Techworld.com reports that UK WiFi aggregator Divine Wireless will be offering a new service, which covers some 15.000 hotspots run by BT Openzone, amongst others, charged in minutes rather than hours or days. Thus, a user would pay 8 pence per minute, or 4.80 GBP per hour. This is still very expensive, but the fact that you only pay for the minutes you use will make it very attractive to occasional users, to quickly check email, for example. Will people go for it? Maybe, but only if you really can get connected while waiting for the bus to come, as they claim in their typical scenario.
Hack to add an external DB9 connector to the Fonera
The guys at Pobletewireless have been busy with the Fonera lately, and have now posted a step-by-step hack to add a DB9 connector that allows easy access to the built-in serial port, without having to make IDC cable headers and so on. [Link]
The hack gives access to the console, with which you can do all sorts of nice and interesting things.
Morse code is dead…not!
Various sources have picked up on the FCC’s announcement that it is removing the requirement of five-words-per-minute Morse code that was required to get an amateur radio license. Boing Boing and Engadget (uggh!) for example talk about the ‘dead’ language, arcane, old and tired. Digital communications, the SMS and the web are here to stay, and replace Morse, right? Maybe not so fast.
When disasters such as Katrina strike, modern digital communication networks fail – and this is a fact. Generators can only give juice to power-hungry cell networks for so many hours, and that is if the generators are working (and have not been stolen!). Usually, in these scenarios, initial status reports, help requests, and coordination attempts come from none other than the amateur radio community, and in many cases, it comes in…morse. When your expensive Motorola phone stops working, a radio ham will build a QRP (low power) transmitter with nothing else but a few capacitors, resistors, and coils, power it off whatever battery he can find (or even a solar cell), and start sending out dashes and dots. The reason for Morse code? It stands out above the noise, and thus makes faint signals much easier to interpret.
Remember the famous SOS, Save Our Souls, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, …—…, which was sent out by the Titanic before its final trip to the bottom of the ocean. If you have a radio ham friend, give him a hug, and ask him to please keep proficient in morse, if only for when the bad times come.
Personally, I think it is right to remove it as a requirement for obtaining a license, knowing Morse will be something to be proud of. A couple of stories related to Morse – in the movie “Enemy of the state”, starred by Will Smith and Gene Hackman, the ultra-high-tech surveillance satellite used by the NSA to track a prey is actually seen sending out the letters ‘CQ’ in Morse…these stand for ‘attention airwaves, I have something to say’. Nice touch from a good friend, Steve Uhrig, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago (more on this in a post coming soon) and who was the technical advisor in the movie.
The second story is in the movie “Space Camp”, where I can only remember Lea Thompson, and is about a space shuttle that is launched into orbit with a bunch of kids from Space Camp on board. For some strange reason, the long-range radios hadn’t been installed (uh?), and so one of the kids actually starts sending out Morse to mission control, by flicking a switch on the shuttle that toggles a lamp on some telemetry panel down in Houston.
Linksys launches the iPhone, wasn’t Apple supposed to be doing that?
Picking up the Register’s story, it seems Linksys has done a really neat PR coup – they have launched their own WiFi phone, and called it iPhone. As you know, there has been a lot of hubbub in the Macosphere the last few weeks about a supposed mobile phone to be launched by Apple, even with rumors of large orders to Taiwanese OEMs. It looks like Linksys beat them to the punch!
Casio PB-1000 unearthed from the vault
Today I was throwing old stuff away from my parents-in-law’s house, when I came across a Casio PB-1000 personal computer, which belonged to my wife. She told me ‘oh, that’s just a calculator I used at school, it used to be good for trig’. In fact, it is a very capable machine (in its time, now your TV’s remote has more processing power than this thing!), it has 8kB of RAM, an RS-232 and floppy drive port, graphic touch screen, and runs for 55 to 100 hours on 3 AA batteries. What really strikes me opening the device is that the keyboard is very similar to the ZX81’s, with all the most used BASIC commands overlaid on each key, and accessible using the shift key. Here is a picture of this ancient device, which brings back many fond memories, such as getting Pong to work.
GMail to handle other providers – Google to mine even more data
So, the great news over at TechCrunch today were that Google has added a feature called Mail Fetcher to GMail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo.
This sounds great, and it probably is for GMail users, but it is also great for Google. Someone with legal wits should point a browser towards GMail’s terms & services, and check whether there are any provisions to exclude or include, explicitly or not, the scanning of all incoming and outgoing email from these other services. Maybe Google will also scan the contents of the additional email services you add to your GMail account to send you targeted ads. Maybe Google will have even better demographics by tying the IP addresses found in the headers of all the additional emails with their own database of registered users. There is a saying that nobody sells dimes for 9 cents, it’s a rather good saying to move your wallet by.
Any lawyers in the audience?