Category Archives: Wireless Connectivity

Jabra BT250v

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Every now and then you buy a product that really just works.  I recently bought a Bluetooth headset for my cell phone – a Jabra BT250v
– and I have to admit that I am truly happy with this product. 
I’ve always used a headset, but the wired type.  When I upgraded
cell phones and bought a Nokia 6820
one of the features that I wanted was Bluetooth for a wireless
headset.  But I stuck with wired headsets for a year or two.

After destoying the wired headset for the second time by jerking the
headset out of my ear or catching the wire on various things, and
having to untangle the wire one too many times, I broke down and bought
the Jabra.  It is now something that I would not go without. 
The sound quality it great, it has a ‘vibrate’
feature so that I have now turned off the ring on my phone, and the
buttons on the earpiece allow me to answer a call, and change the
volume.

I have had two problems with it over the last month that I have had the
device.  The first I was warned about … if I am outside and
there is any wind, the people I am talking to immediately complain
about the wind noise.  I have learned to mute the phone, or warn
people that I am talking with.  The second was that one time the
headset locked up and would no longer communicate with my phone. 
The on-line support indicated that I would have to ‘reset’ the Jabra,
and that meant re-inserting it into the charging base … which was at
home.  That did piss me off.

One other thing that I have learned is that every now and then it will
‘disconnect’ from my cell phone, for example if I set down the phone
and walk away with the Jabra on my ear, or hooked in the neck of my
shirt.  Its easy to ‘reconnect’ by simply clicking the button on
the Jabra.  Likewise, if I switch my phone to speakerphone, and
then back to ‘normal’ the Jabra will be disconnected.  One quick
click on the Jabra button and it reconnects.  I have to say it is
one of the best investments I have made related to my cell phone. 
A very nice design, and very easy to use.

Motion Tracking with a Webcam

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In the worlds of ‘virtual reality’ and ‘augmented reality’ one of the
important technologies is ‘head tracking’ … knowing the orientation
of the users head.  If you want to create an artificial world, or
add an object in the field of view of the user, you often want that
object to ‘sit still in space’ allowing the user to move around the
virtual object.  In the past many of the systems were based on
gyros, or accelerometers, or even some ‘base station’ that the user is
near.

In recent years there is a lot more work going on with ‘video head
tracking’ or the use of a camera attached to the head of the user, and
using software analysis of the image being sensed to determine movement
and rotation.  I have seen some amazing demonstrations of using
this technique in the wearable computer realm, and the software is
becoming more and more available.

This article caught me off guard as the develop is now using this same
technique to create a virtual version of the ‘wooden labyrinth’
game.  This is an impressive application of the technology … all
implemented on off the shelf hardware!  What you can do with a
Tablet PC, a Webcam, and some software!

Casey hacked a Tablet PC with a Webcam to recreate wooden labyrinth game.

I had to get this one in. Phillip Torrone wrote me and said this Tablet PC hack is something I had to check out. I’m glad I did. Casey Chesnut did /cameraFlow. I wanna see this working.

Awesome.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Public Distributed Sensor Networks

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I remember talking with Phil Windley
about one of his ideas to leverage OnStar
as a distributed sensor network. He posited that all of these
cars tend to have temperature sensors, some form of GPS, and the
wireless communications … they could be used to create a nationwide
temperature map.

Now here is another article about taking this further to use cell
phones as the source of distributed sensor information. Very cool
idea. Everyone carrying the right kind of cell phone could opt-in
to providing sensor data to one or more servers. A huge variation
on SETI@Home!

Let’s see … what would someone pay me to participate in this? And protect my identity …

Saving the World With Cell Phones.
Scientists work to turn mobile phones into a distributed network
capable of measuring pollution levels — and possibly detecting
biological weapons before they can be launched. By Rachel Metz. [Wired News]

Accelerando … Science Future

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If you have not yet read Accelerando I suggest that you purchase or
download (Yes! He has a free version that you can download!) a
copy.  I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s SnowCrash and Diamond
Age, and this is yet another a fun book to read.  Charles Stross
has done an awesome job of extrapolating today’s technology and
research into a great possible future.

Go get it … read it.  Welcome to the future …

If it’s not one thing …

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Well … I kept playing around with Radio prior to the Internet Identity Workshop 2005 and
all of the sudden it began to work!  No idea why … maybe it knew
that I had my first two Drupal sites up and running … 🙂

Of course, it did me NO good at IIW, since the wireless network
completely sucked and was unusable.  Now that the workshop is
over, I’m on my own network where connectivity exists.

For all of the people who think that “bandwidth and connectivity will
be everywhere”, I’d like to believe the story, but this workshop was
the second example in the last month where a “high-tech” conference was
unable to live up to the promise.

Ok … sorry for the complaining … now I’ll get to my blog posts!

Crappy Wireless @ Telecosm

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I haven’t been blogging … since it was just too much of a pain. 
The wireless network here at Telecosm – of all places – was a
complete joke this year!  I’ve taken lots of notes, and will post
when I get someplace that there is decent bandwidth … like back in my
room.

The guys from Tropos Networks were supposed
to be providing wireless, however what they provided was crap.  I
had to argue with them on Tuesday to get them to even get it working
… and then it has been up and down for the last two days.  When
it was working, the bandwidth sucked.

It’s amazing in this day and age, to be at a high-end conference that
is talking about the Internet, and not be able to get high-speed
wireless Internet access.

If I come next year, I’ll be bringing all of my own equipment to provide wireless for the attendees!

Garage Blogging

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I had to do it.  Garage Blogging.

I was waiting for lunch to finish cooking, and so I was playing with my
son, Sam, in the garage.  While we were playing I was loading my
truck with my tools for my after-lunch project … I’m heading into
Salt Lake City to work on installing a wireless set-up at an Internet
Cafe.  I had some stuff I had to check on-line, but Sam was having
too much fun playing with his Spiderman Car.  Wireless rules!

I grabbed my laptop from inside, and sat down out in the garage and got
to work . .. what a nice day.  I headed out to the front porch and
thought about the amazing progress … I’m no longer stuck to a desk to
get some quick “global” work done … I can work from my garage. 
Even though I live with technology ever day, some times it still hits
me as truly amazing.  Wild to think where we will be in the next
10 years.

I’ll be at George Gilder’s Telecosm
conference this week … I’ll be blogging there.  I haven’t been
to one of his conferences since 2000.  In 2001 the events of 9/11
caused the conference to be cancelled.  Since then, I’ve been too
busy working on things.  I’m really looking forward to this years
conference.

Jamais Cascio @ AC2005

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I have to admit that I am geting tired, and really just wanted to
listen to this presentation and not think about blogging.  The Participatory Panopticon
was the theme … and it was a great talk … well presented … on the
future world of always on cameras.  Jamais is a very good
presenter …

New Palm Zire 72 … and new applications!

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Well … my Handspring Edge died.  I have now gone over a month
without it and I just can’t go any longer.  I have been using Palm
devices for a long time, starting with one of the original Palm
Pilots.  I find that it is just plain useful.

While growing up my father was always keeping lists.  Writing down
everything that he wanted to do each day … lists of errands … 
shopping lists.  Even to this day when I vist him at his home,
he’ll have a list of tasks, topics, and questions for us to
share.  I obviously picked up the habit from him … but I have to
admit that I moved from paper lists to the Palm.

I had to do some looking around, and although I had a lot of people telling my to go with the Treo 650,
I just really had no interest in having a larger phone.  I also
have heard a lot of complaints about the Treo devices.  In digging
around, I finally chose the Zire 72.

The Zire 72
has got a lot of nice features.  First off, it’s a Palm device
that will do everything that my old Palm did.  Plus it has a color
screen, is a digital camera, can play MP3 music, and has a SD slot for
expansion cards.  The one other feature that really hit me was the
Bluetooth wireless support.  It will actually talk to my Nokia
cell phone and allow me to send and receive SMS messages, and even dial
phone numbers from my Zire address book.

It is this last feature that really got me excited.  While
ordering I began to think about what possible applications I might
create where I have my Zire sending SMS messages for me … Hmmm. 
During the checkout process they of course pushed all of the various
accessories that I could purchase … and I did buy one – a SD
GPS!  I’m thinking that I want to create an application that
allows me to send and receive GPS data via SMS from my Zire 72.  I
can’t wait for it to arrive to begin to explore what is possible …

The next wave of Robots

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When I was growing up, I remember seeing the Heathkit HERO Robots
… kit robots that you could buy from the premiere electronic kit
company.  They were too cool, and of course made me and friends
think about owning our own R2D2 robot.

Yesterday, I found out about the RoboBusiness Conference & Exposition
that was held this week in Cambridge, MA.  I am really impressed
at the conference, and the speakers, and I am sorry that I was unable
to attend.  I would have really liked to hear about the progress
that has been made in the areas of robotics and telepresense.  It
is really this second topic – telepresence – that really interests
me.  This is where robots are being used to extend the “senses” of
a human operator.  In military applications, these robots can
enter a building or cave and allow the human operator to look around
without being in danger.  In personal applications you could
remotely interact with one of your grandparents, and look around their
house for them and to keep an eye on them.

If you visit the website you will see a lot of companies working in
this space … and some very innovative solutions.  One of the
interesting robots is White Box Robotics and their new Model 914 PC-BOT … the next generation of hobbyist/experimental robots.  Is is available for purchase now, or at least to reserve one, and it is priced very aggressively.

There are many other examples, and again I really am impressed by the
list of speakers.  I’ll have to talk Doug Kaye into getting the
conference proceedings on ITConversations!