Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Read in the ACM Technews that Siemens has developed a new application that lets a user post a message to a specific location and when anyone with a cell phone who passes through that area. It seems like an interesting concept but has a lot of potential for abuse.&

Think about it, the messages posted are not censored at all. Anyone can post anything and whoever passes through that area will get that message. So all the new age spammer has to do is send such a message to Times Square or New York Penn station or Madison Square garden and anyone in that area will get the message as an SMS. So in the near future a 15 year old with a cell phone walking down broad street in NY could get a message asking him to step into a shop to get really cheap porno’s or cheap drugs etc.

And the pranksters will have a field day with this one. They can post a porn image to a crowded area and watch the reactions on everyone’s face. There are hundreds of such possibilites and if I can think of them res assured others can too…

Original Summary:
Siemens has developed a new “digital graffiti” application that would allow mobile phone users to send a message to a specific geographic location, where it would appear on the screens of other mobile phone users who are passing through the area.

The concept is similar to placing a Post-It note in a certain spot. The application also resembles SMS (Short Message Service), although the message would be directed to a defined radius and the mobile phone users who are in the area, rather than a specific person. The ability to post notes to a zone makes the digital graffiti technology more than just a mobile phone location-based service. “Imagine a foreman walking through a plant and making notes of things to check for the maintenance crew on the production floor, or a friend who really knows his way around an area leaving tips of places to go for less familiar buddies,” says a Siemens spokesperson. Users can post text messages and pictures, and have the information expire at a certain date. Researchers at the University of Linz in Austria and the Ars Electronica Center in Linz assisted on the application, which could have a commercial rollout by 2007.

Complete Article: Here

– Suramya

Now this is something cool. Voltaic Systems just released a backpack with integrated solar panels. This allows the user to charge most electronics (excluding laptops unfortunately) using solar energy without having to setup the solar panels.

The price is a bit on the high side at $229 + Shipping. But for regular travellers it should be a great help. It even has pockets for most electronic gear (ipod’s, PDA’s etc). Check out the site for the pics.

Would like to buy this when I get some cash and go travelling.

– Suramya
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X10 which was known for its pop up ads for wireless camera’s has released a new package which makes it easier for people to ‘give your home a brain’, meaning you can now use the software to create a smart house.

I was looking into this last year and when my house in India is nearing completion I will be buying the package and automating the entire house. The new kit costs about $100 with new modules costing ~$15. I am thinking I will add biometric scanners to the mix to allow me to unlock the door without needing keys. Although I will be adding manual overrides in case the power goes out and I will use Linux to control the system instead of windows. I will be adding UPS backup to the server incase of power outages and stuff. Another cool thing to add to this would be voice recognition software.

One of the neat things about this new system is that it doesn’t need the computer to be on after you have programmed it. Meaning once you are done programing the controller you can pug it into any electric supply and shut down the computer and still enjoy the benefits of home automation.

I will keep post updates when I actually start working on this.

Original Story: Wired News

While looking for a good document editor for Linux I came across TextMaker created by SoftMaker Software ltd. Its is a very light weight program and requires no configuration, all you have to do if unzip it and run it.

TextMaker launches lightning-fast, needs little memory, does not require complicated setup and still has the full feature set of a modern high-end word processor. It reads and writes Microsoft Word 6/95/97/2000/XP/2003 files without losing formatting or content.

Unfortunately its not free or open source ($49 to buy) bu I think its worth the price. The site offers a 30 day free trial version so check it out if you are looking for a wordprocessor for linux.

URL: http://www.softmaker.de/tml_en.htm

– Suramya

Found out today that a guy named Bart has created a free version of the Windows Preinstalled Environment and made it available for free at his website. So if you have a valid windows xp/2003 license you should head over there now and grab a copy.

This CD will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.

The CD does have some major licensing issues: You can’t legally create more than one copy unless you have more than one Windows license. on the other hand there are plenty of Linux Live CD distributions available which don’t have any such restrictions so I would suggest that you check them out.

Will post links for them a little later today.

– Suramya