Just found out that the reason my wife’s PC wouldn’t connect to the Internet is that I had entered the WEP password wrongly. But Intel’s software reported a good connection to my router! Would it have been so hard to code in a “physical connection good but password is wrong please try again” dialog box? Billions of blue blistering barnacles!

Later And to compound the annoyance, I nearly thought my connection had broken again but then I realised that if you fix the password on one user account it doesn’t fix it on any of the others. Mightn’t it be a good idea to allow administrators to change all the passwords for wireless access to a given point at the same time?

After spending much time with a friendly but unable-to-help Dell technician I seem to have figured out the problem with my wife’s laptop myself (or at least found a way around it). It seems that for some reason her wireless driver crashes the whole system when trying to handle WPA encryption but it can handle WEP encryption fine. So we’re using that now. Not too elegant, but if it works don’t mess with it as I said earlier!

According to this press release from now until the end of the year anyone in (or merely passing through) Canada or the US will be able to use Skype on their computers - or their PDAs for that matter - to call any US or Canadian number.

I have my reservations about Skype - I would be much happier if I could find a VOIP solution that worked well, was open and cross platform but so far I have not found anything that fulfils all three criteria - Skype while not open at least fulfils the other two. I would certainly like it if my friends and family over in North America would all sign up (hint, hint) and let me know they had done so. As an additional incentive, if you have Windows you can even use the latest beta to look in on Adrien while we talk using our webcam…

There are a lot of software engineers with too much time on their hands. First (in 1990) there was “RFC1149″:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt - ‘A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers’. Then there was “RFC2549″:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2549.txt which added quality of service to the protocol. Two years later in Norway it was “tested for the first time”:http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257064.html but took an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information. Finally, in March 2004, by strapping 4Gb of memory cards to each pigeon, researchers managed to transfer data 100 Km using Wi-Fly - pigeon-empowered wireless internet and managed to achieve effective speeds of 2.27 Mbps.

Personally I would rather receive my email in a barrel strapped to a St Bernard dog…

The Guardian Online produced a report on “Nokia’s Lifeblog software”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1166303,00.html for turning the contents of your picturephone into a life journal. BBC followed up with an article with a few more details - most interestingly the clever idea that the software would automatically match up the pictures you took with your phone and the location where they were taken using the automatic phone location service that mobile phone operators provide. So as well as relying on labels you add yourself you can query your lifeblog software and find all the pictures you took in central London last week.

Before you get too excited it isn’t due to be delivered before the end of June and the first version (”blog” name notwithstanding) does not connect to the Internet but this still represents the first appearance of the next generation of ‘life capture’ software on the mass market.

An interesting discussion going on at the very insightful “TheFeature”:http://www.thefeature.com/ (which is all about ‘the mobile internet’). It was sparked by an article by “Howard Rheingold”:http://www.rheingold.com/ all about the potential dangers of ubiquitous location-aware devices. Some good points made about the need for sensible default settings (since few people change their defaults) and I pitched in:

Making “off” appear to be the same as “out of network range” is only a social protection as long as the technology doesn’t work reliably. The old phone excuse of “you’re breaking up I’ll call you back” really doesn’t work any more across most of the UK, for example - the network is just too good!

If your boss requires you to be locatable at all times during work hours you may not be able to pretend the technology doesn’t work - so the only protection for the individual against such harassment would be a social taboo against such behaviour - and I don’t think we can guarantee this will happen.

The only way I think this kind of thing can be prevented would be to make it illegal for a workplace to track someone’s location without a strong reason.

Cory grouses that T-mobile has withdrawn support for the games built into the Sidekick PDA/communicator and in doing so can automatically delete the games from his device at the same time. He extrapolates from this that they would also remove any other data on the device if he ever left their network. I really doubt T-Mobile could or would delete all his personal data from your Sidekick without his permission. But their unilateral removal of the games does go to show just how un-web-like and closed the mobile phone operators want the mobile “Internet” to be…

[Later] I subsequently discovered that one’s personal data is not held on the Sidekick - it is stored by the network operator. So in fact you might indeed lose all your data (at least if you hadn’t backed it up elsewhere somehow) if you stop paying network charges for the device - so you’d end up with a useless lump of plastic even if you’d bought it outright. Pretty disappointing!

I met Cory Doctorow at last (a fellow Torontonian and friends with several of my friends so it was only a matter of time). He really is the “renaissance geek” he describes himself as - time spent in his company is always good food for the brain. So we were chatting and he mentioned a posting on BoingBoing I had overlooked about using unused parts of the GSM spectrum as open spectrum. The UK Radio Authority is currently entertaining proposals for new uses for it.

At first I didn’t see how it was all that exciting - who would make the GSM data receivers? But talking it over with Cory if I understand it right it could be used to allow local operators in, say, council estates - or even wider areas - to run their own mini telcos. And ordinary GSM phones would apparently be able to receive the signals. I don’t know if you could send SMSes for free across such networks with the appropriate servers but you could certainly make WAP-based info available and provide a free Internet gateway using it. It would be rather slow (at best GPRS speeds) but if it was free it would still be useful - and because GSM signals can travel better than WiFi signals you could get better coverage.

Sounds pretty good to me - Julian Priest co-founder of consume.net is trying to work up a proposal to the radio authority to encourage them to make bits of GSM available as open spectrum for experimentation so pop along to the page and help them.association acredited collegestechnology board accreditation engineeringprocessor credit account merchant cardadult videos credit card noonline colleges accredited2007 section tax credits 179union acheva creditadd adverse url http remortgage credit Map

Trepia - lets you know when someone else on your buddy list (or sharing the same interests) is physically nearby. Oddly reminiscent of the lovegety but with more built-in intelligence. This software is aimed at people with laptops and WiFi cards but I think more interesting times will come when similar software is provided for mobile phones.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link

… and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren’t good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well - I’ll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I’m certainly part of the target market).