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In the present-day world of electronics, it seems that whatever you decide to make, whatever its functionality, there will be someone wanting to buy it. From mood phones to uploading video from your camera phone to your HDTV display at home, there is a group of willing buyers...with quality, apparently, be damned. There is nobody in our industry more concerned with the amount of RF consumers are playing around with these days than I am. And I have frequently written of my concerns and have come to the conclusion that there is a ten-year set of effects which are now beginning to be seen by researchers. Apart from apparent effects to the head, there are also reports of male semen being reduced in both quantity and sperm count. One such study came from research at the Cleveland Clinic, a highly-respected institution -- although, as with many of these sorts of studies, the number of samples involved is relatively small. In one of those bizarre moments of product offerings -- and certainly, in this case, one th...

Take one part hacker convention, one part avant-garde art show, one part street fair, add a touch of Burning Man Festival (minus the nudity), mix thoroughly, spread across a few acres of open fairground, and set aside; While the mixture is settling, assemble a rough cross-section of Bay Area underground culture, being sure to include old-school techno-freaks, new-wave multimedia mavens, hard-core hardware nuts, extreme crafts enthusiasts, and whatever samples of fringe activity groups you find in the back of your fridge; Sprinkle the rich assemblage of weird and creative people across the fairgrounds, garnish with lots of strange home-made vehicles, blazing fire sculptures, and a touch of tye-dye. Add performance artists, spectators, food vendors, lots of happy kids, and serve under a clear Spring sky. Serves 50,000 Forget DesignCon, OFC, or even CES -- the most exciting technical conference I've attended this year is the Maker Faire which just wrapped up its second year at the San ...

As weird as they look, I have a certain fondness for Bluetooth headsets because they always make me think of my childhood heartthrob Lt. Uhura, everyone's favorite communication officer on the Starship Enterprise. Besides being a pioneering role model for African-American women, her low-cut uniform and high-tech headset presaged the geek-chic look twenty-five years ahead of its time. While we may not be able to open a hailing frequency, or decode an Antarean sub-space transmission, with the Bluetooth headsets that have blossomed lately in so many ears, they certainly give us a taste of what the future may look like. And now that reality is bumping up against fiction, I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing. %IMG_left_full_150%It's easy (and probably correct) to make fun of the folks who insist on having those funny-looking headsets sticking out of their ears all the time, even at the most inappropriate moments, so I was not surprised when a friend recently sent me a link to a rather funny (but vulgar...

This seems to be the age of sleaze. From the no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and other profiteers; from the lies coming daily from Washington about WMDs, terrorist threats, firing of US Attorneys and the World Bank, to name just a few; from corporate greed like the firing of senior (more expensive) staff at Circuit City, which backfired on the bottom line; from the lies that daily emanate from Israel to support a life of terror for peoples from whom that state has stolen their lands; from the cover-up that depleted uranium has wrought on the health of the children of Iraq. Maybe it is just the information bandwidth we now have. If you go back nearly two hundred years communications were still very primitive. It wasn't until the magnificent steamship The Great Eastern finally laid the first reliable transatlantic cable in 1866 that news across The Atlantic took less than two weeks to arrive. The practicality of the time change from two weeks' wait -- to hearing Samuel Morse's code in a detector...

National Public Radio's recent story about how the Scent Marketing Institute is helping gas stations to spread the smell of coffee at their gas pumps to spur sales at their convenience stores got me to wondering about whether this is an early warning of an imminent olfactory invasion afoot. Until now, most of the public odors (not counting public restrooms) we've lived with, both pleasant and unpleasant, have been un-manipulated byproducts of the natural world: our own activities providing a scent-scape which was often more informative than what we were seeing or hearing. I worry about a day when the forces of commerce start cluttering our nasal radar with noise and false information instead of the cues that we count on for our sense of place. Whether it's the subtle mix of popcorn, salt air, and slightly stale fry grease that tells me I'm at the Jersey shore, or the top notes of lilac and andromeda blossoms punctuated with a hint of compost that defines my garden in the spring, smell has always been the sen...

It used to be said of the race to space that it would create many inventions and techniques which would lead to technological benefits to the general population of our earth. That may nowadays be rephrased to the fact that military works are now looking to expand into civilian roles. It goes beyond the civilian purchases of Humvees (as this editor's spouse would say, "Do you want Armageddon!?") about which my attitude is that, if you want to drive one, I'll be happy to point you in the direction of your nearest Army recruitment office. Non-jittered GPS is a very good example; and a very bad example at the same time, because we have become incredibly dependent on a system that could be taken out of service by a man-made force, or by nature in the form of solar flares. The latest flurry of military vendors looking to expand into the civilian market is in the form of the UAV (unmanned -- uninhabited might be more apropos -- aerial vehicle). I don't remember any reference to UAVs before about 1995, a...

If Melanie Rieback has her way, we could soon have a way to control who reads the numerous RFID tags in our lives - without having to resort to wearing an aluminum foil suit. That's because Ms Rieback's current work as a graduate student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam focuses on developing a handheld device that will act as a wireless firewall that can provide selective access or full blocking of devices attempting to read RFID tags that are on your person or immediate surroundings. Since RFID manufacturers as well as the numerous businesses and government agencies that use these devices don't seem to take our personal privacy and security seriously, it's great to see that we may have a means of taking care of the matter ourselves. Dubbed the RFID Guardian, the device was inspired by Ms Rieback's research which showed that most current commercial RFID devices (including those with 40-bit encryption) can easily be subjected to unauthorized activities such as undetected surveillance, identity theft, an...

A few years ago I had the wonderful experience of being at home when a once-in-a-generation windstorm hit on the Oregon Coast. It was never classified as a hurricane but my anemometer clocked the circular winds at +120 mph. After the terrifying fifteen minutes of this event -- a scene right out of Hitchcock's The Birds -- I was able to take stock of the outside world. We had lost a large section of the roof and there were shingles absolutely everywhere. Their nails would turn up around the yard for months afterwards. I first checked on an elderly neighbor who had also lost a lot of her roof; after I had found she was OK, I walked past -- and through -- the downed power and cable TV lines the mile or so to my daughter's elementary school where they were all huddled down safely. The only noise in the streets was the emergency generator at the hospital… After finally getting the insurance adjuster onto the premises (they were rather busy) he cut a check for the repairs in his mobile office and I then so...