Futurist

There are 396 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 34 of 40).

Local blogs

I was searching through the MT.Net archives tonight, trying to find the name of the service that sorted blogs based on their location. Turns out I found it, or where it used to be, anyway: Local Feeds. It used GeoURL meta tags to mark your blog so that you could easily find blogs in your area. It was a pretty useful service when I first found it seven years ago.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Anyhow, Local Feeds is defunct now, which is a shame. The reason I love Facebook so much is because I like knowing what’s going on in the area. I check Twitter often, for the same reason. Problem with Twitter is that I don’t get enough depth from it. I guess the same applies to Facebook: there’s only so much that one can fit into a status update.

I would like to see someone revive the blog geotagging idea and provide folks with a location-based blog search. I think it would fill a gap that the status-update services just can’t provide. Anyone out there want to take this up?

Roomba’s “other shoe” drops

I’d been enjoying our Roomba robot vacuum again now that it has a fresh battery and its automatic schedule has been set. That all changed yesterday when the Roomba did it’s “wiggle walk” again, indicating that the only remaining wheel sensor has busted.

It has been over a year since the first wheel sensor failed and was hard-wired into place to extend Roomba’s life. Now it looks like I’ll be doing more soldering to patch Roomba up yet again. At least this time I know what to do, though!

Stealth helo

I remember being on base in Pensacola during my Navy training in 1988 and being astonished when two helicopters in the distance suddenly went completely silent. Now I wonder if I was watching some of these stealth helicopters.

The May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s luxury compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, had it all: painstaking intelligence-gathering, a heroic Navy SEAL assault team, satellite and drone surveillance, and biometric forensics.

And now this: a possible super-secret, stealthy helicopter, unknown to the wider world before one crashed during the assault.

via Aviation Geeks Scramble to ID bin Laden Raid’s Mystery Copter | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Fallen wires

The tornado that ripped through Raleigh a few weeks ago left much debris and heartbreak for its citizens. It also left a few downed telephone lines, one of which has been lying in the road near my home since the storm struck. I pondered how anyone could find it acceptable for their phone service to be out for over two weeks.

Then I hit upon the answer: no one has landlines anymore.

That copper lying in the street is likely “dead” copper, having long ago beed disconnected in favor of cellphone service or a VoIP connection. AT&T hasn’t been in a hurry to rehang that line because it’s not making any money from it. I wondered how much copper still hanging on those poles is still being used, and if local telephone companies are on a slow march to irrelevance.

Or maybe it’s a quick march.

Make your own cell phone network

I just discovered a very cool open-source project that turns an ordinary laptop into a cellular tower. It uses Asterisk to route calls.

Very, very cool. Now I have to find out how it works!

OpenBTS is an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk® software PBX to connect calls. The combination of the ubiquitous GSM air interface with VoIP backhaul could form the basis of a new type of cellular network that could be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in greenfields in the developing world.

via The OpenBTS Project.

Satellite fun, part two

Motor mount


After I had my satellite pole properly set, it was time to aim the dish. While I had little trouble finding a satellite earlier when I simply stuck the dish on the pole and fiddled a bit, I found it much more difficult to make things work when I added the mount motor. That’s because the motor adds its own angle to the mix, so you have two dials to set, not just one. When you couple that with an instruction manual often written with poor English it becomes an even greater challenge.

I mounted the motor to the pole, attached the dish to it, and began fiddling. And fiddling. And fiddling some more. I just couldn’t get the receiver to work. The motor needed to be pointed directly south and I worked a long time to get it correct. It didn’t help that I had my TV and receiver all the way inside while I worked. Though I had a “satellite beeper” device which makes a tone when it detects a satellite, I couldn’t get the receiver to do what I wanted.
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Satellite fun

Satellite dish


Longtime MT.Net readers will know that I’m a satellite geek. I bought a DVB-S card for my computer five years ago and enjoyed tuning in the few channels I could pull in on a tiny 18″ dish. That didn’t hold my interest, though, because … well, there wasn’t much to see.

For my latest birthday, I decided to get a little more serious into this hobby. I found a Craigslist ad from a local guy who was selling his satellite gear. For about $75, I bought three DVB receivers, a dish, and an LNB. I took the parts home, scratched my head, and wondered if I had the knowledge to put it all together into something that worked. It turns out I did!
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Woz TV

Why is it whenever I think up something cool to create, Steve Wozniak’s already beaten me to it?

This is from his open letter to the FCC defending Net Neutrality. Like me, Woz knows the value of open networks.

In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I’d provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV ‘company’ in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
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Google still looking to spread Google Fiber

It looks like all hope is not lost on Google Fiber coming to Raleigh (or Durham, or any of the other dozens of NC cities hoping to get it). Tanner points to this update from the announcement on Google’s blog:

Update 4:15PM: We’ve heard from some communities that they’re disappointed not to have been selected for our initial build. So just to reiterate what I’ve said many times in interviews: we’re so thrilled by the interest we’ve generated—today is the start, not the end the project. And over the coming months, we’ll be talking to other interested cities about the possibility of us bringing ultra high-speed broadband to their communities.

Perhaps there’s hope for high-speed Internet in North Carolina after all?