I’m not sure if I should be offended by this or not.
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
Node Atoys is live.
At the crack of dawn, Sandi, Rob, Ken, Richard and I headed up to the UPN Tower on Madison and met with the climbers.
We had to do some slight adjustments to our mounting hardware (aaaah power tools.), but were able to get the climbing started on time.
Down on the ground, we got all the non-antenna bits (OLSR, IP Addresses, and power related arrangements) working, and I snapped a few pictures.
Up on the catwalk, the climbing team snapped some nice pictures with Rob’s camera, and we were even able to stitch one together for Panoramas Gigantus.
For the brave of heart and high of gain, point your antennas here, join SWN-NodeAtoys, and start up OLSR.
Technorati Tags: Free Networks, seattle, seattlewireless, wireless
Wireless Networks for the Developing World (US Mirror) was released this morning. The printing has all been sorted out, and you can download or order your dead tree version now.
BTW, it’s 6:35AM, and BoingBoing has already picked up the story.
Here’s the Press Release:
This week we officially moved HackNight to Wednesday. If you’re going to attend a HackNight, you should always check the EventCalendar.
That said, this week Rob picked up a Wi-Spy dongle, and although I’m partial to the Wispy-Tools console, running the native tools on Casey’s windows box got the most oohs and ahs.
Matthew brought a whole pile of hardware to see if he could get the firmware off his Apple eMate and run it on a Zaurus. By the time I left, he had it running on his Powerbook under an emulator. Color me impressed.
One sad (but slightly funny) point in the evening was watching everyone’s first peek at the printed copy of Wireless Networking in the Developing World. It seems that there was a slight problem in the printing process so you need a magic decoder ring and a whole lot of spare time to read it.
I also had my first piece of Key Lime pie tonight. With Iced Tea. It was surprisingly tasty. According to Richard, it’s surprisingly easy to make as well. Good to know.
If you’ve got some electronics that aren’t worth putting on ebay or craigslist, I noticed there is an electronics recycle box at the Joe Bar.
Although I think this is a scary sign of our throwaway culture, it’s very cool that if I do have something to get rid of, I don’t actually have to go far, and I only have to go to my favorite coffee shop to do it.
How much money do you think Verizon cost Seattle this week? I haven’t done the math, but I’m betting it’s going to cost a lot of money to get rid of all these phonebooks that they have littered throughout the city.
Nobody in my building has taken one, and I’m willing to be none of us ordered them either. They’re not addressed to anyone, and they’re not by the mailbox. To me, this looks like spam. Plain and simple.
I suppose it could be offered that they’re delivering a phone book to their subscribers, but in our neck of the woods, we get our monopoly dialtone from Qwest, not Verizon, and as the TV keeps telling me, we’re supposed to use the QwestDex yellow pages to look things up. I’m pretty sure Qwest didn’t partner up with Verizon for their phonebook when I wasn’t looking. I think they’re just doing it because they’re big enough to get away with it, and if t-mobile and cingular thought they could, we’d see big piles of trash from them too.
Do you think Verizon is going to come by in their little van in the next few days and pick up the left-over phonebooks? I don’t see it happening (I’d love to be proved wrong), and they’re going to go directly in the trash. Or more importantly, the recycling, since it is now illegal (by penalty of fine) to put crap like this in the trash.
This is a horrible waste of natural resources, and it’s costing me and my city money.
It looks like I’m taking another trip to flatland. This time it’s St. Charles, MO for the National Summit for Community Wireless Networks, a shindig thrown by our pals at Champaign Urbana Community Wireless Network, Free Press, and the Mid-Rivers Community Wireless Network.
Much like the FreeNetworks Summits, the NS4CWN2006 is a chance for Community Wireless geeks to get together and have a few beers, but instead of just exchanging hardware trickery and getting into the nitty gritty of network topologies, it’s a mixer of geeks, policy makers, and municipal planners. Want to get face to face with the FCC or find out what your state and local government is doing to cater to the telco’s latest demands? This looks like the place to do it.
I didn’t make it to their first summit back in 2004, but from everything I heard happened, there’s no way I’m missing it this time!
Technorati Tags: conferences, CWN, Free Networks, wireless
After all these years, we finally have our own working node map. You don’t have to email anyone to get on it (like the original), and it’s on our server, so we can implement all the nifty features that we’ve dreamed up over the years. I would really love to see an OLSR plugin that auto-updates the map on it’s status and gives us not only an accurate count, but statistics as well…
Thanks to the Google API (and a bunch of work by Eric Butler), it’s not cutting off any key points of Seattle, and it is very easy on the eyes.
Green nodes are verified nodes, and at the moment, require one of us to make an entry in the database. Adding potential or unverified yellow nodes takes a second of your time, and gives us an idea of what is out there. Please take a moment to add yourself.
And don’t forget to update the Wiki!
For the Windows users at HackNight who hear all about Rendezvous/Bonjour and never get to use it, Apple has Bonjour for Windows.
Sometimes it’s good to have O’Reilly DevCenter (specifically brian d foy) in the blogroll. I totally missed this one, and it’s not new (I wonder if this years update will be in June?)
From the looks of the release notes, it looks like it comes with an IE plugin as well as support for Bonjour printing. Does anyone know if there is a Firefox plugin for Bonjour yet?
Tonight’s HackNight started out like most hack nights, A sandwich, an Orange Crush, and a bit of cross-talk with the Ruby on Rails guys, but once people started showing up, it got pretty lively. Rob, Casey and I went to the base of the tower yesterday and scouted out our spot, so I showed the pictures and gave a quick rundown on what steps are next and approximate timelines for the install.
Ken showed up and talked about his trip to Shmoocon 2006. I got a kick out of the Hacker Arcade, and it kind of makes me want to put a coin slot on my game machine. It certainly would make saving up for stuff easier, and I might even let visitors at the controls every now and then.
At some point, Joe Towner showed up and we played everyone’s favorite HackNight game, “Who’s got the Torx”. He picked up 5 Intel Pro/Wireless 5000 LAN Access Points on surpluscomputers.com and within a minute or two, we had the thing torn apart, photographed and stubbed out on the wiki.
It turns out that this $4 (Yes, that is Four US Dollars) AP is packed full of surprises. 16MB of ram, 8MB of flash, an 802.11a card and a spare MiniPCI slot. According to the docs, you can put in an additional 802.11b card and it will instantly recognize it. We’ve got a pile of MiniPCI cards at Metrix, so we’ll probably spend some time tomorrow seeing which cards it works with and if we can get the thing to go into client mode or possibly cram Linux on it.. If so, it’ll definitely be worth the price of a coffee.
It should probably be noted that starting next week HackNight will be on Wednesday, and that if you’re coming, you should always check the EventCalendar first.
Technorati Tags: hacknight, seattlewireless, wireless
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