If there’s ever been a better argument for net neutrality, I have yet to see it. Sure there’s the whole “Jon Stewart rips into senator Ted ‘A series of tubes’ Stevens” video (yes, the same Ted Stevens who wanted to build the famous “bridge to nowhere” in his home state of Alaska). But, frankly, if you really want to get me motivated all you have to do is get Peter Pan guy and Tron Guy to ask me for help.

Point being: head over to WeAreTheWeb.org and get yourself involved.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on some of the stuff around here recently you might have seen my post about hoping for a Skype WiFi phone sometime soon. Well, on wednesday Skype and Netgear announced it’s in the works.

Quoth the Netgear press release:

The NETGEAR WiFi phone will make mobile Internet telephony a reality for Skype users. Unlike other devices that must connect with a PC, NETGEAR’s Skype WiFi phone will work wherever a consumer is connected to a wireless Internet access point — be that in a home, office, cafe, open public hotspot, or any open municipal wireless access point being deployed worldwide.

I’m glad netgear at least took the time to write about it, because the phone was relegated to a single practically nothing bullet point (”NETGEAR’s Skype Wifi phone”) on the official Skype blog.

Update: More info (and a picture) available from Cnet: Skype, Netgear to launch Wi-Fi phone.

So I read something somewhere the other day about the WiFi phone from Vonage that will let you hop onto any wireless network to use your Vonage account to make calls (like having a cellphone that works on wifi instead of cell networks). And I was thinking earlier that it’d be really nice if Skype would do something similar (all their phones that are available now use a USB connection, I want something that would let me take my skypeIn number with me other places without having to forward it to another number, etc.) and apparently they’re working on it (or were in August) but I haven’t been able to find any more recent information on what’s up with it. I demand slick future-toys now!

If there’s anyone (with a phone that supports it) that hasn’t tried the Google Local for mobile application yet you need to be flogged. It’s all that and a bag of chips, plus pickle and soda.

Hat tip: We Break Stuff

Kenguru and The Long Tail

Vehicles for people in wheelchairs aren’t terribly unusual, but they’re nearly always a modification of an otherwise stock car (typically a van, to allow room for the wheelchair). Such vans are often ungainly and extremely fuel-inefficient, and the modifications to allow wheelchair access are expensive. The Kenguru, designed by Hungarian rehabilitative services company Rehab Ltd., is in most respects the exact opposite from the modified van: small, efficient, and built from the ground up to fit the needs of wheelchair users.

Hat tip to Chris.

So, I woke up this morning to this in my comments on my Combining Technologies to help illustrate New Orleans (or, Google Maps to the rescue again) post…

help! my son’s teacher has given him an assignment of defining “combining technologies.” he has no idea what it means. I found this page from a google search. Can you help? Also, can you give any examples?

Bearing in mind that anything I do is pretty much always viewed through the prism of “The Web” I’d say that the way I’m most familiar with it lately is in the idea of taking publically accessible information from multiple places and putting it together so you can get something different out of it. I’m guessing that didn’t make much sense since half the stuff that comes out of my mouth (?, fingers?, whatever) doesn’t.

By way of an example though I’d toss out HousingMaps.com. It takes a listing of available apartments from the various local versions of Craigslist.org and then uses their apartment and housing listings and puts them onto a map using the Google Maps API (a publically accessible toolkit for making maps of a location you specify on a web page, more information on APIs is available from Wikipedia). So basically, by taking the information and the free toolkit from Google they’ve allowed you to look for a place to live by seeing the map and choosing it, rather than having to read through listings and then figure out where they are. (Similar in idea to this is ChicagoCrime.org which maps police reports in the Chicago area.)

For another example you could go take a look at what Make magazine has in their tutorial about how to “Geotag” photos to associate an image with a place.

(I know I just gave 3 examples that were all maps, there, but please believe me there’s way more that you can do with these sorts of ideas than just “put it on a map”.)

To me (and again, I tend to stick to things that are web-related) a lot of this ties into the idea of “Web 2.0″ that has been floating around lately which I wouldn’t want to begin to dive into explaining so I’ll just point you towards Wikipedia for that one as well.

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program. But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

They opened an Apple Store at the mall here in Annapolis! I’m gonna try to stop there tomorrow.

I guess nothing good comes for “free” forever. Or at least, not until the next crack shows up.

REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp. has kicked off a new program aimed at severely curtailing the ways people using pirated copies of its Windows operating system can get software updates.

When a computer user starts to download updates, the new program, called Windows Genuine Advantage, will scan the machine to see if it’s running an authentic version of Windows.

Whole story (from Yahoo! news).

Update: It took less than 24 hours for someone to crack this restriction, and (go figure) it’s a single line of JavaScript that disables it.

Frequently Answered Answers about the Optimus keyboard

• It’s in initial stage of production
• We hope it will be released in 2006
• It will cost less than a good mobile phone
• It will be real

Link lifted from Gadgetopia.

Lifted from Overclockers Club:

Fujitsu today announced their joint development of the world’s first film substrate-based bendable color electronic paper with an image memory function. The new electronic paper features vivid color images that are unaffected even when the screen is bent, and features an image memory function that enables continuous display of the same image without the need for electricity. The thin and flexible electronic paper uses very low power to change screen images, thereby making it ideal for displaying information or advertisements in public areas as a type of new electronic media that can be handled as easily as paper. The jointly developed electronic paper will be showcased at Fujitsu Forum 2005, to be held July 14 and 15 at Tokyo International Forum.

If I can keep my cell phone from dying long enough, I’ll have to give this a try.

First off, I know it doesn’t look like much — but that’s because it was made for mobile devices. What you do see, however, despite its plainness is a really useful tool for browsing the mobile web.

Go ahead and put a URL in the text field on the homepage. Go ahead, any URL. What you get when you hit “Go!” will be a stripped-down version of whatever site you entered, free of styling or images or anything that has the potential to slow down your mobile browsing and prevent you from getting what’s really important to you — the content of the URL you entered.

• Original post by B. Adam Howell
• IYHY

This has me just the eensiest bit confused as to how to respond to such a project.

Roadcasting is a system that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among cars in an ad-hoc network. It plays the songs that people want to hear and it transforms car radio into an interactive medium.

Have people learned nothing from the matrix and dune? isn’t robots building robots recognized as the universal “you’re fucked” moment in technological advancement?