great success. It allows one to easily setup a wireless AP, and automatically allows password encryption.

You can download my step by step guide here (592 kB).

Engineers engineers

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I was recently linked here, where the guy had made up a list of a few country’s top management and where their respective educations lay.

It is was interesting to note that most of the countries’ (Germany, India, USA & Singapore) top officials were all educated in the arts or law, with a few economics people and the odd science major. China on the other hand is made up purely of engineers, with a lawyer chucked in for good measure.

With the often bad rep that SA’s government is often given, I thought I’d do a quick list of the top brass. Below is the quick list, much like on the linked page, and lower down I give a bit more detail. I took the the president, deputy president and then 7 Ministers, in line with the format of the other posts.

Jacob Zuma – President – No Formal Education
Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe – Deputy President – High School
Mr PJ Gordhan – Finance – Pharmacy
Dr PA Motsoaledi – Health – Medicine
Ms ED Peters – Energy – Social Works & Management
Dr R Davies – Trade & Industry – Economics & Politics
Dr LN Sisulu – Defence – Education & History
Ms GNM Pandor – Science & Technology – Education
Mr JS Ndebele – Transport – Politics

Ignoring the President and Deputy President, they all have several degrees in related fields. Quite a few with honorary degrees and several people with degrees from other countries.

img: republic.org.nz

President – Jacob Zuma
No Formal education, but with an understandable amount of jail time. Three Honorary Doctorares in Literature, Administration and Philosophy respectively.

Deputy President – Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe
Matric (Completed High School), also with some imprisonment during Apartheid.

Minister of Finance – Mr PJ Gordhan
Bachelor of Pharmacy (Natal), detained several times. 3 honorary Doctorates in Commerce, Law and Business Admin respectively.

Minister of Health – Dr PA Motsoaledi
Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery (Natal).

Minister of Energy – Ms ED Peters
Bachelor of Arts: Social Works (University of the North). Certificates in Development and Policy (UWC), Executive Management (UCT) and International Policy Management (Cuba).

Minister of Trade & Industry – Dr R Davies
Honours in Economics, Masters in International Relations (South Hampton), Doctorate in Political Studies (Sussex).

Minister of Defence & Military Veterans – Dr LN Sisulu
BA in Education (Swaziland), Hons in History (York), Masters in Philosophy (York).

Minister of Science & Technology – Ms GNM Pandor
Diploma in Education, MA in Education, Diploma in Higher Education, Administration and Leadership, Diploma in Leadershiop and Development, MA in General Linguistics.

Transport – Mr JS Ndebele
BA International Politics (UNISA), Honours in Development Administration & Politics. Honorary Doctorare (UKZN)

 

 

Almost all the details were taken from the rather informative http://www.info.gov.za.

How does one “Love your SA”?

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Today is voting day in South Africa. We have the opportunity to vote in the 2011 Municipal Elections. Now I hadn’t previously given it much thought. These are only the second elections I’m voting in, the first being the national elections back in 2009. That was easy. 2 votes. One for National Assembly representation, and one for Provincial. But I recently realised that it wouldn’t be as straightforward as that for the Municipal Elections.

img: elections.org.za

After chatting with quite a few people in the area, it’s clear that I was not alone in this state. Everyone knew to an extent who they wanted to vote for, and just assumed they’d go and make their mark, but no one understood that there would be different ballots with different implications. Digging through the IEC’s website, I found this page on voter education, which has some nice pamphlets, which does to an extent explain what’s going on. But again it doesn’t explain the nitty gritty, or how exactly representatives are chosen.

There are 2 scenarios. You either live in a metropolitan area (such as Cape Town Unicity) or you live in a district (such as me in Stellenbosch, other towns in the area would be included in this district). For Metropolitan areas, you get two votes. One for your ward representative, and one for the party you want to run the city, ie be the mayor. For towns in districts, there are 3 votes. One for your ward representative. One for the party to be mayor, and one for the party you want to lead the District.

This is all good and well. The person with the most votes in your ward will get a seat on the local council. Stellenbosch has 37 seats in total, 19 of which are allocated as a result of ward votes. The other 18 are then assigned on a basis of Proportional Representation. But here where things get slightly confusing. There are two possible situations. Either they look at the percentage of votes a party got in the mayoral vote, and assign seats based on that. With 18 seats, it means each party would get a representative for every 5% of the votes they got here. The alternative, and how it looks, is that they include the already occupied seats in the calculation. Meaning that 2.7% of votes would result in a seat. For example, in the 2006 elections, the UDM only received 1.9% of votes. so under the first situation, they wouldn’t really stand a chance of getting one of the 5% seats. Yet they have held a seat the last 5 years.

And this is where the issue comes in. There is so much happening on the IEC’s website at the moment, it’s very difficult to find the information you’re looking for. I’m not even sure if the information I’m looking for is available on their website.

Now for most people this is probably not an issue. They have a party they support, and they are going to vote for them on all their ballots, however lots of community’s have local parties standing for wards. And it makes it tricky when voting mayorally. In Stellenbosch we have the new Studente Stem Party. They are standing for 2 of the wards in Stellenbosch, and then are also standing for the mayoral position. My voting station is located outside of their wards, but I may want to support them with the mayoral vote, but it’s difficult not knowing how exactly the system works.

In any case, I intend to ask some people around the voting station tomorrow and find out how clued up the people there are. Ought to be interesting.

Enjoy your public holiday!

Edit: Another thought. The Student Party don’t stand a chance of winning the mayoral vote, so do I give my vote to them in any case to get another representative on the council, or do I rather give my vote to a party that my vote may have an impact on, thus ensuring my chosen party is the one leading the town?