Wireless

“I thought this was interesting. Up till now, ZigBee was only available as a chipset or some rudimentary modules. Now regular schmucks like me that don’t want to mess with a soldering iron can use ZigBee and see if it sucks or not. These radios have a range of almost a mile and cost less than $100. Not bad since nobody else seems to offer anything like this (yet). Now I can get my laptop to communicate with some of my robotics projects without an RS-232 umbilical cord.” (WikiPedia’s page on ZigBee a is a good way to figure out whether this is interesting to you; in short, a low-power, medium-range radio spec for all sorts of interesting uses.) Link.

Youngsters visiting Michigan State University’s 4-H Children’s Garden are discovering unseen information about plants in the palm of their hands. A new device called the Personal Science Assistant (PSA), similar to a hand-held personal digital assistant, reads the plant label (a radio frequency identification product known as an RFID tag). The application brings up information and pictures about each of the plant’s parts: root, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit and seeds. Link & project page.

The Sprint Treo 650 is… notable for what it does not include: dial-up networking (or DUN) over Bluetooth. Fortunately, a skilled Treo 650 user (known only as shadowmite) spent several hours tracing code and discovered that Sprint had not removed DUN; they had merely hidden it. A two-byte change in the Treo’s Bluetooth management code reveals the hidden setting. Trevor Harmon has posted step by step for setting up dial-up networking with the Sprint Treo 650 smartphone using Bluetooth and Mac OS X. [via] Link.

Review of the $20 RFID mouse- Designed with A4Tech’s Innovative Radio Frequency Identification Technology. This Battery-Free Wireless Optical Mouse is absolutely Interference-free from any wireless frequency. In addition to that, the RFID Mouse Pad is directly power activated & the mouse creates huge cost saving for its users. Most importantly, this technology avoids unnecessary pollution caused by batteries. [via] Link.

Another resource for cracking WEP. With Whoppix, a Prism 2.5 based card, Kismet and this tutorial you can see how easily your WEP could be compromised. The Flash movie is a step-by-step capture of the entire process, capturing 160mb or so of data to grab the WEP key and it has a beat you can dance to. Link.

Now when you are on the road you can look up a free hotspot quickly and easily right from your iPod. No, the iPod isn’t wi-fi enabled (yet). wiPod uses the Notes functionality of the iPod OS to store the database in an easy to use format. Link.

Interesting, I need to check this out. Some cafes and retail stores in Seattle this week will begin individually marketing products and services to bypassers in Seattle using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. The first target group is visually and hearing-impaired individuals who can benefit from positioning and navigation applications added to the system. Other possible applications might be for tourists who might want guidance in the downtown Seattle area… Data about the customer can be mined and sold to the retailers, Donohue said. It can also be used to personalize marketing and map customer behavior. Link.