Before I went to Thailand in November, I arranged to have our mail held (a saga by itself: in what way is three full business days from a Monday morning a Friday morning?) and intended to get a 'no junk mail' sign for our mail box (these work quite well at stopping non-addressed mail in Australia, although I think the code is voluntary). However I couldn't find them in KMart and ran out of time for shopping around. Supposedly it's hard to get them because everywhere that you'd think to buy them relies heavily on junk mail to advertise.

I looked around online when I got back but while one can find a lot of places talking about them, it's hard to find someone who sells them.

Eventually though, I tracked down this: a free 'No Advertising Material' sticker from the Distribution Standards Board (Australia). Well, actually it costs $1 (two stamps) plus the unit price of two envelopes, because you send them a stamped, self-addressed envelope and they send back the sticker and a leaflet that tells you about the sticker. (The universal No Advertising Material (N.A.M.) sign is designed to replace the dozens of different and confusing signs now in use... etc etc. Apparently I still get free newspapers, political material and a few other things. And a hotline )

I've been in the habit of always having a big pack of envelopes at home and stamps in my wallet for several years now (I used to have to lodge a statement of my income once a fortnight in order to get my government student allowance). It's surprising how useful it still is to do that. Well, not that useful. But somewhat useful.

I've been in the market for wireless audio-visual transmission equipment for about a month, since my good speakers are now living next to the TV so we can listen to Wii, DVD and TV sound through them. The computer with music on it is tied to another part of the house by the modem location and I'm well over the era of running cables all over my house.

For the benefit of people thinking of suggesting a product, what I'm looking for is not anything that requires software to run on the computer itself. Instead, I'm looking for something that takes the soundcard output — ie probably just RCA plugs — transmits it over radio and which has a receiver that I can sit near the speakers which will feed out sound via RCA. That way I have fairly good future-proofness: the wireless sound is entirely independent of the operating system I'm running and the origin of the sound it's transmitting, it just transmits to the speakers anything I can feed to my soundcard.

However, we found such a thing today, and I must say: DO NOT BUY the Cocoon Wireless AV systems being widely sold in Dick Smith Electronics. The diagram on the back may well have a brick wall between sender and receiver, but we managed to get significant interference just by putting me between the sender and receiver. In addition, 802.11 wireless networks interfere quite strongly, to the point where Andrew started sending pings over the network and could hear the related interference. (They're listed as interfering in the troubleshooting guide too, without a solution, just a mention that you might want to consider turning your network off to eliminate possible interference.)

Unfortunately, well, in a way, Dick Smith was very ready to do a full refund of something I'd only owned for an hour, because I was all ready to tell them this story, but they cut me off when the hand gestures started, and wrote down 'DOES NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED'.

I did a fair bit of web research before buying and returning a 2.4GHz A/V sender yesterday but it turns out I didn't use the right search terms: including the frequency in the search is revealing. Basically, 2.4 GHz is the frequency used by 802.11b and 802.11g, and also by many cordless phones. Interference is pretty much inevitable unless you have the luxury of not having any close neighbours who have wireless networks and then, if you're lucky, you can set your wireless network to one end of the spectrum and the A/V system to the other and most A/V systems will be happy (some of them use pretty much the entire spectrum, so not then).

Various solutions and proto-solutions:

Use the 5.8GHz spectrum? No. Firstly, people are already starting to get cordless phones in this spectrum in order to avoid interference on those so it's just deferring the problem until there's just as much noise in 5.8GHz. Secondly, all A/V systems I've found are analogue (FM) modulation and analogue use of the 5.8GHz spectrum is illegal in Australia. (Such systems are sold nonetheless, usually with the disclaimer that unless you're buying them exclusively for use in the US and other countries, you don't want them, nudge nudge, wink wink.)

Use digital modulation in either 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz (which is legal)? Well, this ought to be possible. A lot of cordless phones do exactly that and advertise it heavily. However, this just doesn't seem to be an option with A/V systems: they all use analogue, pretty much. The one possible exception is the AVLabs AVMagic system, which is alleged to use 802.11g. But that's only stated in a few reviews of the product (using identical wording), not on AVLab's homepage and not on places where the system is actually sold, which makes buying it a bit of a risk.

Buy one of the many products by the consumer router companies (Netgear, D-Link...) which claim to be wireless media players or digital entertainers or similar? Well, possibly. However, most of these require software to be installed on my (Windows or sometimes Mac, ie no) PC which streams signal to it. Or often it streams just straight out files, which means that in future it may well not be able to read my new-fangled format of the twenty second century media files. In fact, most of them don't support Ogg Vorbis. Plus they're pretty DRM-happy. I don't know anything about DRM from a technical point of view, but I know what I don't like.

Use a second computer sitting near my speakers in various ways (make it my media centre, stream some audio to it)? Again, possibly, but I do rather like having only one 24/7 computer in my house (noise, power, impending heat death of the universe). If I could get a wee fanless PC in Australia with enough grunt to decode a stream and run a sound card for the kind of prices I see at cappuccinopc.com, then probably. For more than about $400 at the absolute most, not so much.

Buy a mini-ITX board and little case and build it yourself, lazy bones. This is me we're talking about. I was once warned away from sewing machines due to my lack of patience and short temper. I've never built a computer either, and you want me to start with an eeny one? (I did once change a CPU. It went OK. Except then I had to get someone help me underclock it, and it made me the least cool 22 year old on the planet.)

Get your man to do it. He'd probably eventually try, maybe if I had a gun or something, but just as I worry that during the process of building it, I'd go crazy and throw the motherboard across the room with a ninja scream, he worries about his hand tremor. The hand tremor that gets worse when he worries. And besides, c'mon. Why can't we substitute money for time? Paying for fiddly things to already be done is awesome.

Reconfigure the house network so that everything lives near the speakers? Kind of a pain because the aerial connection and the telephone jack (ADSL) are separated by about ten metres, which includes doorways and cupboards and stuff. We like using the computer itself as the router for a bunch of reasons. In fact Andrew really likes it and strongly discouraged me from playing around with it. (He probably remembers the first time I set up PPP over ethernet, which took two hours of yelling. On my birthday. This comic is the story of our relationship, except that every so often we switch roles.)

Buy another set of speakers? Given how much the current set cost, the 'buy another computer' solution is better.

So what are you going to do? Not sure. Maybe a Squeezebox. (Open source server, uncompressed streams.) But man. C'mon wireless revolution, get with the program.

I feel crappy being sad about the news that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's mainly because of the books... but then, I mainly know the books. Pratchett outside the books I mainly know from his Usenet posts, which I'm sufficiently interested in to go and do that search about once a year.

Anyway, it's sad. For him, and for the books. Good luck, Terry.

Simon Rumble writes:

I quite enjoy the various Planets I read because I get to read more about people. I read about their cats, their struggles with the landlord, their healthy problems, all kinds of stuff.

[...]

Of course, the shadowy cabal who run Planet Linux Australia clearly don't agree with this thinking, [as demonstrated] by silently dropping all of my blog except the geek category.

[I believe the cabal in question is still entirely comprised of LA's very own shadowy underworld evil genius, Michael Davies, for what it's worth.]

I generally concur with Rumble's sentiments within certain limits that I won't go into here extensively, save to note that there's different genres of blogging and actually, not all of them do work on a Planet. There's a certain level of formality, a certain level of curiosity and a certain level of detail that makes for a geek's blog — even when they write about cats or landlords — and I do notice when there's a syndicated blog that is substantially out of genre and it does bug me. (Even when the blog in question is a good example of its own genre.)

This is part of the reason that I generally choose to have my short, whiny, chatty, half-geeky thoughts section syndicated, and never my diary section. It is out of genre, mostly because individual entries are far too long for Planets (the most frequent comment I receive on it these days is well, it's good writing and all, but I don't read twenty paragraph stuff online), but for another reason also, which is that I don't really want it publicly criticised. It's not a dialogue. I'm happy to take email input on what wireless audio device to buy, but I don't really want or expect anything other than very neutral commentary on what I put in the diary section, not much more than sounds like you had fun or similar.

In particular, geek blogs are very commonly assumed to be in a genre where unless quite strongly specified otherwise, the poster is assumed to be asking for advice or a critical take, much like a posts to a user mailing list for a software project. There are reasons I've written about my day-to-day life online for over seven years, yes, and I am aware that by doing so I at any time could suddenly receive one hundred thousand emails and discover a thousand blog posts containing nothing but kindly advice concerning and stinging criticism of my every sentence. And what's more, I'd probably deal with it fine. Well, relatively! But it's not the genre I intend, and so I don't feel comfortable having it syndicated on a Planet any more than I would, say, fiction or poetry I wrote, even though in practice I'm sure none of those things would horribly jar Planet readers.

I was at a party on Saturday and someone mentioned they had a car share car with them. Actually, she didn't mention it in a good way: she'd gone to pick up the car and it was misconfigured and she'd been terribly late. But it reminded me to check on them.

Car share systems work something like this: the company owns a number of cars with their own guaranteed parking spots in various suburbs. You subscribe for some amount of money per month (in the $15 to $50 range) and then you can book and use a car as you need (assuming that there's low contention for them): you usually swipe a card to get into it. Cars are charged hourly and also by the kilometre and the rate includes insurance and petrol (apparently you can buy it more petrol on their account). For errands and such they're much cheaper than rental cars, because you can pay by the hour rather than by the day and the companies themselves claim that you save money on car ownership up to 10 000km a year.

Since the hire system is automated, you also aren't bound by the rental car opening hours, which has bit us several times (either hiring or returning a car on Sunday is a particular pain). Nor their 'base rate' quotes where they quote the price before compulsory 'extras', much like the way international airfares are quoted. (The quote in the article about a $39 airfare that turns into $59 is deceptive, by the way. In Australia domestic airfares must be quoted as all-inclusive. It's only international airfares where they quote it before compulsory extras. And apparently the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is just dying to move on both rental car and international airfare quoting practices, but they need some legislative backing.) Nor their enormous excess charges, unless you pay another $20 to lower the excess.

However, most of them are focused on the city. GoGet has two cars in Chatswood and one in St Leonards, but the whole thing sounds a lot less attractive even when I have to get a train for half an hour to get to and from the car in the first place. If you're in the Hornsby area and interested though, go tell them to get us a car.

Even leaving aside the fact that I can't find any with a car in Hornsby yet, there are a few problems with them from our point of view.

There's the minor one that Andrew can't drive them yet, as he is not on a full unrestricted licence. However, he is on his P2 provisional licence — "green Ps" — and eligible to take the test to move to unrestricted in May. However, rental car companies don't let provisional drivers hire cars either, and in fact some require that drivers have held an unrestricted licence for a full year. Most of them do have a nice feature whereby you can add an extra driver to a plan for little or no cost.

A bigger one is with the pricing model. When we need a car it is typically because we're going to a lengthy event that's not easy to get to on public transport. (Sydney, which is 100km across in some directions, has radial public transport, meaning that you have to travel into and out of the centre to cross suburbs. This party on Saturday would have been a 25km/40min drive but was about 60km on public transport and took us 2 hours on the trip home. That's partly because a scheduled bus didn't turn up, but cars don't do that as much.) The shared car rates look a little less attractive when we consider that when we'd want them, we'd most likely want them for at least 10 hours at a time.

Another problem we would ideally want also want cars for trips of several days in length taking in about five hundred kilometres. Once we get to that point, we might as well rent a car, the price is equivalent before the monthly subscription fee. (Give or take excess reduction charges and it's difficult to figure out how the included petrol plays in in advance.)

Nevertheless, if a car ever gets to Hornsby we'll at least give it a trial run.

Car sharing companies in Australia:

• GoGet: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (formerly "Newtown Car Share")
• FlexiCar: Sydney and Melbourne
• Charter Drive: Sydney