Daily Wireless - Belair Does London Hot Zone

Islington council have covered Upper street in free WiFi apparently running from the Angel to Highbury corner. Now I wonder if I can get it from my favourite cafe in Torrens St [from: JB Ecademy]

Wanted: Good Windows programmers to work on the Skype API

Because it's there. There's no money involved. Probably.

I have some projects in ascending difficulty involving the Skype API.

1) A toolbar App that watched the Skype presence status of the logged in person and their contacts and called a simple web service whenever it changed.

2) A toolbar App that watched the Skype status of the logged in person and their contacts and FTPed a GIF to a web site whenever it changed.

3) An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out

4) A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out.

I have a prototype for the first and second but I'm not good enough at Windows programming to finish it with out a lot more research.

Drop me an email at julian_bond at voidstar.com

A VC: del.icio.us : The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know.

Lovely!

PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth : By Robert X. Cringely

Bob describes connecting to three neighbour's WiFi simultaneously to get fast reliable internet access. In each case he's borrowing a cup of bandwidth! Now to do this he says he's got three patch antennas on a pole on the roof connected to three Linksys WRT54G running Sveasoft firmware and set to client on 3 channels. Then there's a proxy server/router with three ethernet cards linked to those and running on an old Mac G4. Finally there's a local DNS server also running on the mac.

I can't help thinking that there's some potential shortcuts here. What you need is an OS like Linux that can support multiple connections to multiple networks with multiple DNS. And a box with 3 USB ports for USB wifi cards and one ethernet connection to the local network. In fact a baby Soekris box or perhaps a MeshBox from Locustworld could do this. Or any old Intel based PC running Knoppix as long as it's got the USB connectors.

Hidden in here is what I think is the holy grail USP for local mesh networks. It's not to extend internet connectivity off the edge of the broadband network, but to aggregate internet connections for a whole street. Let's say that my street has 5 houses with a broadband connection from multiple vendors. Another 5 houses have networks but no internet. We should be able to create a local WiFi cloud so that anyone in any of the 10 houses can get a connection. And if one of us needs short term high bandwidth (like a big bittorrent download in the middle of the night) we should be able to get 5 times the normal speed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Daily Wireless - T-Mobile Brings WiMax to Trains is a good roundup of T-Mobiles experiments with providing WiFi on trains from Brighton to Watford. It also covers the work GNER are doing with providing WiFi on the London to Edinburgh line. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bloggerheads (UK) - A way forward gave me pause for thought.

There's something I don't really get about the current Election campaign from Labour. And I don't understand why the opposition parties aren't making more of it. It goes like this.

Why should we vote for, and how can we vote for, someone who has already announced they are going to resign?

Let's say Labour get into power. Some time during the course of the next parliament, Tony Blair is going to resign. If past history is anything to go by the leadership challenge and change will be bloody and messy. And there's no guarantee that it will be in 5 years or 3 years or even one month.

So Labour is asking us to vote for something that we have no hope of predicting and with an uncertain outcome. This makes no sense to me. So wouldn't it be better if Tony resigns now, the election is called off until Labour can agree on a new leader and we start again? Which is all about as likely as Veritas forming the next government.

Blair Out - Labour In.

grat.uito.us
me too [from: del.icio.us]

How to Make a Simple Curry "Anything" : Joe Grossberg
Me Too. Found on del.icio.us bookmarked on del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Looks like linkedIn have introduced a feature to mass message all your contacts. That'll upset a few people.

See the left box Grafitti. Does Ajax get round the traditional problems with refresh on web based chat systems? Are we about to see a renaissance of web chat all over the place?

The usual approach is to use IRC which then means a Java or Flash IRC client and they're all pretty nasty.

Uncle Davey gets a new MP3 player...? : I want a device that interfaces as a hard disk through USB, so I can use it on any computer I like, and add and remove music using operating system commands. ... And [MS] iTunes sucks! It really is awful.

This is a perfectly reasonable request. Why don't the iPod fanatics understand this? Let's face it, Apple is now part of the content distribution industry as much as the technology industry and their pact with the devil means they are deliberately hobbling their products to keep the other content industry players happy. Why? It's time a few more people stood up and said Apple aren't wearing any clothes. And he's absolutely right, iTunes on Windows does suck.

RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency

I'm not going to even attempt to precis this. Just go and read it. It's a study of the implications of 2005 being the year that oil production peaks. [from: JB Ecademy]

A Different CD For Every Person On The Planet says that CDDB has just identified it's one billionth unique CD title.

If there are 1 billion CD titles, why are there only 1 million tracks on iTMS?

Here's the "it should exist" request. I want to see a mainstream legal download service using the AllOfMp3.com model. Any flavour of encoding you want with no DRM and charged by the Mb. Charge $1 a track for the first 3 months after release. $0.50 for the next 9 months and $0.10 ever after. (for 192Kb VBR encoding). Then digitise and make available every bit of audio ever recorded. You want to bet this wouldn't make a ton of money?

So where's the Project Gutenberg for audio? For those that don't know, Project Gutenberg is a project to digitise every out of copyright book.

and finally:

Just Say No To DRM [from: JB Ecademy]

Not Apathetic AKA none of the above
A site for those who choose not to vote or to spoil their ballot slip to explain why. [from: del.icio.us]

The Berkeley mailbox format for storing email in text files is as old as the hills. So why doesn't Outlook import and export to this format? Or does it?

I kind of expect this from Micro$oft. But what about Thunderbird/Mozilla? Surely they should support this format for import/export? or do they?

Every so often the blogerati have a moan about your data being stuck in their system, for instance Yahoogroups is notoriously difficult to get email archives from so that you can do somethig else with them. Or your favourite YASN won't let you get at your network and all your network messages. But how much more of a lock in is it when your email program doesn't provide any way to import or export your email except to a select few alternate programs.

This seems like an appropriate time to relaunch the UK Politics Club.

ps. would've been better with the link. Doh! [from: JB Ecademy]

If you were buying a DVD player to go under the TV, you'd be crazy not to buy a Multi-region machine and they're readily available even from reputable mainstream stores in the UK like John Lewis.

But what if you buy a DVD player built into your laptop? Or you buy one of those neat little portable DVD players for the kids in the back of the car or to watch on the plane? My understanding is that you can't get these (ahem) modified for Multi-region. On most laptops, you get 5 chances to change the region encoding before it simply stops working completely. How about accessory DVD players for fitting in a desktop PC?

Let's face it, this stuff sucks! Exactly why shouldn't I buy a DVD in the USA while on a business trip and play it on my machine at home back in the UK? Why shouldn't I go down to Forbidden Planet and buy some import Anime and expect it to work on my UK machine?

Just Say No To DRM [from: JB Ecademy]

tagging.pagina.nl
Everythingb folksonomy. Lots of lists of tagging tools. [from: del.icio.us]

NTL have started rolling out more speed upgrades but they've been fairly quiet about it. If you have NTL Cable broadband then go to http://www.ntlworld.com/data-feeds/editorial/microsites/tierMigration/ The old 750Kbps service has been boosted to 2Mbps for the same price. It looks like the upload speed has gone from 128Kbps to 200Kbps. Which is better but still a right pain. We used to get 512-128 so a factor of 4 between up and down. Now it's a factor of 10. I guess they're still trying to limit file sharing.

Note that there are usage limits. 2Mbps gets you 1GB per day and there's 3GB per month on their entry level 1Mb service. Which is not good. 1GB a day is fairly reasonable. And they haven't actually started enforcing it yet. Customers with the existing services or 2Mb & 3Mb (1GB per day) Ntl reserves the right to contact customers who regularly exceed their daily usage allowance, where such excessive use impacts the quality of service for other ntl broadband customers.

But as we all start downloading episodes of Alias from the USA via BitTorrent it could get irksome. I understand why they do usage limits but I still don't have to like it.

The throttle seems to be in the cable modem. What would be good is if the speed limits were controlled in the network. So you could have ethernet speeds on your local cable segment, 10Mpbs and upwards within NTL and 2Mbps for the wider internet. This would still help NTL keep down their peering costs, but let me share my entire machine with my friend up the road. Just an idea, although I don't expect it to happen.

The Horizon Project :: View topic - ver 054 download link and instructions.
Video add on for Skype [from: del.icio.us]