You probably have seen the video on YouTube about a molten Fonera, apparently due to overheating, which shows the plastic case completely deformed.  Gizmodo  ( also in Spanish ) and other sites are also reporting on this. As usual, Fon has censored the post on their forums that broke the story, but alas, thanks to their partners a…

I wrote before about the Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo, and there are plenty of posts around the web that confirm that the product sucks - badly. To recap a bit, the problems are random reboots of the keyboard, disconnections of keyboard and mouse, erratic mouse behavior (including spontaneous motion of th…

You probably remember  the post I made regarding FON’s figures, and how much I thought they differed from reality. It got quite a lot of attention, particularly from detractors, and from Martin Varsavsky himself. Many comments were posted on my blog and some others, which pointed towards the fact that I am involved in a startup th…

Various sources have picked up on the  FCC’s announcement  that it is removing the requirement of five-words-per-minute Morse code that was required to get an amateur radio license.  Boing Boing  and  Engadget  (uggh!) for example talk about the ‘dead’ language, arcane, old and tired. Digital communications, the SMS and the web ar…

The New York Times ran a story two days ago, also picked up by Glenn Fleishman over at  WiFi Net News , about how hard it is sometimes to get connected at hotels over their WiFi networks. Some travelers even report a failure rate of 50%, in comparison with 5% in wired connections. Support is usually directed to a hotline run by th…

My first BlackBerry was a 7100v, the first that had the slim form factor and two letters per key - which despite what anyone says, is still more uncomfortable than a full-sized thumb pad. After a couple of years, I have returned to the BlackBerry (but still keep a Nokia N93 handy for pictures & video), getting an 8708v from Vo…

I got a tip today that Fon is looking at launching a new router with a LAN port, apart from the WAN port found in the current Fonera (they seem to privately admit not having a LAN passthrough was a rather big mistake). With the current Fonera,  you cannot access devices on the wired side of the network  (such as a SAN drive or p…

So, the  great news  over at  TechCrunch  today was that Google has added a feature called  Mail Fetcher  to Gmail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo. This sounds great, and it probably is for Gmail users, but it is also great for Google. Someone with legal wits should point a browser towa…

Went to my local  Vodafone  store to pick up the new  Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem , which with a 49 Euro monthly contract gives you 1GB of transfer at 1Mbps maximum, and free mobile to fixed landline calls - pretty good deal if you ask me. For 59 Euro you get 5GB of transfer, at the full 3.8Mbps that HSDPA offers. These are theore…

Airport security is doomed to fail in preventing terrorist attacks. Unless they want us to fly naked and possibly even then get an X-ray and proctologist exam before boarding, there is no way they can prevent nasty things from happening. We are currently forced into placing our toiletries (gels, perfume, shaving cream) into a sm…

For heavy MacBook and MacBook Pro users, a burning feeling around the knees after a couple of hours of use is something usual. I have wondered for a long why didn’t Pro’s fans kick in sooner, even when some surfaces were getting so hot that you could not lay a finger on them, but it now seems clear that Apple chose low noise over …

This Christmas, we should be receiving a gift we have been waiting for over 20 years. Our volunteer Fire Department started with a 4-wheel-drive and a cart-mounted 100 gallon water tank, and has since progressed to become the proud owners of two large all-terrain pumpers and one 4-wheel-drive with a small tank & pump for fast re…