10. March, 2002 - it's a hardware problem
- First a bunch of updates on Dave's Picks. I updated Dave's Recommended Reading over the weekend, adding a Food & Cooking section to it, Dave's Writing now has a better index, which might make it marginally easier to find something you were looking for, and finally, I've started a list of Webloggers named Dave. I expect it'll end up taking a bunch of my available free-time for a while.
- U.S. Military to deploy laser cannon in the War on Terror. Talks about the Boeing Advanced Technical Laser (ATL). Q department's been busy.
- Anoto has a cool product, a digital pen and special paper. You just write, and it digitizes what you wrote. The bad news? They've got a pretty horrible website to tell you about it.
- Information Leakage from Optical Emanations (pdf). You can figure out what's going over a modem by watching the blinky lights from afar. You have to watch very closely, but they can
read
a 56k modem from across the street, and it looks possible to read the data off a Cisco 4xxx or 7xxx router from the backpanel (fast serial) lights. [some guy]
- I was thinking about buying the Polaroid Mio recently. It looks pretty cool, if perhaps a little bigger than I'd like. And the business-card-sized photos would be especially neat if Polaroid were to release a Mio Scanner that made it easy to get 'em into the computer. But then I thought again about the cost of film. A buck per business-card-sized photo. Oof. That's pretty steep. I guess I'll just keep using digital, but I'd still like some way to make paper while on the road. Maybe something like the Olympus P-200 is the answer, but that's $450 for the printer, and I'd bet it's nearly a buck a throw for prints. You save by only printing what you need, but still....
- The Shifted Librarian, talking about internet access, says
We'd need a similar e-rate-like initiative for wireless to change this [the lack of wireless access in libraries], but the Bush administration would rather cut this type of funding.
Or perhaps having a library that's welcoming enough that a geek could donate an airport base station, walk in on a saturday afternoon, and plug it in would do the trick. Check out the discussion. [librarian]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 10 Mar 2002 22:05:51.