Gadgetopia

Schlotzsky's Offers Free Wi-Fi in Restaurants in Six States; Free Use of In-Store Computers Adds to Wi-Fi Appeal: Free wi-fi is working well for Schlotsky's, apparently. No sign of Wi-Fi at the lone Schlotsky's in Sioux Falls, sadly. More than 40 percent of customers say that free Wi-Fi or the ...

e-Minister will make every public library a Wi-Fi hotspot: I want to live in a place where public libraries have Wi-Fi and people still use the word "keen." [U.K.] Government minister Stephen Timms [...] confirmed that his plan to put an open Wi-Fi hotspot in every public library was "going ...

Cafes find Wi-Fi boom unsettling: Having free wi-fi in your cafe isn't always a good thing. [...] there was also a disadvantage, staff members said: The cafe filled up with laptop users each weekend, often one person to a table for four. Some would sit for eight hours purchasing a ...

USATODAY.com - As wireless hot spots proliferate, commercial windfall in doubt: Turns out there are too many free Wi-Fi spots for anyone to make any money off it. "Then there are colleges, geeks and city officials who are making Wi-Fi as free as the foliage in public plazas. And now ...

Would You Like Wi-Fi With That?: "If you want to see the right way to serve wireless access, find a Schlotzsky's Deli. The Austin, Texas-based sandwich chain figured out the secret of making money from Wi-Fi: Give it away. Schlotzsky's lets anyone sign up and use its network free, even ...

Taipei gets world's largest Wi-Fi grid: This makes that St. Louis plan look almost quaint by comparison. It's the love of this kind of connectivity that is driving Taipei city planners to build what they say will be the world's biggest "Wi-Fi" network, making cheap, wireless Internet access available almost ...

Telecoms lobby against public wireless networks: While we love hearing about community wi-fi projects like those in St. Louis and Taipei, telecommunications companies don't. Providing this service is what they make money doing, and they're actively opposing many community wi-fi projects across the country. A chief complaint: a city can ...

United is cleared to offer Wi-Fi on domestic flights: Can we never get away from the Net? Airplane trips were always pretty relaxing because nothing could bug you up there. The airline expects to have Wi-Fi up and running in mid- to late 2006, letting passengers check e-mail, send instant ...

These people are driving to a conference somewhere, and are going to have wireless access points in vehicles strategically placed in their convoy, thus creating a rolling Wi-Fi network. So long as you stay in the convoy, you stay connected. Cool.

Melding of cell phones and Wi-Fi will be cosmic, man: New buzzword alert. Over the next few years, companies will start selling dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi phones. The phones will be able to make voice calls either on a cellular network, or by connecting via Wi-Fi wireless Internet to make calls using ...

Fuji recently unveiled a prototype of a digital camera with Wi-Fi capability built in. The interesting part of this story is that the camera they displayed is the exact style of the one I own. It features a compact flash and a smart media slot. If Wi-Fi is not actuaully ...

Teens' wireless feat could be world record: Quite a feat took place at DefCon. In the end, their 55-mile amplified connection exceeded last year's winner by 20 miles. Then they turned off their amplifiers and broke the record for an unamplified connection at the same distance. While not yet confirmed, ...

Parents Sue School Over Wi-Fi: One more thing for lawyers to get rich with. "A pioneering elementary school district outside Chicago has been sued for installing a wireless computer network by parents worried that exposure to the network's radio waves could harm their children. According to the complaint, filed last ...

Sadly, the Wi-Fi Caravan didn't quite pan out like expected: "The first mistake I made was underestimating the problem of powering computer equipment in a vehicle. ... It was quickly discovered that under the load of nexus, the main wireless server, the inverted would just barely support the load. If ...

Philadelphia mulls wireless society: My head hurts just thinking about it. For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot. The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of ...

How wireless changed the work behavior of Intel employees: An interesting look at how having wireless laptops available changed the way Intel employees worked. The study showed that employees gained about two hours per week in productivity because of the migration (Intel says the cost of the upgrades paid for ...

WiFi - SM: feel the global pain: Like I said, stop surfing all the blogs or someone will tape this to your neck without you knowing about it. "WiFi-SM is an Internet connected wireless device that you can fix on any part of your body. It automatically detects the information ...

Rhode Island wants statewide Wi-Fi: The true testament to how small Rhode Island is: $20 million gets you wi-fi across the entire state. America's smallest state is seeking to become its first to offer a wireless broadband network from border to border. Backers of Rhode Island's $20 million project say ...

Wi-Fi Sails the High Seas "....Wheat Wireless Services of Reston, Virginia, has begun selling a tweaked version of Wi-Fi Internet access that can broadcast signals 30 miles out to sea. The service piggybacks off T1 lines in data centers along the coast and requires radio towers up to 300 feet ...

Time Warner sues apt. complex over Wi-Fi: I knew one of these suits would pop up sooner or later. "Time Warner Cable filed a lawsuit charging a New York apartment complex and its wireless Internet provider with illegally reselling its high-speed Road Runner service over a wireless network. The suit, ...

Carnegie Mellon Wi-Fi Data: Carnegie-Mellon University has a page which shows a map on on-campus Wi-Fi activity in real time. There's a dot for the location of every connected wireless card. This reminds me of those campuses a decade ago that had Internet-enabled soda machines that would report their temperatures ...

E-Mailing Around an Open Fire: Campgrounds Go Wireless: "Getting away from it all" just isn't the same anymore. KOA campgrounds are installing wi-fi access. "'Grandma and Grandpa will not leave home without their e-mail anymore,' Mr. Gast [spokesman for KOA] said. The company surveyed its customers last year and found ...

How fun would this be? From ComputerWorld: BNSF has started to deploy Wi-Fi wireless LAN systems extensively in rail yards to allow crews to remotely control engines used to make up trains. These Wi-Fi systems are connected to a control panel that mimics the control panel of a diesel locomotive ...

Just when everybody was so excited about the so-called iPod killer, Zune, Apple comes out with something new that blows it out of the water. CEO Steve Jobs earlier this morning showed off the new Apple iPhone, and from the looks of it, there will be little reason left to ...

Wireless Internet access about to go extra 5 miles: We had WiMax-like service here in Sioux Falls as a test market for Monet Mobile. You could surf the Web from a laptop in the back seat of your car driving down the interstate. Sadly, it looks like Monet was a ...

Zune vs. iPod: the battle begins: Fortune reviews the Zune against the iPod and the winner is...the iPod. But it's not as much of a runaway victory as you'd expect. The Zune did quite well in a couple areas, and, as Fortune notes, it's the first model out the door. ...

I have the need for a new office router. We only have a couple of people, so a normal home router would be fine, except that we're geeks, so we need more than one external IP. Most home routers don't handle that. You can snag yourself a fancy Cisco PIX, ...

Xplore Technologies Corp. - The iX104: If you think Tablet PCs are for wussies, then take a look at this one. Check out the environmental specs it will survive a 4-foot drop onto concrete or immersion in water for up to 30 minutes. I dare someone to set up ...

McDonald's Wireless: McDonald's has a site to promote wi-fi access in their restaurants. Select McDonald's restaurants in the greater metropolitan areas of Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle proudly offer wireless Internet access. (BTW, the site is 100% Flash, so I had to type that in by hand. ...

PhotoVu recently announced the PV1910 wireless picture frame to display your latest and greatest digital creations. The PV1910 is the industry's first Wi-Fi®, 19" LCD digital picture frame. Recognizing that most digital camera users store, organize, edit, and share their pictures with the computer, the PV1910 compliments the way you ...

Pop Goes the Cell Phone: Between this and the electrifying Wi-Fi patch, gadgets are getting dangerous. "Nokia on Thursday pointed the finger at counterfeit batteries after another of its phones exploded and burned its user, the third such case in two months, and said that original batteries sold with its ...

I'm generally a PC guy, but this is really cool: "You walked into a room bearing a laptop running Jaguar (the latest version of the OS X operating system) with a wireless networking (Wi-Fi) card, and you could instantly see the iTunes music files of everyone else in the room ...

Engadget has linked to a story on Wi-Fi Planet about the hackability or the WRT54G. We covered this a while ago, but I went hardcore with mine and did everything with the console and config scripts. This article covers a distribution called DD-WRT that wraps a lot of the more ...

Junxion, Inc.: You can run a WAP off a cell phone card. This means you could sit out in the great wide open somewhere, plug in, and create a wireless network on the fly. Insert a cellular PC Card modem into your Junxion Box Connect to the Junxion Box using ...

This weekend Apple opened six new 'mini' stores around the country. They are much smaller than a normal Apple Store and they allow Apple to enter more markets without the high initial start up costs associated with larger stores. Once again the design is impeccable. The stores have clear white ...

Thumbs up for new library's technology: A great article on the technology behind the new Seattle Public Library. Yeah, I think I'm moving to Seattle in the next couple of days. [...]as far as the library's technology is concerned, it's thumbs up. Wi-Fi access is available nearly everywhere and, with ...

The Web, According to Google: An interesting look at what effect Google has on information retrieval. I will admit to checking Google and little else at times. "Were Google less influential that probably wouldn't matter. But as Americans, especially young ones, come to regard the leading search site as the ...

I've been putting off posting about The Building of Basecamp because I was trying to get my hands on a picture. Neither Joe nor I thought to bring a camera, and the workshop was the first thing we did in Chicago, before Joe bought a disposable to shoot this ...