lately i've been using the "touch your key to your chin so your body acts as an antenna" trick to increase the range of the car key remote control. by itself, the remote is usually reliable only to about 30 feet or so, but with the "chin antenna" i've been locking, opening windows, etc. from well over 50 feet away.

tonight i parked my car on the rooftop of my apartment complex's parking garage (6th floor), but when i got back to my 8th floor apartment i couldn't remember if i had locked up or not. i really didn't want to go all the way back to the car to check.... i looked out my window and could see my car parked in the distance, so i said what the hell, pressed the key tip firmly to my chin, hit the lock button... and saw the car's interior lights turn on! talk about range... i'd estimate the car is between 150ft to 200ft away, and through my apartment's closed windows no less. the power of the key's RF transmtter (as well as the sensitivity of the car's receiver) is quite impressive, and the chin antenna really does the trick. saved me a good 10 minutes going all the way to the car (and btw, i think i had locked it after all. )Quoted from: bimmerfest - BMW Forums - wow! chin "antenna" trick really works...

Everythign I see about wireless network sin Buffalo, quotes the units as costing far too much to be accurate.

So far, Buffalo's zones have been designed as an accessory mostly in outdoor areas, for tourists and other occasional users. Access is limited to an hour at a time.

A Wi-Fi transmitter costing under $1,000 can blanket a radius of about 300 feet. Each of Buffalo's zones have a capacity of 11 million bits-per-second, about 200 times as much as a dial-up line.Quoted from: Urban Wi-fi 'Hot Spots' Criticized in Report

[inlink]twisted,209[/inlink] You shuldn't feel like you were "peering" in. We invited you. Also, you could just move here and then you wouldn't have to feel guilty anymore :)

Once again (e:rzoo) congratulations on public transphere. My favorite part was when we made a detour to give some guy a ride to deleware and hertel so that he could take his aids medicine on time. He had been waiting about a half and hour for the metro bus when we arrived. We gave him a warm ride, a handfull of bus tokens and some food. It was like a miracle for him I think. He said that we would be blessed by god. It was so great that someone was helped by the project.

On the public transphere, every thing that could go wrong with the network did. I am never working at 800 bytes/second again. Well, that isn't true but at least only with reliable connections at 800 bytes. I feel like I let (e:rzoo) down. It worked a lot of the time, but a lot of the time the batteries were dead or UB would reject our PPP connection, or someone would call the cell-phone and kill the connection. In the future we will know that we either need a GPRS account or a data card for the laptop itself.

ven the audio turned out to be a disaster. The first day everything was messe dup because of a broken microphone. It was plugged in so lot sof the day sounded like garble. Then I started taping everythign yesetrday after we got that fixed. Apparently, today saved over that - argh. Then it turns out at some point the ocnnection was terminated and the stream recorder stopped so that the radio was on most of today, accept during the lunch break, but that it wasn't being recorded. i have about a 10 minute recording at 3PM today. How sad is that. We should have just rbought a voice recorded on the bus.

I guess we learned a lot about buffalo in terms of network infrastructure. On this side of main street there is a wireless network everywhere you go. I almost found no time that netwroks didn't exist. However, only a few of the were "open to the public." The ones that I rememeber were are parky by starbucks on deleware an kenmore, the corner of tupper and elmwood at the laundromat, outside of colter bay, and by west ferry and main st.

The majority of those open to the public were named linksys or netgear. How funny is that. It is almost like a way of creating giant branded netwroks. So many people clearly don't rea dthe manual of their wireless routers. They really need to change the network name and add some security. My guess is that the people with linksys or netgear or dlink as a network, are not just creating spontaneous open networks, but have no idea how to operate their routers. I would think that if they really understood what they are doing by leaving it open that they would be able to chnage the name.

I am going to start a buffalo hotspot locator site as soon as I am sure that one doesn't exist. maybe tomorrow.

WWe hit the end of the road almost. I one the lottery for $5.00

Thank (e:twisted) , it got into PC magazine. Here is the original article again

Analysts: Merger Works for Adobe, But Customers May Suffer
Paul Visco, a professor in the digital media arts program at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., said he worries about competition, pricing and the future of graphic design.

"It seems as though much of the recent innovation between the two software giants was brought on by healthy competition. They had an array of software packages that had the same purposes, e.g. GoLive and Dreamweaver, Illustrator and FreeHand, Photoshop and Fireworks. If there is no longer any need to compete, then they might not continue to develop new products. It will effectively create a monopoly in graphic design."

."Quoted from: News from PC Magazine: Analysts: Merger Works for Adobe, But Customers May Suffer

I foudn it quoted here to

Here it is again

I am sure someday I will say the same thing about my ten newest projects, like top secret movie pic sticker maker.

ElmwoodStrip.com
02/28/05

Two or three years ago, or even perhaps longer, I registered the domain name ElmwoodStrip.com. I envisioned a community site with news, perhaps personals and classifieds, forums for people to interact, etc. (This was before blogging really took off and entered my consciousness.)

Of course I never did anything with it and after a couple years I let the domain name lapse - just one of many that I've had over the years.

Well, about a year ago I discovered that someone else had registered the domain and now has created essentially what I imagined, only they have done a far better job with it than I ever could have. It seems to cater to the college-aged crowd, offering personal journals, etc. (Incidentally, I have been thinking about letting people set up their own blogs on Buffalog.com - their own Buffalogs - if anyone expresses interest...)

Seeing an idea I originally had get done, and done better by someone else is an experience I've had many times. It always feels like the universe telling my how much I suck. Oh well.
Posted by Craig at 12:24:04 am into the following categories: Craig
Quoted from: Personal and Frivolous Crud - February 2005

It was so horrible experience the day at 800 bytes/sec. I don't think I ever want that to happen to me again

Well after like 48 hours of no sleep I am here to tell the story of day one. It was generally a success for my part. The internet seemed to hold up accept for our lunch break from 2-3 and from 4-6 during a battery crisis, for which t-mobile could not help us.

Oh and the microphone mixup. We wanted a data card GPRS style ASAP but the shortest turn around on activation that they could promise us was 3-4day. I wish I had $1000, just to see what they would do for that.

I felt really weird today, partly because of the fact that i haven't selpt since thursday and partly because of the situation. I have been driving the route so long that I think people are beginning to take notice of me. i think they think I am some sort of cyborg cop. I can't blame them as i actually had a web cam wired to my head, a laptop displaying my location constantly on the internet, a big white van, and lots of microphones, and other technology.

I felt like such an outside peering in at a science experiment. It made me so uncomfortable. I loved the project at first because it gave mne a change to hold surveillance technology really close and then it freaked me out. I started feeling like I was on some weird cultural safari. Nothing can make me more uncomfortable than that. It is preceisely why I am done traveling to poor places. The feeling was akin to some feelings I had spending time in Morocco back in my early twenties.

(e:rzoo) did a fantastic job pulling it all together. The issues I was having were mostly with me and my feelings about me as the outsider. She is such a kind woman and I know her heart is good. I am excited to see what tomorrow brings.

Here we are live on the route at allen and north.

I can't believe after this work and science, we are crippled by an 800 byte per second, dead battery piece of crap cell phone. Why didn't we get the card!?! What a waste of my life.