802.11 wardriving auto-mapper. Sweet app that mates your GPS-equipped laptop to your NetStumbler 802.11b network-detector and a satellite, stylistic or aerial map, automatically plotting all the WiFi base-stations you discover as you war-drive/walk through your environs.

mapserver.zhrodague.net is a tool for visually displaying position and signal-strength of WiFi (802.11b) Access-Points. We are still in development, but you can see how quickly we've been able to put this together -- and it works. This was setup and functional in one week. The website and clean-up took another week. It was brought into being to have the ability to show maps, and prove that people actually use this technology in the Pittsburgh area for the Pittsburgh Wireless Community (http://www.pghwireless.com). Soon we will have each point indicating singnal-strength, I had a link to scans near my apartment, but until we get the AP-data coming from a database, it's just way to slow to load the (currently) 33589 entries, and plot them -- stay tuned!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drew!) [Boing Boing Blog]

I'd love to see someone try this with their Pocket PC device.

9:52:18 PM    

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 14:01 permanent link to this entry [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

So, the nation that gave my generation an insatiable appetite for tutrtle fighting plumbers, giant monkeys, hedgehogs, and all things gadgety, has now gone all retro and is playing in the mud.

Upside:

1. No more Pokemon.
2. Kids playing in the outdoors.
3. Return to arts and crafts over game scores

Downside:

1. Less cool games for us if this really takes off
2. Mudder fashion: The return of toughskins.

9:49:27 PM    

New LASIK guidelines unveiled [USA Today : Front Page]

I'm a geek. Most of my friends, are geeks too. So far, none of them has gone for this, though a few do qualify. Their reasoning is simple: The long term effects of this surgery are not yet documented.

Personally, I think they are just waiting for cybernetic implants that will give them superhuman vision, but again, we're geeks, that's what we'd want.

Kidding aside, this procedure can have nasty long term consequences, and I wouldn't want to risk it myself. Since I'll be wearing glasses in a few short years anyway, I'd rather wait and see what tech will come. maybe MEMS will be to the point that I can have a killer pair of glasses that do all kinds of neat things. Time will tell.

12:13:19 PM    

Fire Scout UAV gets another $3 mill. Fire Scout project studied by Northrop Grumman Corporation gets another $3 million award from DARPA for the study of unmanned combat armed rotorcraft (UCAR). Fire Scout is manufactured by Schweizer Aircraft Company. Fire Scout is an unmanned copter UAV with vertical take off and landing and will provide enhanced reconnaissance and attack capabilities for U.S. Army aviation.

Here's some other interesting sites for Fire Scout and other UAV info, and here , and here. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

UAV's are the next big thing, the same way that armor changed the role of the cavalry in the past, UAV's are going to change the way that recon and artillery are used in future.

Civillian roles: Traffic enforcement, hunting for fugitives, searching for lost campers/missing persons in large parks/rural areas.

11:19:55 AM    

Open source invites terrorism - study. Your CHILDREN are in TERRIBLE DANGER [The Register]

A Washington think tank calling itself the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is preparing to release a 'study' warning that the widespread use of open source software will allow international terrorists to have their way with us.

"Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," the group warned in a press release.

So, is it crack, or PCP that the writers of this study are on?

11:13:04 AM    

SWEET! I just found out that I can have the MP3 player on my Clie run in the background while I run other apps... Very nice. So now I don't have to quit out of that app if I wnat to check an address etc. And the supplied remote still works to control volume, track #, pause etc.

An aside - I see that RBT also has UMAX on his "never buy" list, because of their driver policy.  

9:52:28 AM