Apple released a new 700KB patch regarding the functionality of Macbook and Macbook Pro batteries. It’s not a usual type of update and that makes is worth mentioning. According to Apple:

Battery Update 1.2 updates battery firmware and improves battery functionality.

After Battery Update has been installed, each battery you insert into your MacBook or MacBook Pro will be updated automatically. Your computer’s power cord must be connected and plugged into a working power source.

For further information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n305256.

We’re half-way releasing an all-new WiFi product called …. #$%^&&! :P

Unfortunately we’re not ready to disclose names, business plans or other details related to the new venture but here’s some pointers:
- take all you know about WiFi. Forget it! Now rethink it!
- the platform allows *any* WiFi router in the world to join in
- a market of over 10 million routers and a few hundreds of mil. users targeted
- worldwide. no regional limits.
- social, simple and catchy.
- from the creators of c*free wireless and wirelessisfun.com

I’ve pitched the idea to a number of contacts and it arose some VC interest. Looking forward to actual negotiations.
I decided to spill the news on wirelessisfun.com before it gets picked up elsewhere.
Expect the new service to come live in the next couple of months.

For business partnerships, inquiries or media coverage please shoot an email at dan {at} wirelessisfun {dot} com

Where I am sitting as I type, in the southeast corner of my urban house, my WiFi sniffer reports as many as nine separate wireless networks passing through my home. Most of these have some form of security, but a couple clearly have not been changed from the default settings, with SSID’s such as “SSID” or “Untitled”, and have no security, so I hop on for my web, keeping my mail.app firmly closed (as we all know, these mail programs have no security of their own and rely on the network’s security to keep your password private). However, more than half of the wireless networks on my corner still use the default broadcasting channel (6) so there is a tremendous amount of interference. As a result, even the one or two networks I can get connectivity through only work some of the time; I don’t need to tell you how frustrating an unreliable internet connection is.

So I find myself now paying for broadband and hooking up my own wireless access point, even as I’m bathing in the excessive microwave radiation of all of my neighbors’ networks. Of course I use encryption, and change the broadcast channel to one not being used in the vicinity, and of course, now my network works great. But I hardly feel triumphant; there are nine more wireless networks in my neighborhood than are really necessary - mine being one of them.

See, I believe that internet access ought to be completely free to all people, and WiFi begins to make this possible, but people are still thinking in terms of protecting their precious bandwidth, and their precious data. (In fact, hotspot hosts now need to be concerned about protecting their very precious freedom, as recent court cases have demonstrated that the owner of an open hotspot can be held criminally culpable for illegal activity across their network based on the fact that their IP is connected to their name and that’s proof enough for the American justice system. Owners of open hotspots, read up on this!)

So if I do want to take on the risks of acting on my ideology of Free Internet, I need to run two wireless access points off of my broadband connection - one encrypted for my own traffic, and one wide open free for all - just adding more noise to the ether.

We have the same problems everywhere: too much WiFi, all WEP’d, and all interfering. Some businesses I know have given up WiFi with robust encryption and returned to wired networks - yes, they have turned off the WiFi for the reliability of ethernet! Obviously THEY weren’t having fun, and I can’t blame them. Those businesses - cafes, restaurants, libraries - who promote their free WiFi are few and far between in my city.

I live in an urban area where I can walk to all of the services I really need within fifteen minutes, but there isn’t a cafe offering free WiFi for three kilometers from here. WiFi has become almost totally inconvenient. Everywhere I use it, wires work better (though that doesn’t mean that I actually run the cable!). Services like FON are getting a bad rap for everything from shoddy hardware to censoring the community they depend on, and anyway it sounds like the hotspots are few and far between, so there’s not much incentive to sign up.

Standards keep getting better when I look at the specs on paper - N is better than G is better than B - and now we’ve got WiFi TV, WiFi MP3, and WiFi phone - but the system, the platform, the real mobility, is getting worse. Wireless IS fun, when we learn enough about it to make it easy - especially for the non-geeks out there - and I’m excited to be working with people who are thinking up ways to make it more fun, and more easy.

What’s the next evolution of wireless going to look like?

Digg.com is still a mystery to me! We’ve submitted great stories and even industry exclusives, of which surprisingly, those we would have made no fuss about were picked up by the digg community.
The only story that was made popular was Feb. 20th Dell Powered by Linux? submitted by Marius. It was dugg by 1274 people and brought wirelessisfun.com a little over 10k unique visitors in one day. Unfortunately those people never came back or never subscribed to our RSS. What a shame!

Although I can still find interest in digg.com, I submit WiF stories only now and then. The bitter taste of a suddenly empowered users who bury your story just because somebody else might have covered the same topic, poor quality comments and even skewed understanding of democracy I reject. Of course the service is optional, but I really appreciate the concept and I’m sorry it’s so poorly misused by some people.

I feel democracy should be regarded in a more positive light and with a more pro-active attitude. Most of democracy on digg.com is authoritarian and rejects any new perspective on the same topic. Take the story below as an example. There’s somebody who must have submitted some of the stuff below on digg. But that might be only the reproduction of the press release, whereas our story is an analysis of the matter from a distinct point of view.
When I submitted the story about Michael Dell using Ubuntu people argued in the comments that I should pay respect to the original poster, some dude who submitted the story about the same time I did, quoting different sources and having a different content. WiF story was buried by a number of users because of this.

I’ll wrap it up here and keep it objective… What a shame, digg!

Note: it’s what I feel people and I take the risk of not being popular. If you are to hate someone for this article, hate me! But save wirelessisfun.com from hate mail! It’s a great tech blog! Now hit me! :D

Update: Digg comments on the story:
1.pcbeast says “blatant digg-bait, marked as spam”
Bravo, buddy! There you go! Thanks for underlining exactly my point above why digg.com sucks! I do have content and even arguments! What are yours? Have you even read the story??

2. thenativeraver - “Buried, what a lame attempt to get traffic.”
If only you read the the article before…

The Fon Spot for Mac and what’s inside it

There hasn’t been much Fon news or related lately but we couldn’t miss the fact that
- Time Warner opened their doors to broadband sharing in the US and
- The programmers in Spain finally came up with a beta version of the FON Spot Mac / Linux

What this software does is that it turns your Intel-based Mac into a FON hotspot. If you use a 3G or EvDo modem this software will turn your Airport into a Access Point-like WiFi adapter and start sharing your connection around.
It’s not a new concept for Mac users as by default Macs let you share your modem connection in three clicks anyway. But FON saw this was an opportunity that could not be missed to expand their service and brand where conventional hotspots do not protrude. Shrewd!

Screenshot of Mac’s WiFi sharing enabler

Let’s analyze if this would really work in real life past the obvious geeky sexieness.
Having a Fon hotspot ‘built in’ your Mac is neat if you’re a big fan of the service and really want to take it everywhere with you. Maybe you have a flat mobile broadband connection anyway and you don’t mind sharing but you’re missing the credentials for your signal. Or maybe you just don’t mind doing it. Any case you chose it’s fine!
But in all other cases you’d be simply sharing your connection as is or no sharing it at all. Eventually it all comes down to FON’s business model. Share WiFi and get WiFi for free elsewhere in FON hotspots, as a Linus. Or share your WiFi for some money. These cases are based on a permanent presence in a determined location. Usually one would use a fast connection they don’t really mind sharing.
What happens when you share your crawling 3G/EvDO? Those pipes are not that large, your connection is not in a specific connection and does not provide service 24/7. That does not make for a compatible service with FON’s, which anyway is catchy because it brings advantages both ways.
Based on how FON Spot for Mac works the only winner here is.. FON! You would likely not share that limited bandwidth (I’ve done it oh so many times with my EvDo) and not agree FON is using your expensive connection for self-promo and Alien (non-member user that pays premium for access) money milking.

Running c*free, a free hotspot operator, I’ve often used Mac’s WiFi sharing to promote the brand at different events or ingenuous places. Hell, I’ve shared that signal a couple of years ago when I was still using Windows through an Ad-Hoc profile and later using a USB kit called c*free mini.
Yet, I still don’t know how this would go beyond such use!
Most folks who have/use a mobile broadband connection pay a shit load of money on it every month. They are usually business/entrepreneur/SOHO types that
- care for their data and its security
- pay for the 3G / EvDo for a precise purpose
- are time critical
- don’t have time or interest in playing with gizmos and hacks such as FON Spot
- are energy-conscious, meaning they would power their WiFi only when in the range of a signal they would use.

It’s unclear to me how this hack will make it in the real world. It might! But as it stands, incentives - even ones like the principle of sharing in exchange for free connectivity (wait!! Free WiFi? Why, when you already have the darn 3G?) - are low or inexistent!

For the techie ones I opened the installer and below is a screenshot of the package contents. I did not install the hack on my Macbook for it’s still beta and I rely on being able to use my Airport card. Those of you who have the time and curiosity are welcome to post their experiences in the comments section.

Use your mobile setup!
It’s really rare that we get to experience grid failures these days. And so it should! This is 2007!!!
Oddly enough we had such a power outage today and, from what we’ve been told, the grid failed in almost every corner of the city! If your business is in tech and telco you probably rely on more than one computer, a good connection to the Internet and a big load of office gadgetry that is energy-dependant.
In a few seconds I realized that the cable modem and the WiFi router are off so there’s no connectivity. Luckily my setup is mobile so here’s how I got back online in minutes:

- I work on a Macbook and, if unplugged, I get about 3-4h of work time on one charge.
- If WiFi or the ISP fail, there’s a backup connection at hand - a mobile 2.4Mbs EvDo USB modem from Zapp Mobile.

While the outage lasted about 30 minutes and it took the cable company an extra 15minutes to re-broadcast, I should have been offline and out of business for about an hour. Plugging the USB modem and clicking connect was easy. Sure, some have redundant connections and UPS power savers in their offices. Albeit being able to save work and wait for the power to bring back the net is not the way to go.

Both ends meet when I saw that the mobile setup I use when out of the office took over the local setup with flying colours! This is so 2007! :D

As if there wasn’t enough buzz around blogging, competitions and rankings emerged.

WiF:)) is too young to qualify for the major rankings (yet!) but our local blogging community picked up our blog and we’re nominee at two of the Cluj BlogFest sections
- Best Collective Blog
- Best Tech Blog

Preliminary voting ranks us second on both, so I’m darn proud we don’t blog in vain! Funny though, as it’s an English blog for the dot com era, wirelessisfun.com is a favourite read among fellow Romanians! Bravo, Romanian blogging! And thanks for supporting us!

Voting session still open and, even if you are not a Romanian native, please help us by voting Wirelessisfun.com in either of the two sections! Thank You!

Yes, my dear followers, for the past year I’ve been using the last incarnation (mid-2005) iBook 12″ from Apple that was phased out in early 2006. It was a great road buddy and my life on the go has been taken to another level using it. Its awesome portability (12″), great battery life and unbelievable power from such an obsolete configuration allowed me to roam hundreds of hotspots, record podcasts and edit demanding video. I browsed maybe a million websites, configured around a hundred WiFi routers, sent 5000 emails and received twice as many, blogged hundreds of posts, beta-tested around 200 Skype builds, delivered a few world-class presentations and played a few days Unreal Tournament 2004 with the little devil.

But I was never really happy with the performance when I had to record a live skype conference call for a podcast or when the whole thing slowed down because of the 30+ tabs open in Safari, a few IM clients running in the background, the RSS reader, the email app and maybe iTunes streaming a chill out online radio station. Maxing out the RAM to 1.5GB did not help much either so I always had to chose judiciously what apps to run simultaneously.
Of course it’s a great machine for basic web browsing, normal IM and now-and-then Skype calls, some basic editing of the last vacation video and such. But we take mobile computing serious here at wirelessisfun.com as following the crazy www demands insane multitasking and multithreading.

The most relevant feature, though, is the ability to cover all or most wireless standards. The iBook could “see” 802.11b/g networks but the very new ‘n’ and the isolated ‘a’ running on 5Ghz standards were things I couldn’t really experience. You can laugh, but NASA still uses 3×86 computers in their space missions, okay?! :)

I just bought a brand new Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook that has no problem connecting to 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi networks and, should cables really really really be needed, it can do Gigabit Ethernet! I completely love it! It’s not the black one (because Macs are historically white) and as a matter of fact it’s that machine one can get for around 1060 Euros in Europe.
I’ll provide it with some extra RAM soon and cap it at 2GB (it now has 1GB) so I can effectively run multiple apps and XP decently in Parallels.

The new Macbook is the 5th mobile machine I own in 5 years (I change my laptop almost every year). An older post about the previous ones here! Good times for Wirelessisfun.com! Stand by for an Airport Extreme Base Station review in the next couple of days!

In case your WiFi is dead, your DSL modem does not respond to ping, your Blackberry acts as if its job was to show the time not to send/receive email, you stopped being slumped by Twitter updates from you friends…. that means the world has been taken over by zombies! And these guys could not stop them!

Just got an email from Robert Lang, Fon’s Europe manager, informing me that they launched the Romanian eshop. Good times! Here comes competition! :)
Those looking for the hottie (*grin*) router, rejoice!

I missed Michael Dell’s bio on the corporate website but I didn’t miss the big story on Dell going with Linux and the note that Michael Dell’s OS of choice is Ubuntu.
Entrepreneur Martin V., Dell’s friend, bloggs about a recent email in which this story was confirmed.

Dell’s lappie software:

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
VMWare Workstation 6 Beta
OpenOffice.org 2.2
Automatix2
Firefox 2.0.0.3
Evolution Groupware 2.10

Intel wants to kill wireless networking with its integrated powerline Ethernet!
They want to push HomePlug AV 200Mbps powerline standard into their desktop designs next year as an optional feature, in particular in Intel’s Viiv platform (the multimedia branch for home).
We’re going to cover this to more extent as soon as it gets more realistic. Till then, have fun staying wireless! WiFi rulez! ;)

“Vista sucks, there’s no need to rush”

Can’t remember where I read this statement, but it’s one absolute truth hidden behind a joke! :)

Ahhhh, the sound of precious electronics crashing onto the expensive natur pavement of Bill Gate’s cubicle… The horror!! The horror!! Linux strikes back (thanks Intel *grin*) in an Mac-esque incarnation for the UMPC.
Looks like Intel is shedding the Origami gorilla (read: Microsoft) as they prep a Linux-based platform to compete with Vista and XP-based UMPCs. Intel will unveil their new MID (Mobile Internet Device) platform at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing later this week. says Endgadget.

That’s about it, folks. First Dell, now Intel… ;)

Wireless is fun! Thanks to Linux!

Increased Internet access in Romania reveals poor use of grammar. It’s a frightening sight, really! By comparison most native English content comes untampered with.

I’m considering introducing grammar quizzes in our free hotspots that will grant access only if user checks correct spelling.

Romanian is a language of Latin origins spoken by around 28 million people worldwide.

I have been imagining an avatar-based enhancement of current WiFi nets forever.
No, there’s no sign of such an upgrade to 802.11 networks yet.

But it’s easy to have the hack become mainstream because of two very important reasons:

1. 802.11 broadcasts SSID as a clear text password for auth.
2. 2007 routers have plenty of user-accesible flash memory a small avatar could be fitted in.

Any enhancements and changes needed for the operating systems to display such a visual ID would be minimal. Just as a WiFi hotspot sends out a textual identification string (the network name) there’s little reason to believe they couldn’t send out some sort of avatar too.

Just imagine how much personality a visual identification could give to a wireless network?
Businesses could take advantage of it by broadcasting their own brand and creating awareness, hotspot operators could enhance their visibility and home users could have the customization their IM avatar brings.

It’s all up to the industry, I say. Need not wait for some new draft on behalf of WiFi Alliance. I have the feeling we’d be in 2012 by then.

Come on guys! Asus? Linksys?

Paul Miller from engadget writes about the Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) being postponed to October. It’s a sad day today for the Apple enthusiasts who were waiting for the spotted OS, but Apple blames it all on the iPhone. They had to move some of the key software engineers from the Leopard developers team to the iPhone developers team.

This is good news according to engadget because this will guarantee that ma