thebaldgeek

I want to live out in the sticks.
Either here or there, almost matters not.
But at the end of the day, I want the remote solar powered (or wind, or steam, or something along those lines) cabin in the woods. Freddy and I were talking about it over the weekend. It’s a common topic around our place.

The one thing (one, hah, yeah right) that stops me is Internet.
I loves me some Internet.

These guys are living on a island.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-group-of-neighbors-created-their-own-internet-service/

Their internet sucked.

CenturyLink promised better speeds over the years “but that never came to fruition,” Sutton said. “Just waiting around for corporate America to come save us, we realized no one is going to come out here and make the kind of investment that’s needed for 200 people max.”

So, if they are not going to fix it. Do it yourself.

Long technical technicalish article follows…. I expect only Dan and Gary to read it.
And that’s Ok, I had those two guys in mind when I read it…. It is exactly the sort of thing the three of us would get up to if we all lived in the same town.
Drones, wifi and microwave. It’s a great read if you are into networking.

My Dad sent me an email today, said he could hear the thunder at around the same time the live lightning map updated……
Not that I did not believe him, but I wanted to check it out…..

Sure enough, there it is….
Very cool. I just love the web and technology when it is used for super cool stuff like this.

I know it’s not a big deal to most people, but I really get a kick out of stuff like this… Think about it, I got a notice on my watch that my Dad sent me an email from the other side of the planet, the subject line was ‘Weather’, so I opened it, read it, hit my website, followed the live lightning link from my web page, went to the other site, zoomed in and bam.
To top it off, the fact that the lighting tracker is by guys like me, they bought the hardware themselves and upload it to the site because they want to be part of something bigger…. Very very very cool.

This is interesting…..

http://9to5toys.com/2015/10/27/infocus-kangaroo-pc/

Kangaroo gives consumers the performance of a light-use desktop computer paired with the convenience and mobility of a cell phone. This new mobile form factor uses an Intel Cherrytrail™ (Z8500) SOC and has an on-board battery paired and a standalone Kangaroo Dock with port access for HDMI and USB. Users simply connect a Kangaroo Dock to existing screens and devices – from PC monitors and big screen TVs all the way to projectors and the iPad – for anytime, anywhere access to Windows 10, Microsoft Office and personal files.

So for something the size of a pack of cards, you can carry a light duty Windows10 PC.
The interesting bits for me are that it comes with a 4 hour battery built in. That you can connect to it over an iPad via USB (I’m thinking it’s something like VNC, but over USB) and the built in wireless radios.

I am not going to carry a screen and mouse and keyboard, but since an iPad is all that, and probably already in your bag, it is a smaller setup than a laptop, and that’s that power of it.
It is not very often I need a full laptop Win10 experience, so something like this might just be the ticket….. For 99 bucks, not a lot to lose…. Let me know how yours goes Gary….

Never thought of this…..
By cutting some of the undersea cables you could really hurt an entire nation/country economically.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/russian-navys-aggressive-activity-near-underwater-cables-worries-us/

While no US Navy or intelligence officials would go on the record regarding their concerns, the Navy’s Commander of US Naval Forces Europe and US Naval Forces Africa, Admiral Mark Furguson, noted that Russian submarine patrols have risen in number by nearly 50 percent in the last year. Unnamed military and intelligence officials told the Times that much of the activity is happening along cable routes. A European diplomat, unnamed by NYT, was quoted as saying, ““The level of activity is comparable to what we saw in the Cold War.”

While cable breaks happen all the time because of seismic activity or even shark attacks, a concerted effort to cut multiple undersea cables could cause disruption of the global Internet and have both economic and military repercussions. Despite its network of communications satellites, the US military is heavily dependent on undersea cables for much of its communications.

The other thing mentioned (briefly) in that article is the fact that nations have been tapping into these cables to eavesdrop on the communications in and out of the nation. So that is another option for what we are all doing to each other, stealing data.

Just how close to the edge are we?