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 his 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