This really makes me wish I had some drums to practice on right now. Apartment living sucks. Having to be quiet to appease the neighbors sucks.

Regarding implementing a program in Minnesota similar to the one in South Dakota that pays land owners to let people hunt publicly on private land:

“It’s definitely time to put this concept into place in Minnesota,” said Petterson, a retired teacher who drove to St. Paul last week to voice his opinion at a State Capitol meeting. “It’s so popular in South Dakota, why can’t we do it in Minnesota?”

The rest of the story can be read here. I think the plan sounds like a great idea. Get it done!

But, I’m starting to realize that my Motorola Droid does have some weird WiFi issues.

The issues are so bad actually, that I was initially convinced that WiFi was disabled or blocked by my provider.

I’ve since learned that isn’t the case.

When I first got my Droid a couple months ago, one of the first things I tried to do was to connect to my secured WiFi network at home.

After selecting my network and inputting my password, I was able to connect to my network just fine. It looked like I was connected to the Internet through the WiFi and the signal was strong. But any apps that use the Internet seemed like they didn’t have Internet access. My browser couldn’t load anything, my email no longer worked, and basically it just seemed like the phone wasn’t connected to the Internet, even though my WiFi connection looked fine.

Oh well, I thought, my provider must be blocking WiFi on my phone so that I am forced to use their 3G network. That is what I actually thought for a while.

DroidMod made it work for a couple days…

The next turning point for me was when I installed DroidMod a few days ago. Instantly after installing DroidMod I noticed that my WiFi actually worked! I connected to my home network just fine. I was able to connect to the secured network at work the next day just fine. I was able to connect to the WiFi at Atomic Coffee just fine. And while connected I was also able to actually browse the Internet and get my email!

Hmmm… what the hell does this mean? I initially thought that hacking my phone unlocked the WiFi capabilities. However I’m thinking that I’m still incorrect on this.

The WiFi should have been working from the start anyways, based on what I’m reading on the Internet.

Now today…

I grabbed my Droid after I woke up this morning to check email and noticed that my phone has not had Internet access since I left Atomic Coffee at about 7:30pm last night.

Hmmm… Atomic Coffee’s network is unsecured, and my work/home networks are secured – it appears that yesterday my Droid decided that it didn’t want the Internet to work on any secured WiFi networks that I’m connected to.

I’m going to go back over to Atomic Coffee today to see if I’m able to get on the Internet on that unsecured network, now that no secured networks work on my Droid anymore.

Annoying

The annoying thing is that my Droid is still able to connect to the secured networks just fine, but then it can’t transfer any data over those networks.

This is annoying because if I have the WiFi turned on it will connect to the secured networks, turn off the 3G, and basically leave me without any data connection, even though it looks like it’s connected.

In the meantime I’ll have to turn off the WiFi and just use the 3G 100% of the time but this is rather frustrating as WiFi is one of the reasons I bought this thing.

If you install DroidMod on your Droid, for example, you’ll be able to do things that your phone was not originally intended to do. Tethered Wi-fi? Yep. Multi-touch screen capabilities? Yep.

Also – you’ll also basically break your phone’s warranty.

So my tech curiosity got the best of me last night and I installed DroidMod, which used to be called SholesMod.

I was very reluctant to do it. Something about doing something that basically turned my phone into a device that wouldn’t want to take back to my cell provider just didn’t seem right. But I got over it and just did it.

I’m glad I did.

It took a few minutes to get through the whole process, but this walk-through regarding DroidMod installation got me through it rather easily. Too easily actually.

Note: I just noticed that they updated this walk-through again as of today.

So – what’s the benefits of installing DroidMod? Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• I can actually use the built in WiFi functions to connect to available wireless networks rather than the 3G network
• I can turn on wireless tethering to allow me to use my phone as a wireless access point
• I can use a more extensive cache clearing app to clear junk off my phone
• The photo gallery app is a lot more awesome, to put it shortly
• I can install SetCPU to tweak my processor speeds to increase performance or save battery juice
• I have 5 home screens instead of 3

Those are the most prominent items that I’ve noticed after 1 day of using a rooted Droid.

What were my concerns?

• I was worried about losing data (photos, etc.) during DroidMod installation but that was not an issue, I still have all my data
• I was worried that I might break my phone – but that did not happen
• I was concerned that my phone would suck more battery power or that I would do something to compromise battery efficiency – but nothing bad happened.
• I was concerned I was going to lose a bunch of the apps I had downloaded and installed – still got ‘em all

Overall, this was a good move. My phone does the stuff that I thought it would when I first got it. Nice.

If you’re considering rooting your Droid, don’t take the decision lightly. I can see how this wouldn’t be for everybody. All I can say is (from a tech-head standpoint) that I’m glad I did it.

At least that’s what I can tell. If anybody out there is reading this and knows for sure whether or not this is an official Boards of Canada music video or if it’s a fan video, I’d like to know.

Good stuff eh? The monkey kids are weird as hell.

The most interesting thing about this though, in my opinion, is that the video footage was taken from a public domain educational video about bicycle safety. The video author links to the public domain footage in his description.

I watched that bicycle safety video, titled “One Got Fat: Bicycle Safety (1963)” – and I think that it may qualify as one of the oddest educational videos I’ve ever seen. It’s so weird that it almost seems like it’d be a spoof, but it’s not.

Bizarro stuff huh? Those masks would also work well for bank robberies or death metal stage props.