Category Archives: Wireless Connectivity

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Internet Access Everywhere …
I have to get into the blogging mode again. It’s been so long that I’ writing about things after the fact … instead of during the events. In this case, it’s funny to write about last weekend … especially when I was staying in a remote southern Utah town where I was able to get Internet Access!

I went to Hankville, UT with some friends for a “Fusion Weekend” of hiking, scientific discussions, and general life reflection. It was a blast. We stayed at the Wispering Sands Motel, and the manager is also the ISP for the town of Hanksville. He has installed a 56kbps Frame-Relay link into the Qwest cloud … connected to XMission here in Salt Lake City. If you are curious about why we all went to Hanksville, you’ll have to go visit the Fusion Weekend link above … it’s where to stay if you want to explore Goblin Valley and some of the incredible Utah slot canyons.

Don, the manager, was so cool that he let me put my mobile 802.11b Access Point in the lobby of the motel and we were all able to get wireless Internet in our rooms. This really got me thinking about just how connected we are becoming. I’m going to be talking more with Don about our http://80211.net project … he might be assisting us with more locations in the south.

Lastly … our weekend trip was a fun family adventure. With the birth of my son Sam our truck had become quite crowded. In order to provide more space for luggage and the possibility of road trips, I picked up a camper shell for my truck so that the bed is now fully enclosed. It worked great. We did the drive and started to get the process of driving with a baby worked out. All of this is in preparation of our trip to Seattle for Thanksgiving. It’s going to be a fun trip!

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International Symposium on Wearable Computers
After wanting to attend this conference for several years now, the planets aligned. The conference was in Seattle, and I was able to break away and go! I have to admit that ISWC 2002 was smaller than I would have anticipated in size and attendance, but well worth the price and time in the content and what I was able to learn.

The conference started with some tutorials and I chose to attend one on power issues with wearables, and the state of power solutions. It was a good talk, and I was able to get some insight into where research is going. One thing that I started to realize is that, IMHO, battery technology evolution is being underestimated.

The next three days consisted of papers that were presented. Each paper was given 30 minutes, and they had breaks every hour and a half. It was great … hearing everything from work on the International Space Station (Yes, they are using 802.11b wireless on ther space station!), to location-based services and map rendering, to the various software that is being developed to create augmented and mediated reality. I’ll talk more about this in future posts.

Overall, it was a blast. I can’t wait for next year … I’ll be there in a very different capacity … 😉

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Personal, peer to peer devices …
I really like this article … it starts to really look at the next-generation applications that we are going to be seeing soon. I have a different opinion on the platform that this will occur with, but the concepts at the same. The power of the systems that we are carrying with us is extreme … and with low-cost wireless appearing all over the place it is only a matter of time before the various applications begin to appear. One of my core interests is the “Mobile Ad-hoc Networks” that are coming …

Inter-Personal Awareness Devices [Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

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Location based information … information on how to get … information!
I really think this is a great idea for a cool web service! These guys have written a really cool application that consumes a FCC database and let’s you know what radio and TV stations are in your area. Very cool! If converted to a web service then anywhere in the United States that you might find your self, you would be able to detect what stations are around. This would be great coupled with a GPS and a wearable computer … and if the wearable had a radio/TV tuner peripheral …

Station Location and Information 1.0. Search and display AM, FM, and TV station information. [freshmeat.net]

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WarBlading II … going on III …
So a couple weeks back – before my two week long set of business trips, I headed out WarBlading again. This time I had a couple of objectives:

  1. wear the unit outside of the pack to see if the unit would run cooler.
  2. use the Olympus/Xybernaut Head-Mounted Display (HMD) that I have.

The unit ran cooler … actually all night on the single ElectroVaya battery … however I had to use the tablet display since I couldn’t get a pointing device working! It sucked!

The issue with the pointing device is that Windows 2000 would keep freaking out with the GPS and Mouse connected at the same time. I wanted to skate and had to bail.

So this Thursday will be it … I bought a new USB “miniature hand trackball” that you use with your thumb. I’m going to install it and see if that works better … we’ll see.

I also got my 2.4Ghz radios working with Win2k … so that I can see if we can do some “peer to peer” wireless exchange of GPS location information. While I was on the business trip last week, I was able to spend a lot of time, while we were driving up and down the northeast coast, working on my “waypointer” application. I am adding the “target” tab so that I can store a set of “waypoints” that I want to keep track of. While writing this I just realized that I want to have a “track on/off” capability to keep entries in this table whether I am tracking them or not … duh!

The last area of interest is the new pack. I found a great pack at REI that is made by North Face. It has a completely ventilated rear pocket that is perfect for the wearable … good cooling.

More later … and I’m making great progress with the HX2002 … I’m hoping to have some info on the web site soon …

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WarBlading …
It was a very cool experience last night … I went WarBlading for the first time … and it worked! Although the temperatures were very hot, and the machine croaked a couple of times, I was able to rollerblade around Salt Lake City last night with my Xybernaut wearable computer, with a GPS connected, running NetStumbler, searching for 802.11b access points …

What really hit me is that this is going to be big … very big … and goes far beyond mapping 802.11b access points … just wait. 😉

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Tim writes about the “undercurrents” of innovation …
We all hear about Open Source and it’s implications, however Tim is really doing something about it. It is great that he and his organization are taking on the role of assisting in the communication of new and innovative ideas coming from the “trenches” … these are the ideas that are the real “undercurrents” that will emerge as the next big thing.

In this article, he does a great job of outline many of the new innovations are are coming …

O’Reilly Network: Inventing the Future. Tim O’Reilly. But the most interesting part of the story is still untold, in the work of hundreds or thousands of independent projects that, like a progressively rendered image, will suddenly snap into focus. That’s why I like to use the word “emergent.” There’s a story here that is emerging with increasing clarity. [Tomalak’s Realm]

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A wireless, remote monitor for my wearable computer?
This looks very interesting … a wireless LCD monitor that I might be able to use with my wearable computer! It’s still slightly pricely … but this is going down a very cool path. I could even maybe use VNC to connect to my wearable and simply remote display the machine.

This really starts to get wild … this is the first time that I have thought that I might one day carry multiple wearable computers with me … maybe one Windows and one Linux … and remote display into both of them … very cool!

Wireless Monitors? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

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Group Outlines … an interesting idea …
This is a cool variation of Esthers article about the conference blogging. The idea that a group of people would build an over all conference outline in real-time … multiple people contributing to the construction of an outline of notes … is very cool. I like this idea of a new form of potential collaboration …

Masukomi sees a connection between instant outlines and conferences.  [Scripting News]

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Human forms of real-time telemetry …
This is an excellent article with a prime example of the future implications of mobile/wireless networking and various applications. Esther is writing about what occurred at one of her conferences when some of the attendees were blogging in real time during the conference … providing real-time “telemetry” about the conference proceedings.

We started to do this type of things years ago at Novell when we would use Instant Messaging and Chat during internal road-map review meetings. A large group of us were able to multiplex between the presentations and our group anaylsis without generating verbal side conversations. This also allowed us to ask questions and opinions between the members of our team to minimize the need to interupt the speaker.

All of this culminated with an application that I wrote called LiVote … for Live-Vote … that was an experiment in allowing a group of people to see a group of questions about a presenter or their presentation. Under each issue is a slider that allows each person to “vote” on that issue and rate it between 0 and 10. Below each slider is a bar graph that shows the “average” rating of all of the voters. So I can now be giving real-time feedback on my opinions … to my team … and potentially to the speaker!

I have thought about completing this application in a way that could be utilized at future conferences. Maybe I’ll have to bring it back to life and touch base with Dan Gilmore about it … 😉

Esther Dyson on the connection between blogging and face to face conferences.  [Scripting News]