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My US-bought Kindle 2 is providing me with free Internet access including browsing and gmail in Italy over local cellular networks. If this also works in the rest of the countries in the world – or even a lot of them – and if it also works on the Kindle 3, it's a big deal (it definitely won't wor More...
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski uses the apt term "invisible infrastructure" to describe the radio spectrum over which all wireless communication occurs. "Though you can't see it, spectrum is the oxygen of our mobile communications infrastructure a More...
You can hear the gurgles, coughs, and explosions of the Stomboli lava tube clearing its irritable throat before you reach the southwest edge of the caldera at 3000 feet. The guided hikes, all the way f More...
Where in the world are Tom and Mary? We knew we were in the Hertz lot in Catania, Sicily; but our droid X GPS insisted we were in Somalia – not what we had in mind. Mary wouldn't let us sit more than five minutes to let the GPS find itself; good thing because a day later it still didn't k More...
My Verizon Droid isn't going to be able to communicate with cell towers in Europe; it uses CDMA technology and Europe is all GSM. But I've gotten dependent on the droid for lots of things including navigation. In most cases, there's an app for that - even two or three apps.
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Proponents of shutting down Vermont Yankee blithely assure us that "sun and wind and conservation" will replace the more than 5 million megawatt-hours of carbon-free electricity the nuclear plant produces per year. Even without quibbling about cost and subsidies, this replacement is highly unlik More...
Vermont and other rural areas usually trail the rest of the nation when communication technology is rolled out. Not going to happen this time! The fourth generation (4G) of cellular data technology, LTE for Long Term Evolution, will be rolled out in Vermont at the same time that it is first deplo More...
A man sat next to the window of a bus tearing paper into scraps and throwing them out the window. "Why are you doing that?" asked the woman next to him.
"It keeps the elephants away," he said.
"But I don't see any elephants," she objected.
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Last week Geoffrey Norman of Vermont Tiger interviewed me on where Vermont is on Smart Grid and broadband as I retire from my job as state CTO, where I More...
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