Considering that more and more offices nowadays gave up cables and wires in favor of wireless devices, Netgear noticed the need for increased security in an office like that and introduces the SRXN3205.

Netgear released the ProSafe Wireless-N VPN Firewall (SRXN3205) – the first product to combine dualband Wireless-N with SSL and IPsec VPN. With this dual option, unmatched by competing security solutions for SMBs, the firewall provides 25-user offices with optimal, secure remote connections to their wireless networks. In addition to VPN flexibility, the SRXN3205 supports businesses transitioning from legacy networks to draft 802.11n networks.

The SRXN3205 Wireless-N VPN Firewall supports up to five SSL VPN tunnels and five IPsec VPN tunnels simultaneously for enhanced protection from network security threats. SSL VPN tunnels enable clientless, individual remote access to corporate data, anytime and anywhere – without needing to install a software client. (www.netgear.com)

[via INSECURE Mag, Issue 19, December 2008]

More and more people ask me for tips and tricks to improve their WiFi setup in their homes. People that recently moved in a new flat and want good coverage all over the place, which includes the living area, sleep quarters, kitchen or even bathroom, and people that just built a new 3 story house or the likes of it.

The first mistake that everyone makes is to place the router exactly where the internet connection enters the house, and that’s usually one of the corners where flats are concerned, or the basement for multistory buildings. Almost any decent WiFi router on the market today can cover an 80 to 100 square meters flat, so I won’t go into much depth on that situation, but when large houses are concerned, you need to have in mind that the best place to position your WiFi router is at the center of the structure. So, if you have a basement, ground floor, and 1st floor, you would be better off placing the device on the ground floor instead of the basement, where the internet connection is made available by the ISP. This way, you will get good coverage on the ground floor, and the adjacent floors, without the need to scale the network up to more than one router. If you have your office in the basement and your rest room on the 1st floor, it would be probably a good idea to have two separate access points and use an Ethernet connection between them. However, placing your only router in the basement is never a good idea, and should not be tried. The easiest way to test everything is to plug in a router with no WAN connectivity and walk around the house with your laptop to see where the weak points in the WiFi network are.

Feel free to post comments about your setup, or your needs based on your new home, and remember Wireless Is Fun to play with and it’s darn useful to have all over your property! Garden included ;-)

About a year ago I used to tinker with RF, exploring ways to make it more ubiquitous, friendly, widespread and easy to use. Great material for WiF:)
I’ve slowed down.

Either wireless tech got so much of the above or I’m just comfortable with my setup.
I still have a whole closet of c*frees Merakis, Foneras, Airports, Linksys, Asus and 3G all-in-one-office boxes and various antennas, mostly WiFi tech. But I only employ a simple Airport Express ‘n with AirTunes.

Somehow it all worked out and the iPhone with its GPRS/EDGE/3G+ took over my connectivity white space.
All this is not to say that my wireless saga is over. It’s more like a new chapter. A bump up in usability and solutions that just work got me closer to connectivity nirvana, having to seek more enjoyable experiences than raw hardware solutions.

Frankly I don’t even know or care what firmwares my routers have installed. I just plug them cables or modems in and there, we have a nice working wireless link.

But all that tech in my closet is probably waiting to be employed. I suppose I could WiFi my whole neighborhood with them.
Listen! Maybe you have an idea on how to mix such a multi-skilled equipment in an ingenuous wireless project. I’ll do it!
Sound it off in the comments.

A few minutes ago, Lorand Minyo uploaded Steve Jobs’ keynote from MacWorld 2008.

I can’t write more right about now as I am extremely anxious to watch it myself, so for all of you who did not see it yet, you can do it here: Macworld 2008 Keynote Address (high quality)

(outside link)

Don’t you just hate it being somewhere with your laptop, enjoying internet access on a free hotspot and the battery runs out of juice? What is the normal load for a normal battery? 3 hours? maybe 5 hours if you get a bigger battery, and set your usage profile to minimum? Well, I have some good news for you: Batteries are going to last a whole lot longer!

According to Next Energy News, your laptop battery can last up to thirty (yes, 30) years!!!

The US AirForce Research Laboratory reviled the betavoltaic power cells, which are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.

Apparently you can’t build a nuclear weapon out of it even if the description has some pretty scary terms inside (radioactive, isotopes etc), and it’s quite safe on the environment.

Read more about this here

Won’t wireless be even MORE fun like this?!

It’s true! Done! Basta! I did it! It took me less than half an hour! My iPhone is unlocked!

It’s maybe the first trully unlocked iPhones in Romania and among the few in the World by this method! But I can attest it works! Brilliantly!

Kudos to the dev team and the guys at Engadget who pointed this out. To have yours unlocked, go over to http://iphone.unlock.no/ and follow the exact steps. It’s the method I used and the one that now gives me full use on Vodafone RO and Orange. Simple!

Here’s a screenshot I took of the unlocking process:

Don’t come here! Go to Engadget! They cover this Apple event aplenty! :P
I love you, my dear readers, but I’m there as well! Or go to Apple.com and start spending.

But do come back for sugga-lovin-thrills about what the above all means! I’ll make sure you’ll find that unique insight here!

To tip you off, focus not so much on the new hardware, but drool on the new iTunes WiFi Music Store! That’s where history is now being written! ;)

Yes! Finally I have my geeky hands on the all-mighty Apple iPhone! Remember the already famous “iPhone release date“? I lived to see it available then in my pocket!
I’m sorry I won’t be writing more on it but this thing is too darn addictive to ‘waste’ time blogging. Going back to playing on it! :)

Pics were uploaded via computer, but this text is *proudly typed on an iPhone*! Enjoy!

Okay, it took me a while to sort things up and decide. I’ve been harrassed by fellow bloggers to start my own blog, as a personal development tracker. As if WirelessIsFun was not enough!! :) Well, dear friends, all your danberte-related dreams came true. Since I have so little time to blog cool shit I do like Lindzon here does, I thought of using Twitter feeds (and *that* I update often!) to govern the microsite you can find http://www.danberte.com
I chose to link to my LinkedIn page, my Twitter page, my Twitter RSS feed and my bio. Let me know if you’d like to add something to it or would like to see something else there!

What happens if you jump from entrepreneurship to full time corporate dude? First, you cease good ol’ habits such as doing email where rubber meets the road in the wireless industry – the WiFi’ed caffe!
Luckily sometimes big guys that work in tall buildings come back to the streets to smell that roasted coffee flavor and sniff those 802.11 airwaves, hopefully one of them free. Had my chance for a couple of days to bring the love back so here I am, feeding heavily on all that online stuff that makes me smarter and more competitive, at Bourbon Cocktails&Coffee in the lovely harbor city of Constantza.
Usually people would be sunbathing and stuff here but instead I’m wirelessbathing in all free nets I can find and hop on.
During my two day stay I ran across plentiful networks to do my job on, all ranging from 1Mbits to 6Mbits, all in key locations such as rep building, hotel, cafe and… parking lot!

Of couse both my N70 and my HSDPA SmartModem from Vodafone could have taken over in case there was no WiFi to grab. But for some reason I love WiFi and simply like to enable the Airport on my Mac and enjoy it from there.

Now missing a more portable device to play with nets for when taking the Macbook out feels cumbersome. I’m considering one of those new HTC touch smartphones. Anyone tried one?

I hate to plug those guys (read brands) who don’t plug back! But I do have a strong dose of admiration and respect for a number of products and brands I use everyday (pictured above). More so, I hardly pick up any blog tagging games but this one from a crizatu’ is fine.

In order of appearance, here’s my link farm: I compute with Apple, make calls with Sonyericsson and Orange, record with Behringer, shoot with Nikon, drink Salitos, drive a Ford, fill up at Rompetrol, fly KLM, get online with c*free, Linksys and 802.11, browse with Safari and Firefox, sniff news and pods with RSS, call and beta-test Skype, twitt with Twitterific on Twitter, IM with Yahoo!, feed podcasting gland with Leo Laporte, Lindsay Campbell and Veronica Belmont/Tom Merrit, replace YouTube with trilulilu.ro, pretend IPtv is normal TV with Joost, tool with Dasboard widgets, chorono with Dugena, wear H&M, polarize UV with PolarGlare, stay alert with RedBull, spray Kenzo and shop with MasterCard.

To respect the rules I’ll politely ask my blogging friends Chad, Marius and Alex to post about the brands that govern their lives.
An extra tag goes to Flavia! ;)

Sorry, dear wirelessisfunarmada, for the lack of more frequent posts. I decided some time ago to cover less news and publish more insightful stories and food for geek thought articles.

Too bad I’ve been out of sync and totally busy lately, just scrambled enough to be scared of the idea to start an article and never make it to the ‘publish’ button with it.

Too keep it hot, Fon censorship (no, not only boards-related) and unfair competition, WiMAX and alternative LED lighting stories I’m hiding up my sleeve. Will churn them out slowly, one at a time! :)

See ya!

(if in Cluj Napoca RO you might catch me doing email and coffee at BT Cafe – pictured above)

Almost everyone who got a second generation iPod Shuffle complained they had to carry the bulky dock with them to be able to transfer files or charge the minute mp3 player. Apple decided to drop the big USB jack the previous version had and go for a weird 3.5 audio jack port that transfers data to USB.

If Apple would have listened to their users nobody would have liked to get a simple USB to 3.5 cable in the box instead of the shiny dock. “Oh, Apple drops costs by shipping the thing with this cheap cable”. Some, though, did consider that a small cable was a more convenient to carry around. Myself included. But instead of buying a Proporta $20 cable or alike I decided to take the time and make one myself.

Searched the net for diagrams and pin-outs and found a couple of good articles on such fabrications. Since no store had the much needed 4-pin 3.5 jack for sale I went for one of those A/V cables ($2ish) and cut the jack off. A USB cable extender one can find bundled in just about any USB WiFi adapter for example, which I have in abundance laying around, made for the actual USB link.

Past the careful soldering time and my clownish wire switch that almost fried my Macbook’s ports, the project took no longer than an hour to complete. The cable is about 2 inches long and is really convenient to carry in a pocket. It even looks good! (see the picture with the ‘baby iPod’ connected through it). And it was so much fun and relaxing. Yeah, you there! Pick up that soldering iron once in a while and mod smth! :)

My friend Dennis from WirelessJobs.com, a prolific blogger as a matter of fact, asks a really good question:
Why do you blog?

Here are some pointers he adds:
~ Why do you blog?
~What do you prefer to blog about?
~Where do you receive your inspiration from?
~Who do you write your blog for?
~How much has blogging impacted your company’s recruiting brand?
~When do you find the time to blog?

Here are my reasons, folks:
- I blog because I got a lot of inside industry stuff to share! A blog is a wonderful platform to network, meet fellow geeks, enforce a stand point, build a personal brand and secure a wonderful career! It doesn’t get better than this mix used properly.
- I blog about what a 25 year old Romanian WiFi entrepreneur is interested in, follows or plans on doing.
- my work and the tools I use are my inspiration. I often spend a tremendous amount of time in WiFi’ed coffee shops where everything in the wireless world happens. No, it doesn’t happen in fancy glass skyscrapers offices!
- I blog for a rather small audience. It’s not being ignorant but I learned a few valuable readers are worth writing for more than having thousands of people who never come back. Among the few are fellow entrepreneurs, podcasters, bloggers, geeks and industry chaps. If my blog suddenly became mainstream I’d adapt this strategy to accommodate all my readers. But that’s maybe to far ahead.
- the companies I run have not been exposed to such extent as to cover the brand of the blog itself.
- it’s not ‘when’! it’s ‘why’! If it’s worth blogging, I’ll do it in my pajamas!

I’d like to hear what reasons my fellow bloggers have. So tell me! Why do you blog?

My good friend Robert sent me this pica a few days ago to remind me why wireless is fun :)
The snapshot is from a new deluxe lounge downtown and it reads “Free wirless internet”. Too cool, too sad! Now laugh!

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?

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!

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!

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?

Telecoms Pricing Asia
Le Meridien Hotel, Singapore
28th-31st May 2007

Late May I’ll be in Singapore as a key speaker for IIR’s Telecoms Pricing Asia ‘07. This is the third event organized by the Brits that I’ll attend and deliver to, following Fixed Mobile Convergence ‘06 held in Amsterdam and Telecoms Pricing ‘06 held in Barcelona.

Get both keynotes here:
The Holy Grail of WiFi (TP’06)
Wireless is Fun! (FMC’06)

The subject of my upcoming keynote, Establishing a framework for wireless service pricing which reflects the different capital and operational costs of WiMax, wireless local loop and UMTS/HSDPA deployments will revolve around the following draft:

Today’s standards bundle provides great flexibility for network deployment.
While it might look like an easy plan to blueprint a new rollout and provide
a good pricing framework to effectively monetize it, there’s a number
hurdles to overcome:
- determining the right technology (based on the market size, geo,
penetration and lifecycle expectations for backend systems used);
- determining the right mix (WiMax + WiFi? WiMax only? HSDPA+WiFi?);
- outlining the costs and rollout timeframe;
- examining exit strategy and determining fruitful adoption incentives
to generate growth;
- “Will it work?” – cheating the incremental rollout;
- “Keep an eye on net neutrality and disruptive 3rd party add-on
services!” – how can innovation maximize revenue without hindering
sensitive end user alternative choice?

Telecoms Pricing Asia is the world’s premier pricing event focusing on Asian telecoms and talks about maximising profitability and customer retention in Asia’s competitive telecoms markets.

To find out more or register for the event go to IIR’s website: TP Asia

For your convenience I have included the event brochure: telecom_pricing_asia07.pdf

Free Pass!
To get you guys into it, here’s a neat trick! As a speaker at the event I’m entitled to bring along a guest that gets free access to the conference!
A WirelessIsFun.com exclusive, I’ll give out the invitation (valued US$3,800) to one of the WiF:)) friends so he/she can join me in Singapore!

You gotta tell me soon if you’d like to join in so I can announce the event organizers. Unfortunatelly the invitiation does not cover travel or accomodation expenses. I really wish it did.

Dennis, Mike, Chad, Robert, Marius, anyone? :)

I’m in grief. I was so hyped and supportive about Moo.com (you know, those minicards fellows) to realize this morning that the order I placed a few months ago never made it to my office.

Apparently they love to print, but hate to deliver! ;)
Bad Moo, bad bad!

I’m a little behind with posting articles, not so much news. I realize that most of our readers have TechCrunch, WiFiNetNews.com or Endgadget in their RSS readers so there’s no point to replicate most stories. The main idea behind WirelessIsFun.com was a place to host industry related articles, research, reports and studies conducted by the WiF:)) crew, all wireless telco insiders.

Let’s try a different excercise! Meet my desktop:

Dan’s current www’ing
I’ll share some articles that are currently open in different tabs of my Safari browser. I didn’t get the chance to read them through so I invite you to do so.

An entrepreneur’s dream – NYC – DarrenHerman.com
People don’t scroll…emails – 37signals.com
Ideas Worth Spreading: Hans Rosling from TED 2006 – on GoogleVideo

Now meet my “hot” RSS feeds I check as often as email:
– click to enlarge

Podcasts I always listen to:
This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte and friends, a must listen to!
Net@Night with Leo Laporte and Amber Macarthur.
Buzz out Loud with Veronica Belmont and Tom Merrit of c|net
Diggnation with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, a web classic.

Follow me on Twitter

Oh, by the way! The weekly beer review is indefinitely postponed because I’ve been continuously working and an absurd amount of time behind the wheel. ;)

I bet you didn’t try the all new Yahoo! Widgets 4.0 yet!
Ok, I’ll wait! The 11.3MB installer should take you no more than two minutes to download and about a minute to install! Got it?
Good! :)

Let’s get down to business, shall we? Are you a Mac user? You’d better be, I’m biased here! I assume you are familiar with the Dashboard that comes preinstalled with all Macs OSX 10.4ish onward. It’s great and I use it frequently. But PCs did not have the ability to display widgets like Macs did before Konfabulator, later bought and made more friendly by Yahoo!. Starting with version 3.0ish I begun using this cross-platform environment because I found it was surprisingly easy to design and code widgets for. More so, it allowed those widgets to be run on Windows machines too.
And I needed to reach a broader audience. Granted, Yahoo! did not make such a big fuss around its widget environment so the awareness is scant. But there!

Up until v4.0 it was just another application I’d bring up at times. Now it comes with a redesigned interface, more glam-bam-bam, a more consolidated library (yes, I’d spread my widgets all over the harddrive and once deleted or moved they’d be orphaned) and a neat sidebar. The sounds that go with it are also cool. I mean, hey, any PC or Mac you can think of can be pimped like nothing just by installing this piece of software (a no-brainer anyway, very intuitive).

The installer already has a bunch of widgets to suffice for everyday use. But the beauty is just begining. Point your browser to the Yahoo! Widgets Gallery and a full catalog of free widgets open before you eyes. Anything from weather snippets to wifi status monitors. Pick one, download it (they’re really small), and Yahoo! Widget Engine takes care of it for you – it moves it to the designated directory and places it in the convenient sidebar where you can activate it at any time.

This glossieness and web2.0ish interface is really eyecandy but all that comes with a price. Yeah, you guessed: system resources. It runs a little slow on my G4 iBook, a tad slower than the Dashboard I bring up by pressing F8, but not below usability. The app itself takes no more than 7megs but be prepared to guard your RAM: every widget you power on takes around 7megs by itself. So choose only the ones you want to have running.

About a year ago I designed a WiFi connectivity monitoring widget that has been downloaded more than 29.000 times so far. Just search “wifi” in the gallery and “WiFi Status” will show up first in the list. The widget displays the SSID of the base station you are associated with and the signal strenght, in both percentage and intuitive graphics. The tremendous amount of times it has been downloaded and the fact that it bears the c*free logo makes for really cheap and efficient marketing. It took no more than a couple of hours to design and code, but brought good visibility to our WiFi service.

My good friend Robert Muresan of MobileGround.com took the widget to another lever, creating one of the coolest tricks in WiFi history: a real time wireless conectivity/awarness service. Do you want your blog readers, fellow forum users or website visitors to know where you are online? Just install his widget you can download from this address, create a free account, and follow the steps to place the status badge on your blog or website.
You should get a badge looking like this:

We only scratched the surface of this environment and have not really devoted much time to development. There’s plenty of free templates really easy to customize. One can, say, brand their own RSS reader widget that displays the latest blog entry or news. Or can make a widget useful in their field, of course branded. If you’re not skilled in coding or design there’s plenty of freelancers and small companies that will be happy to provide you with a cheap, customized widget. Remember, anyone from Skype to Google has a free widget they tout in their “download” section. It’s a proof of good conduct, if you want. A complementary Mac-compatible Dashboard widget would be a smart thing to do also. Anyone in search of a great way to advertise their blog or whatever should ty the marketing power of widgets.
Take some time to play with the new Yahoo! Widget Engine v4.0! You’ll be sold! Trust me!

No intro, no closing bells, just a really illuminating talk I had with Mike Puchol (Whisher.com co-founder) and Chad (AustinTX of elfonblog.fondoo.net), a WiF pod regular. They were really nippy about recording but I was really lazy about editing and posting. Sorry guys!

We discussed topics ranging from Apple to Fon and Gizmo Project. Then, in Part 2, Chad and Mike went on their own bragging their thorough knowledge of wireless tech. Worth listening to! Big time!
We had fun and I’m sure you will too. :)

Get the topics here: Podcast.txt

Download MP3: WiF podcast / 1 of 2 for April 9th ‘07
(running time 25:50)

Download MP3: WiF podcast / 2 of 2
(running time 49:35)

Update: Yeah, the audio feed doesn’t really work (hey Feedburner, thanx!) like snooz_bar pointed out in the comments. If you don’t mind doing this the old fashioned “Save as..” way until I get to the bottom of it we’d be really happy.

Now here’s some fresh Joost vs Apple news! Yeah, ‘I told you so’ is on my lips. Remember the article ‘Joost should be under FrontRow?‘ we published a little ago?

Well, Joost doesn’t play in FrontRow, but it does in BackRow :)
The hottest WiFi gadget around, the AppleTV, has been hacked to support Joost! Hell yeah!
As a matter of fact I’m starting to be interested to getting one even if I don’t have a HDTV nor do I have a lifestyle wrapped around watching TV!
Was planning to write on WiF:)) about the AppleTV when I learned they hacked it to run Firefox or an Apache server on Apples media hub. But you gotta give’em credit, the Joost thing is just amazing! Go on! Go, check those witted guys over at appletvhacks.net!
Pssst! Btw, they run a $500 bounty for the first team to get the open source PBX system, Asterisk, running on an Apple TV.

You probably haven’t heard of Flavia Stoian. Well, not if your business is selling icecream in India, no. Otherwise, get ready to plunge into a world dominated by this girl. She just laid her hands on a top notch Sony Vaio to power her mobile life. Why is this important, you ask? Well it’s simply because that’s probably the last toy this girl geek needs to have to redefine the wireless world. Don’t let me say “I told you so” when it’s all done. Just take my word for granted!

Go, kid! Make some magic! ;)

We drink beer at WiF:))
As a social and…productivity beverage we choose beer at times, instead of coffee or energy drinks. Yes, we are made of flesh and blood, go out, spend not more than half a day online and enjoy a good beer and feature chit-chats.

Personally I’ve developed this habit lately. Working at night requires a beverage. Since during the day I spend a long time behind the weel of a 1.3l car, beer is reserved for the evenings. The habit means every other day I try a different import brand of beer.
Today I tried a beer called “Claro!” (5.0% / clarobeer.com). It’s a Corona wannabe, but quite surprisingly, great tasting. As a matter of fact, if I had the eyes tied up I’d say it feels, smells and tastes like a genuine Corona. It’s made in the Netherlands and it’s about a buck cheaper than the Mexican counterpart. Granted, I had no lime to enhance the taste, but that’s fine.
The past week comprised in sessions of Salitos, Corona and Beck’s. Longing for Radler, Bibop, Kostritzer and Tzishke. Maybe next week, provided my favorite retail store has those in stock. Unlikely…

Allright. Claro! – what an awful name! – gets 4 out of 5 grains of rice*. That makes it a fav buy the next time and I’ll make sure to refill. Make this the beer of this week for the great taste and cute “let’s smack Corona in Europe” tryout. Join me next time for the following edition of the most serious series on WiF:)) – “Beating last week’s cerveza!”

* we’ll use grains of rice to define the quality of the beer. 1 stands for “yuck”. 5 stands for ‘exquisite’.