Whiteboard

Today I was in a pinch and found myself needing more cash that I had in my wallet. I walked over to the nearest ATM knowing and expecting the surcharge to be ridiculous. My mouth dropped when I read that the ATM from a major bank was asking for $3 per transaction! As my response I am proposing a new business I'm calling "$1 Cheaper". I would love to put as many of my ATMs next to all the currently available ATMs. Maybe over time, these prices will come down and I'll make some coin in the process.

How do you like like my new iPhone app? Hardware style!

Today at the whiteboard I am thinking about drywall. You know the common building material used for interior walls. To be honest I am actually focused on the empty space behind the drywall that is completely void of use.

When I talk to friends in the ubiquitous computing research arena I usually hear the same expectations:
(Click the link to see how (re: if) I connect ubiquitous computing with drywall)

Mikael Lugnegård, a Swedish industrial designer, and his awesome concept roadster for Audi. When can I get one?

I'll be the first to agree that this post strays from what I would like to have on the Whiteboard. However, on my way home tonight I got an idea that could be useful. While I think it is important for police to perform traffic enforcement I question if we could make small policy changes to traffic enforcement that could improve what I see as two large problems.
(Hit the link for more!)

I have been too busy lately to get in some lab time lately but I wanted to share some information on my current project.
I am very close to wrapping up the first hardware prototypes for this system. As soon as I get to a stopping point I'll make sure to move this over to the project pages. (Hit the link for more!)

I have not been to the Whiteboard in a while so today I carved out some time to let my thoughts wander to see if I could find a creative thought or two. An hour and a nice IPA later, all I could whip up was to open up a second IPA. (Hit the link for more!)

When I was a kid I was fascinated by pirate radio stations. Occasionally we would hear a pirate station or two on the FM broadcast band playing odd music and going by fun DJ nicknames. Later when I got to college the trend continued. However, the stations seemed to be more interested in talk of politics and media censorship than playing any music. The media censorship argument was simply that the pirates felt they had no way to disseminate local information they decided was not being covered by large broadcast networks. They typically defined "local" to mean a few city blocks/square miles. Eventually the FCC addressed this need by creating the Low Power FM (LPFM) Service. I am curious if anyone today is using 802.11x as an alternative. Hit the link for more!

I do believe a picture is worth a 1000 words. Here is a GUI mock-up to demonstrate the Status Service concept. After a little discussion on this concept we have two differing opinions. One camp would like to see this as an Internet only application to reduce the development (integration) time. The other camp is mostly interested in using an application like this via APRS. I do not see why the Status Service could not support both Internet & APRS. However, I do agree that starting with an Internet only version will speed up development time and get a useful product out the door. As long as trades are not made that will cause the APRS integration to suffer I think that this is an excellent approach. What do you think? My email is listed at the bottom of the page.

Wanted: A CS ham with web development experience to develop a service (ARS) that might be useful to the ham radio community.

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As a ham who tends to turn on the radio late at night I realized that there are few ways to determine who is on the radio. A typical solution might be a short transmission on a repeater, a quick CQ on 80m, or leaving the radio on a local simplex frequency assuming another ham will perform the same search. Click the read more link for more details.