Ed Berger dot com

Motorola Mediacenter – Press Releases

So here’s a piece of the ubiquitous technology of tomorrow. This is a product from Motorola that runs on most all cell phones and gives you access to your on-line banking securely from your phone. The extensions to the technology are really the attention getters! In conjunction with the an emerging technology to interface your cell phone with a merchant’s store systems, this can, and very well might, replace credit cards.

Even if it is not this technology, the “thick wallet” full of credit cards is a dinosaur and we will soon have much simpler ways to engage in local commerce!

Well after reading about al the fun hacking the Linksys Wireless Router WRT54G, I decided to give it a try. It turns out to be easy if you are a little persistent.

Linksys has been making these ubiquitous 802.11g routers on a Linux base under the GPL license and publishing the source code as required by GPL. This of course led to a community of people modifying the source or using other flavors of Linux to add features to the standard router.

HOWEVER, Linksys switched away from Linux for the latest version(v5) of the WRT54g making it nearly impossible to modify. Linksys also said they would sell the version 4 routers under the model WRT54GL. Of course it doesn’t look like that commitment is going to last very long. There is a wide spread rumor that Linksys was discontinuing the L model.

As you can imagine the race to find V4 routers is on! I found one at our local Office Dpot burried in the back of a large stack of V5 routers. I’ve spent some time this weekend upgrading and I will post my results on here shortly.

Wireless Home Music Broadcasting–Modifying the NSLU2 to Unleash Your Music – Linux Journal

As many of you know the inexpensive Linksys Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is imminently “hackable” to provide many more services than just NAS.. This device, often called the slug, is intended to interface two external harddrives to your wired home network for file storage / backup. The slug runs Linux and has an ethernet 10/100 port and two USB 2.0 ports.
The link above is to an article in Linux Journal explaining how to turn this device into am mt-daapd serer. This will allow any mt-daapd aware software such as iTunes, to find and use the slug as a music store. In the article a Roku soundbridge hooks up your home stereo! The protocol even supports playlists an genres for a complete solution.

If you’d like to explore the things you can do with a slug, You can browse the Unslung project pages. This is one of the most popular firmware replacement sites. Here, you can find a list of projects you can do with your slug.
Have some hobbyist fun with a small investment!

Here is an affiliate link to Amazon for an NSLU2.

Reuters Business Channel | Reuters.com

I carry a company blackberry and the question I get from everybody is: what are you going to do if all blackberries get shut off?

As simply as I know how to state the issue, RIM the Blackberry company is being sued by NTP a holder of patents potentially covering the Blackberry technology, for patent infringement. The courts are uniformly upholding the idea that RIM is violating NTP’s patents. RIM is appealing at every turn to buy more time and losing every appeal.

Meanwhile the US Patent Office is reviewing the five underlying patents to assess their viability, that is should the patents have been issued. The reviews are being done individually on each of the five patents. Each of the reviews has resulted in invalidation of the patent and all of the patents are generally considered “bad”.  Obviously this is why RIM is fighting for time.  If they run out of time they may have to pay up a settlement for invalid patents.
The link above is Reuters reporting on the “non-final” repudiation of the fifth and last patent.

There are two real issues here.  First the US Patent office is issuing patents on software and technology that should never have been patentable!  Second, the courts uphold a patent violation without considering the viability of the patents.