Category Archives: Original Duenos

Posts by the original Duenos.net crew.

WiFi on the river Thames

Global Reach Group has entered the wireless internet game in a big way by making the whole of the London’s river Thames a giant hotspot. It’s a free project and is available to absolutely anyone with a wireless device and £2.95/hour, £5.95/day or £9.95/month. Admitting that one can’t really make much bob providing just wireless access, the mesh network is also providing service to CCTV networks, river traffic regulators and emergency services. The network currently runs along the river and its banks all the way from the Millennium Dome at Greenwich in the east to the Houses of Parliament in the west. That’s most of downtown London covered by one provider!

“Link”:http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070329_814918.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily to Business Week article.

Sports Fans: How Happy Are You With Your Team?

ESPN.com recently posted a “fascinating ranking”:http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/franchiseRanks of all major American sports franchises related to fan satisfaction. Using an interesting “methodology”:http://sports.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/story?page=ultimatestandings07methodology that emphasized affordability, wins, team talent, and administrative competence, ESPN ranked the dynamic and high-octane “Buffalo Sabres”:http://sports.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/story?page=ultimatestandings07No1team at number one.
“http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/franchiseRanks Sadly, but unsurprisingly, my hometown "Chicago Blackhawks":http://assets.espn.go.com/sportsnation/no118.html continue to be regarded as one of the worst franchises in the sports world.

NYTimes.com Now Free for College Students

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com has recently made its “TimesSelect web feature”:http://www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/overview.html, which most notably provides access to the NYT’s “brilliant opinion columnists”:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html and much of the 150+ year archive, “completely free for college students and professors”:http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html! All that you need to sign up is a valid university e-mail address.
“http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html In effect, this makes the entire contents of the New York Times free and computer-accessible. How convenient!

Last Harry Potter book jacket unveiled

Muggles rejoice! The richest person in the UK is that much closer to becoming even richer. In addition to having the “least navigable web-page in history”:http://www.jkrowling.com/accessible/en/ JK Rowling has finished the _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ and with it the whole Harry Potter series. Here are the British book jackets, no word yet on the American ones.

Oh how much has changed since the first book came out in 1997. Words like quidditch and muggles weren’t parts of the vernacular, Alan Rickman wasn’t creepy (ok, maybe that was already true) and Daniel Radcliffe was yet to be chosen to play the boy wizard on screen and subsequently fear typecasting so much as to cause him to play naked “Equus”:http://www.playbill.com/images/photos/equuspre5.jpg on Broadway.

In Katrina's Wake

Absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking, those are the words that come to mind looking through Chris Jordan’s “web-preview”:http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set.php?arch_id=6 of his book, _In Katrina’s Wake._

The Hurricane Katrina is one of those important events that gets completely ignored by the generation that lived through it only to be memorialised by their less-guilty-feeling children. The reason for the guilt? While we continue to consume at an almost inhuman pace, fight wars all over the world, and thumb our noses at global warming, proof that not all is right sits there in the heart of the United States where the Mississippi meets the Gulf and we’re almost straining ourselves to not look at it.

Kevin Kelly's other blog

I have been a long-time subscriber to “Cool Tools”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.php, a blog on Kevin Kelly’s site, “kk.org”:http://www.kk.org/index.php and highly recommend it. Basically any time he or someone else finds something they think is cool or especially useful, up it goes. I’ve discovered some great things reading Cool Tools (The “‘Allen and Mike’ camping books”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000704.php and the “Sierra Stove”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000012.php being two that have led to very wise purchases) but I didn’t realize there was more greatness to be had.
On the left side of the Cool Tools page there is a navigation menu of all the other things found at kk.org and one day for some reason I was actually on the site (instead of just reading the RSS feed) and I looked at all of them. The other blog I found was “Street Use”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/index.php and it has been on my daily read ever since. This blog explores how people adapt objects and technology to suit their particular needs. For example, “this article”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/archives/2007/01/phone_charging_booths_in_ugand.php is about improvised phone charging booths in Uganda.
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Keyboards: Dvorak

The layout of a QWERTY keyboard is a strange thing, I’ve always known that. Why have so many of the important keys not on the home row? Why force a single hand to type whole words like _million_ or _greatest_? I didn’t know the answer to this question but for some reason I spent most of this afternoon finding out. During my explorations I rediscovered the Dvorak keyboard layout, or DSK. My roommate Dave made the switch to Dvorak in college when he’d worked out how much faster he could type (all the world-record typists are Dvorak typists) but quickly abandoned it out of frustration that no other computers used the layout and he was often in and out of campus labs.
Well it turns out that the reason we are all using QWERTY instead of the clearly superior Dvorak is because the designing imperative back when the first typewriters were made was to *slow down* typists, trying to avoid key jams. Jared Diamond, the author of the seminal _Guns, Germs and Steel_, wrote a really insightful piece on the evolution of keyboard design in Discover magazine which you can find “here”:http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/thecurseofqwerty1099/.
I highly recommend the article and maybe even trying Dvorak out for yourself, I just switched myself and while slow at first I can see how this will be much better.

Visualizations of Last.fm

A month or so ago I wrote an “article”:http://duenos.net/article/14/melodic-match-making-on-lastfm about “Last.fm”:http://last.fm , the self-proclaimed harbringer of the _social music revolution._ The site keeps track of what you listen to and then can export that data as simple XML feeds to put on your blog, or anything else. Well, two other websites, “Snapp Radio”:http://www.snappradio.com/ and “Last.tv”:http://lasttv.net/ have taken those data feeds about what you’re listening to and made something you can watch.
http://billiethevision.com then the pictures are more mood pieces, which I think are taken from "Flickr!":http://flickr.com This entry was posted in Original Duenos, Uncategorized and tagged , on by .