This is not confirmed, and a speculation, based on the observation that when you shop for music at allofmp3.com, you are directed to the music.allofmp3.com subdomain – where I could swear that before they simply used www.allofmp3.com – can anyone confirm or deny this? Maybe we will soon see videos.allofmp3.com or movies.allofmp3.com…

Picking up the Register’s story, it seems Linksys has done a really neat PR coup – they have launched their own WiFi phone, and called it iPhone. As you know, there has been a lot of hubbub in the Macosphere the last few weeks about a supposed mobile phone to be launched by Apple, even with rumors of large orders to Taiwanese OEMs. It looks like Linksys beat them to the punch!

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 are here to stay, and replace Morse, right? Maybe not so fast.

When disasters such as Katrina strike, modern digital communication networks fail – and this is a fact. Generators can only give juice to power-hungry cell networks for so many hours, and that is if the generators are working (and have not been stolen!). Usually, in these scenarios, initial status reports, help requests, and coordination attempts come from none other than the amateur radio community, and in many cases, it comes in…morse. When your expensive Motorola phone stops working, a radio ham will build a QRP (low power) transmitter with nothing else but a few capacitors, resistors, and coils, power it off whatever battery he can find (or even a solar cell), and start sending out dashes and dots. The reason for Morse code? It stands out above the noise, and thus makes faint signals much easier to interpret.

Remember the famous SOS, Save Our Souls, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, …—…, which was sent out by the Titanic before its final trip to the bottom of the ocean. If you have a radio ham friend, give him a hug, and ask him to please keep proficient in morse, if only for when the bad times come.

Personally, I think it is right to remove it as a requirement for obtaining a license, knowing Morse will be something to be proud of. A couple of stories related to Morse – in the movie “Enemy of the state”, starred by Will Smith and Gene Hackman, the ultra-high-tech surveillance satellite used by the NSA to track a prey is actually seen sending out the letters ‘CQ’ in Morse…these stand for ‘attention airwaves, I have something to say’. Nice touch from a good friend, Steve Uhrig, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago (more on this in a post coming soon) and who was the technical advisor in the movie.

The second story is in the movie “Space Camp”, where I can only remember Lea Thompson, and is about a space shuttle that is launched into orbit with a bunch of kids from Space Camp on board. For some strange reason, the long-range radios hadn’t been installed (uh?), and so one of the kids actually starts sending out Morse to mission control, by flicking a switch on the shuttle that toggles a lamp on some telemetry panel down in Houston.

Today I was throwing old stuff away from my parents-in-law’s house, when I came across a Casio PB-1000 personal computer, which belonged to my wife. She told me ‘oh, that’s just a calculator I used at school, it used to be good for trig’. In fact, it is a very capable machine (in its time, now your TV’s remote has more processing power than this thing!), it has 8kB of RAM, an RS-232 and floppy drive port, graphic touch screen, and runs for 55 to 100 hours on 3 AA batteries. What really strikes me opening the device is that the keyboard is very similar to the ZX81′s, with all the most used BASIC commands overlaid on each key, and accessible using the shift key. Here is a picture of this ancient device, which brings back many fond memories, such as getting Pong to work:

There is a wealth of information about the PB-1000 on Andreas Wichmann’s site.

Starting to think about removing Engadget from my gReader subscriptions. Why? It really really annoys me that all the links in their posts are to…themselves! You read some interesting article, and try clicking some of the links, which take you right to other Engadget posts or sections. I consider this to be selfish, self-centered and simply wrong. When you make a living writing stuff about other’s products and services, the very least you could do is drive some traffic towards them.

A perfect example is this post, where they have 8 links in the text, and all of them go right back to Engadget. Even when they mention Skype they link to their own section on Skype. At the end of the post, there is a short, meaningless ‘Read’ link that takes you to the external article. What does Engadget gain from compulsive self-linking? In my opinion, this policy makes the site look like a link farm.

So, the great news over at TechCrunch today were 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 towards GMail’s terms & services, and check whether there are any provisions to exclude or include, explicitly or not, the scanning of all incoming and outgoing email from these other services. Maybe Google will also scan the contents of the additional email services you add to your GMail account to send you targeted ads. Maybe Google will have even better demographics by tying the IP addresses found in the headers of all the additional emails with their own database of registered users. There is a saying that nobody sells dimes for 9 cents, it’s a rather good saying to move your wallet by.

Any lawyers in the audience?

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 happening.

We are currently forced into placing our toiletries (gels, perfume, shaving cream) into a small clear plastic bag, presumably because the small clear plastic bag will contain the brutal force of a liquid explosive going off inside it. Actually, the explosion would not be that spectacular, as The Register explained.

I happened to travel to London from Barcelona on the 20th, but on flight BA477, the early morning one – had I picked the later flight at 11 AM, BA478, I would have been on one of the aircraft contaminated with Polonium-210. On the way back that afternoon, we flew out of Gatwick, as the Heathrow flight was full…which happened to be BA479, also a contaminated flight. Near-miss on both trips.
Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance, but which emits alpha particles, which travel slow and cannot even penetrate the human skin. This makes it very difficult to detect, and since a dose of 1 milligram can kill a human, it is very easy to conceal and transport many lethal doses, for example, inside a pen. Delivery to a victim can be through water or food, inhalation, or an open wound. It’s unlikely a terrorist would start placing little pellets of Polonium in the food trays delivered during a flight, but he could empty one of the sub-100cc bottles he conveniently carried onboard in the clear plastic bag in the lavatory, a place likely visited by most passengers during a long flight.

The next obvious question is – how easy is it to obtain Polonium-210? Very easy, actually. Although it is a byproduct of nuclear reactors, United Nuclear sells license-exempt quantities to the general public. How easy is it to obtain Polonium-210 in toxic quantities? Not that easy – a lot of hype has been passed around the media regarding United Nuclear, but as their special note states, you would need to spend $1 million and order 15.000 samples to have a toxic amount of the stuff. Samples ordered are produced on demand at a reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

We should not worry too much about getting a whiff of Polonium-210 on our next flight, but we should raise against the draconian “security” measures imposed by panels of would-be experts. We are not realizing that the terrorists are winning one battle, which is to make us live in fear and paranoia, when the actual chances of dying in a terrorist attack are smaller than tripping over on the sidewalk and fatally hitting your head on the concrete. Maybe we should outlaw sidewalks…