Valerie Khoo blogs at SMH about Sex and the City, where the ladies are tech-conscious.
If an utterly trivial movie like Sex and the City can recognise how important technology is - and how we are increasingly reliant on being connected in order to do business - isn’t is a shame the state government can’t see it the same way.
Maybe I should go see it then…
Day 1 at the Wireless World expo was quite successful. Lots of positive feedback (nearly non negative), and great industry contacts. Read Nat’s write-up:
“Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways.“
Big thanks to Nat for driving up to Sydney from Canberra in the morning (4 hours!), and back again in the evening! And big thanks also to Alison to show up and help out (on her free day, and with beautiful weather outside). Sometimes the two of us just wasn’t enough to handle all people at the booth.
Starbucks (US) has set up a social networking site where customers can sign up and share their Starbucks experience, fire off new idea’s and have people vote on them. Current number one is “All stores free wifi”. As some customers comment:
“I purposely go to a cafe in my home town that offers free wi-fi. I drive by 3 Starbucks on the way there and pay 50 cents more for the mocha for the free wi-fi.”
As an added bonus, the coffee may probably be better too… Read more over at Computer World.
If I think of all the small, independent coffee shops around town, you could form a really big mesh of free wifi in the CBD.
Just received my Meraki Mini Pro, and a Meraki High-Gain Omni-Directional Antenna for the outdoors one. They also included some stickers and a brochure (because I asked for something promo material).
Quick write-up. Playing around with the Pro dashboard. Main different feature is the user registration (and the possibility of billing, but I won’t be using that). It is disappointing that you can’t limit bandwidth/usage on a per user basis, I thought the usage configuration would be more elaborate. You can also disable the spashpage and the messaging toolbar, but I want to use both of them anyway. So, not sure if it’s worth the extra 100$, tripling the price of the Mini, or double the price of the Outdoors.
Now both the Outdoors and the Mini Pro are gateways. When I unplug the Mini Pro from my router, it automatically connects to the Outdoors, which is pretty cool (the meshing feature). But because that is a Standard version, the Mini becomes a Standard too (as expected).
I can now also see the other neigbor network through the dashboard, so when two Meraki networks are within each others reach, they can see each other, and connect to each other when one’s connection drops (as tested by unplugging). When connected to one, I can get the signal strength of the other through my.meraki.com, in dB. The Outdoors (euh, outdoors) with high-gain antenna gives me 58dB, the Mini indoors gives me 50dB.
Oops, the week I get my face and URL into a newspaper, I managed to kill my blog…
Luckily I had a backup, which didn’t really work…
So took the opportunity to upgrade Wordpress to its latest version at the same time.
All well again, pfeww.
(unless you see something weird, then please leave a comment)
Mauricio Freitas writes about a Meraki deployment in Wellington:
“The project is being initially sponsored by Webstock 2008 and Govis, who are creating a fund with their donations of NZ$5,000 and $9,000 respectively to purchase those devices and donate to individuals and companies who want to start sharing their networks.”
Webstock is a NZ web conference (WebDirections South, are your reading this?)…
Read all about the project at Geekzone.co.nz and TheFreeNet (Aotearoa).
Ian Woolf interviews Lachlan Hardy (the man who got the ball rolling) about freeing the net in Australia with Meraki wireless meshing routers. Download the interview at Here’s Why.
Not that I want to scare you away from the idea of an open free wireless meshed network (a mouthful), but something to keep in mind, although all still theoretical:
The epidemic model developed by the study’s authors - Hao Hu, Steven Myers, Vittoria Colizza and Alessandro Vespignani - suggests that several tens of thousands of routers could be infected with a worm within two weeks, most of them even within two days. To avoid the potential distribution of these so far only theoretical flying worms, users should be forced to change the default password of their router’s configuration interface and to enable WPA functionality with passwords which cannot be guessed.
Read on at Heise-Security.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and MIT have published a paper titled “Architecting Citywide Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Access” where they propose creating a cooperative of trusted Wi-Fi access points:
“We argue that citywide ubiquitous Wi-Fi access can be architected at near-zero cost because the network infrastructure is already in place: A majority of city dwellers have a broadband connection and a personal Wi-Fi AP at home.”
How about that?
Release your inner geek, while discovering Wifi networks:
“At ThinkGeek we’re pretty lazy when it comes to technology. We expect our gadgets to do all the busywork while we focus on the high level important tasks like reading blogs. That’s why we hate to have to crack open our laptops just to see if there is any wi-fi internet access about… and keychain wi-fi detectors, we would have to actually remove them from our pockets to look at them. But now thanks to the ingenious ThinkGeek robot monkeys you can display the current wi-fi signal strength to yourself and everyone around you with this stylish Wi-Fi Detector Shirt.”