Category: Electronics

Solar powered batteries, on your back..

Voltaic Backpack, Solar Backpack, Solar Bag
Now when you are out on the street and your laptop (I haven’t verified that this will power a laptop) is running out of juice, you can plug it into your back and keep on going. Looks heavy but I guess we are stuck with this type of thing until some miraculous battery technology breakthrough comes.

From the site:
The Voltaic backpack is a mobile power source, designed to charge your gadgets without tying you to a power outlet.

Thanks to Betsy for the link.

Hacks for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router

Portless Networks
The other day I put this hacked firmware on a spare router. It was fun to look at the additional capabilities that are offered (such as SSH) but what I would really like to do is be able to modify one of these and put a very light weight streaming server on it. Unfortunately, you need a solid Linux box setup (I have to get to work on that one) to build a new firmware image.

Oh yeah, what is MORE interesting (to me at least) is that Linksys has made available the firmware for their wireless cameras as well (also Linux based). Looking through the firmware image for the WVC11B I was able to confirm my suspicion that in fact they do not offer a true MPEG-4 solution, rather it appears as though they *may* be using an MPEG-4 codec but wrapping it in an ASF file (hence the reason you need the stoooopid active x control to view the stream).

In any case, it is one of my missions to hack a true MPEG-4 solution onto one of these. How cool would that be!

Wearables conference

ISWC ’04
Colocated with IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
From the site:
ISWC 2004, the eighth annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, will bring together researchers, product vendors, fashion designers, textile manufacturers, users, and all other interested parties to share information and advances in wearable computing. We invite you to attend ISWC 2004 and submit to one or more of the following categories: papers, posters, demonstrations, tutorials, and exhibits.