alex.moskalyuk

Due to Netflix outage this week I was thinking about getting their Vudu appliance for instant on-demand streaming to a TV set. But then, it seems that those appliances are just interim products, till we move to something better, sort of like CD-ROMs.

The better in this case is wireless HDMI. Since Netflix already supports streaming part of their catalogue to your PC, it’s just the matter of time till you can get that stream in high-def, and then plug in a wireless HDMI adapter to stream it directly to the television, bypassing a settop box entirely.

A limited selection of wireless HDMI products on the market is pretty pricey nowadays compared to a box from Vudu sold through Netflix. A set of extenders from Gefen is currently $700. Belkin Flyware HDMI transmitter is also $700. Hopefully the pricing would follow the DVD player timeline close enough.

With frequent changing of apartments it’s always a crap shot on whether the next bedroom/office will have a cable outlet or not. I was briefly considering purchasing a wireless bridge for my desktop machines, but then figured out since 802.11 b/g USB drives were so cheap nowadays, I might just as well go with those.

TRENDnet TEW-424UB was the first choice, since pretty frequently on CompUSA Web site the adapter will sell for $15 with a $10 rebate. Rebates for TrendNet are pretty reliable and come in the mail, but the adapter itself seems to be a total opposite. Its coverage seems to be quite spotty, and on my wife’s HP laptop with the drivers pre-installed it kept being recognized as some RealTEK networking product. Who knows, could be a Windows XP issue.

D-Link DWL-G120 (AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless USB Adapter 802.11g, 54Mbps) is also quite frequently on sale from Buy.com, which in combination with Google Checkout’s $10 off for new customers would sometimes yield you a free product. The driver for this guy has not been certified for Windows, of which you’re warned on installation, but little you can do at that point. Lack of certification seems to be appropriate considering the occasional blue screens of death the driver causes. Windows Error Reporting then redirects you to a page with generic “driver failure” message, which doesn’t help much. There’s not an updated version of a driver, nor a Windows-certified one.

What seemed to work for me flawlessly (so far) is ZyXEL ZyAIR G-220 - USB 2.0 802.11G Wireless Adapter & Soft-AP, which I generally got on Buy.com. The driver installation goes through pretty well, there’s an additional utility for wireless network management you can install, if you opt to use another one outside of Windows’ default. Right now they sell it for $27 with a $17 rebate (which is trackable online, and which I got). However, on Buy.com checkout screen there’s also an option to get a free magazine subscription. Opt out of that, and you’re eligible to receive a $10 rebate, bringing the price of the wireless adapter effectively to $0 (except for sales tax in California). I have not received that rebate yet, and it does seem kinda shady without online tracking. Nevertheless, so far this adapter seems to perform the best.

Most of the widgets available for your Google homepage are pretty much the rehashes of the RSS readers - you can get this feed with a customized look, and that feed with pictures added in. So Callwave’s products are standing out from the crowd, as they’re pretty useful to have on your browser start page.

It’s a text messaging widget with support for US carriers for now, and a visual voicemail widget that actually accesses your mobile voicemail (in my case, Cingular) and displays the information on the caller, allowing you to play the voicemail within a widget as well. Pretty useful when you’re at work, see that voicemail pop up, but have no time to drop outside and call up your voicemail. They distribute their gadgets for Apple, Google, Microsoft Vista and Yahoo!

Yet another e-mail arrives in your inbox with threatening DONOTREPLY e-mail address in the From: field. According to Cingular, I am also supposed to filter out this e-mail to make sure it doesn’t get blocked by GMail’s anti-spam.

Most likely my innocent inquiry about the bill I received is forwarded to some ticketing system, where it will just duly wait its turn in the queue. Most likely there’s a ticket number assigned to it, and most likely I will be asked to provide some additional information regarding my request. I will probably be asked to go to the ticketing system page, and depending on the level of integration might be asked to create another account or use my cingular.com login.

All of which could be eliminated if instead of DONOTREPLY you accepted a reply email. The fact that I replied to it most likely signifies that the subject is going to look like Re: Ticket #1234567890, which would allow you to append the text of the e-mail to the ticket queue and increase efficiency on both ends.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal reports on GPE Palmtop Environment creating a full stack of open source software for mobile phones. Mobile operator Orange and France Telecom are contributing to the project.

With municipal Wi-Fi taking off and startups distributing free wireless routers for those willing to share their Internet connections, Wi-Fi phones or hybrid phones with both cellular and Wi-Fi access, are attracting interest. Dr. Dobb’s Journal runs a review of 6 wireless phone devices available on the market today. The cheapest ones start around $80, but lock you into T-Mobile branded hotspots. The more expensive ones, Sony Mylo in particular, offer support for 3rd party clients, such as Skype, GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger:

None of the VoIP services running on Wi-Fi phones currently support emergency calling such as E911, which makes having a Wi-Fi phone as your only phone service a risky proposition. Vonage provides a valuable service, though; if 911 is dialed from one of the Wi-Fi phones using its service, the call will be answered by a Vonage emergency call center, which will help contact the appropriate local emergency resources. Because of the power requirements of including a Wi-Fi radio in phones, these first-generation Wi-Fi phones can drain a battery in standby mode in just a day, and offer only a couple of hours of talk time. Some power-saving advancements are being made, such as technology that allows certain devices to lower their power consumption when not actively making calls, but things will need to come a long way before Wi-Fi phones can deliver the days of standby and hours of talk time taken for granted with traditional cell phones.

To pull local audio, video and photo files from your home desktop to your Wii you might set up wireless sharing, then point Opera browser to a file location on the network, then debug firewall access issues, then…

Or you could just install Orb and then on your Wii bookmark mycast.orb.com and log in with your Orb username and password. This will stream all the multimedia content on your home PC (or several of them, if you have Orb server installed on many PCs) to your Wii and consequently to your TV.

In an article on recent growth and current downfall of EarthLink the New York Times puts a price tag on the cost of development of municipal WiFi.

The idea behind the networks is to provide a wireless alternative to broadband for city residents and give tourists and business travelers a place to log on for the day. The projects are expensive: $85,000 a square mile, or $10 million to $15 million to cover all of Philadelphia, for example.

Getting ready to protest RFID tags that can be intrusive of user’s privacy? HP might help the world to get rid of RFID, as Memory Spot is smaller and stores larger amounts of data than RFID tags:

Memory Spot has a 10-megabits-per-second data-transfer rate and can store up to 4Mb of data, although the demonstration chip stores only 256Kb. The chip also has an integrated antenna, making it much smaller than RFID chips, which get their size from separately attached antennae.

Google VPN client also works great once you’re connected to GoogleWiFi SSID. The client is available for download once you’re on the network, and can be configured to connect automatically once the SSID is there.