We (Ken and I) will be holding a wireless workshop at Toorcon 9. Wireless 101 with a takeaway Soekris box. We did it last year and it was good times had by all. This year the class is on Thursday, so attendees will have all weekend to play with their toys in a conference environment. My guess is it will be much more interesting.
Metrix moved into a new office this Summer, It’s right above the new Stumptown on Pine st. If you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to drop by and we’ll get some coffee or something. I’m sure I don’t drink enough coffee. *jitter*
I’ve been making more and more pictures lately, and NAS (Nikon Aquisition Syndrome) has fully kicked in. I’m rolling with a D200 now, and have a full strobist setup complete with PocketWizards. If you want a stylish portrait for your blog or social networking yadayada, let me know and we’ll see if we can work in some time.
Jeff let me know the feedburner/flickr feed was irritating his aggregator, so I’ve cut it back to only feed out the pictures marked with the ’seattlewireless’ tag. This should cut down on the amount of RSS spam from me since I always forget to tag things.
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Seattle has been selling off it’s old signs, and it made the rounds on Slog and the Seattle Times, but if you want this one on Boylston, it looks like you just have to give it a hard tug. Every time I look out the window at Metrix, I think it’s going to be gone, but so far, it’s still there.
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It has been a fairly slow night around here (apparently everyone is in vegas). I’ve been attempting to do a much put-off screen swap with my G3 iBook (defective video card), and my G4 iBook (broken hinge). I’m probably 50-60 screws into it, and have just realized that the connectors are almost certainly different. I have this feeling that for this to succeed, I have to pull the LCD away from the frame assembly. I’m pretty sure iFixit doesn’t have instructions for this step. Wish me luck.
MTL3P (Michael Lenczner) points out a writeup of the IS4CWN in Government Technology *Beta* (not sure if it’s a magazine or just a website).
He rightfully quotes the following:
“Compared to the more professional attendees of other wireless conferences like MuniWireless and W2i, the people at the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks are a ragtag bunch. They do things like walk up to a McDonald’s drive-thru window at 2:30 in the morning impersonating a car in the hopes of scoring some late-night food.
But its folks like this that invented wireless networking and, judging by the Summit attendance, they have spread their innovation to every corner of the globe. Their gusto was on clear display at the three-day affair in Columbia, Maryland, May 18-20, but so was a sense that big challenges are on the horizon.”
And it’s true, ISF-ers did impersonate a car in the hopes to score food. But what actually got the food in hand? Talking to strangers.
There’s probably a lesson here.
I just got back from the IS4CWN, and I have to say, Sascha throws a pretty good conference. This year, things were held in Columbia, Maryland, a prime example of American suburbery, but the conversation was anything but suburban. European and Latin American community wireless networks are growing faster and bigger than ever while North American CWNs tend to go muni or turn back into the pre-press-frenzy *fun* geek gatherings that they started out to be.
There are a pile of pictures on Flickr tagged IS4CWN. Dan Blah has a few over on Picassa that include the ‘mcdonalds’ story.. I took a few, but found myself conversing or consuming much more than capturing. Funniest/saddest of all, even in strobist country, with a pack full of flash gear, I didn’t even once break out a light, relying on sunlight and the dim flicker of flourescent tubes to fill my sensor.
By the way, captive portals are the devil to eye-fi and other browserless devices. I brought a battery powered kit with me for getting through them, but my guess is not everyone has one in their bag. I talked with the ISF guys a little about a global whitelist, but that’s probably not the right answer either. Any ideas?
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Went to Seattle Toorcon (Beta) this weekend. Lot of fun people in attendance, and some very cool talks. There really is nothing like hearing about WiFightclub and drinking Guinness all morning either. By the way, you’re now part of WiFightClub too.
I haven’t really pruned the pics yet. They’re all tagged up over at flickr with toorconseattlebeta.
For some odd/funny reason, the Eye-Fi thinks the PNA is in the middle of Idaho.
It’s only monday and someone is already selling their Golden Ticket on Craigslist.
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Not sure where you are? Check out Loki from Skyhook Wireless. It’s a firefox extension that gives you GPS-like capabilities with just a wifi card. For those of you that think this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Place Lab + money - privacy. That aside, I can see it being relatively useful. You can put yourself on a map with the FindMe button, fine tune your location (make that database better monkeys!), send your location via SMS or Email, and add GeoTags to flickr. It’s definitely worth the 2MB download.
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This week, it *looked* sunny out, so we decided to meet in the park. None of us bothered to check the weather reports or anything, standing around in the cold got old fast, so we ended up back at the Vivace Roasting Room. Matt Wilson brought in some Zigbee gear for us to check out, Andy brought in his Fon-in-a-box, and we talked a bit about some of our random projects. Currently the big thing is getting Andy and Eric’s nodes up and running. Andy has pictures in the SeattleWireless flickr group, and I’m sure Eric will have some up soon. If you’re on Capitol Hill, and want access, right now is a pretty good time to come to a hacknight and find out what you need to do.
It’s funny, we’ve been meeting at OCC because of the fast internet and ample table space, but I’ve really missed the coffee at Vivace. Hopefully next week will be sunny AND warm, we can meet in the park and kick back with a decent cup of bean.
We’ve been working on Node SeaCCP, a SeattleWireless node that covers much of Capitol Hill from the 30th floor window of the Westin building, and although my node already has strong signal from the roof, I wanted to see if we could connect with something a bit less beefy than a Metrix Mark II. We (Metrix) recently started carrying the Ruckus Metroflex (it kind of looks like a plastic taco) as a low cost CPE, and I had heard good things about the new Dual Zone (DZ) features, so I thought it might be a good idea to toss one in the window.
Just sticking it in the window, I was able to get 2 (out of 4) bars to swn-seaccp-yagi. Initial tests got about 800k through speakeasy’s speed test. Not bad, but I was sure I could do better. I added an Ikea mesh ‘plate cover’ to the mix, and bumped it up another bar and 2mbps. Not bad at all. I still haven’t spent any time messing with the angle to get an optimal install. I have a feeling if I get the distance right on the reflector, and actually point the thing correctly, I’ll be able to pull down packets a whole lot faster.
Dual Zone, enabled after a really easy one button firmware update, turns the ruckus into a single radio repeater, something that we’ve played with in madwifi-ng for some time now, but is rarely seen in a consumer grade device. I don’t think I’ll have a problem recommending these for people who want to connect on the cheap, and as an added bonus, I’ve knocked 15 bucks off the metroflex for the entire month of April.
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We headed down to the Kids’ Parade for a Better Waterfront today, and it was a blast. It was raining out, but we dressed appropriately, and brought the rainshield for Mason. He wasn’t too thrilled about being pushed around in a bubble, but the music and other kids seemed to make up for it. Orkestar Zirconium broke out the brass, and it was awesome.
We started out at Victor Steinbrueck park, walked down to the waterfront, back up the stairs (elevators for the strollered) and then through the market. Originally we were supposed to head over to the new Sculpture Park (which I would have liked to see), but it was pretty cool watching the band play on up three flights of stairs. As we walked along, it became really obvious to me that the people crying for a rebuild haven’t spent a lot of time at the waterfront. Even as a carless Seattleite with a bad photography habit, I haven’t spent a lot of time at the market looking around, Taking the time to walk from Pike Place to the water is just a shocker. The Viaduct, even on a rainy Sunday is loud, ugly, and a blight on an otherwise touristy area. If you stand at the park, you’re instantly aware of it, If you walk down the hillclimb, you have to walk under it, and if you walk down to the piers, you’re surrounded by parking lots and freeway. Granted, there were Tourists wandering around at the Market and the piers, but I can only imagine what it would be like if the area didn’t have a freeway running through the middle of it.
I’ve heard people talk about a working waterfront. Tear down the Viaduct, and we might just get one.
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