It was through a TUAW post that I discovered PosiMotion, who are going to launch a WiFi-enabled GPS receiver towards the end of the year.

They claim things like “Want to keep track of your child or pet’s location? The G-Fi will stay connected to your device for over 100 feet!”, which seems pretty pointless, as they are most likely going to be in visual range. And there would be nothing more unnerving than looking at your child’s position and suddenly have it drop out of range, which knowing how WiFi behaves is bound to happen even at closer distances than 100 feet.

Another supposedly useful feature is to locate your car in case you forgot where you parked it. I’d rather make a note of the parking spot’s number on my phone (you can even just pretend to dial the number, and use the recently called numbers list to recover it), than paying $180 which will let me locate the car…if I can get within 100 feet of it, by which time I’m either blind, or I will be able to see it. Oh, and make sure you park in open spaces, as GPS won’t work in underground car parks.

Honestly, this seems like a pretty bad idea for a product, and at that price, I doubt it’s going to be on many’s Christmas shopping lists.

It was about time to get a professionally-designed theme for my blog. Thanks to James Kendall, whose services I strongly recommend to anyone looking for a theme design, I have the blog I really wanted all along. He provides a fast service, will help you install the theme, and will work with you if there are any small details that need tweaking after you launch your new theme.

Uh? Armenia?

It all started with the search for a nice short domain on which to host my personal blog, which I started in May 2006. Since pretty much all short and decent .com domains are taken, and by chance stumbling upon GoDaddy’s Armenian domain registration service, I though ‘tech.am’ would be a catchy name for a tech blog. This was true at the time, but made the blog lean strongly towards the tech side, leaving my firefighting interests on a second level, where some posts would look out of place in the midst of hardware dissections and software rants.

Last year, GoDaddy stopped offering .am domain registrations, and when renewal time came up, tech.am spent about a week in a limbo, where even they weren’t sure how the renewal could be done. It seems email is not read in Armenia, and my attempts to transfer registrar were totally fruitless. Thus, one of the reasons to move to a .se domain is that Sweden is likely to provide better support for registrants, and I would be spared of the nerve-wrecking renewal time once a year (and no, you could not renew .am for more than a year at a time!).

Off to Sweden!

The tech.am domain has been redirected to the.firehou.se, so please update your feeds to point to the new domain, as I will post everything here from now on.

The new theme

When I first contacted James, I offered a few basic guidelines. The theme should be clean and polished, combine both a tech and a firefighting look, and most importantly, allow me to group posts into two categories, tech and firefighting, with a different look & feel to posts in each category. As you can see, posts in the tech category have a small computer icon and the text is blue, while posts in the firefighting category have a flame icon and the text is read. Feel free to chime in and comment on the design!

I visited this page which lets people give their details to Telefonica Movistar, and supposedly be sent information about the upcoming July 11th iPhone 3G release in Spain, for which they have exclusivity with Apple.

It seems that in earlier versions of this page, as iPhone Alley shows, Movistar showed a counter with the number of people that had submitted their details, but this counter is now gone. Worry not, however, as if you access this URL: http://www.iphone.movistar.es/cuenta_reg.php – it returns the number of signups to date. In the space of time it took to write this, the number went up by almost 30, standing at 141.723. Not bad, I guess the queues will be long at Telefonica stores this Friday!

A freak chain of events led to the discovery that Starbucks and Swisscom Hospitality have parted ways in Spain, leaving the coffee shop experience operator free to offer alternatives (maybe even free WiFi!).

It all started with one of the hottest days this summer, which caused everyone on our office building to change their AC units’ fans from ‘High’ to ‘Warp 6′. This in turn melted the utility’s power cable into the building, and cool joy turned to hot dispair in minutes. With no internet connectivity and rapidly heating office, the move seemed clear – hit the cool Starbucks just below us, while repairs to fit a bigger cable took place.

Upon connecting to the SSID ‘swisscom’, I was sadly greeted with a blank page, a single line of text reading “This service is currently unavailable”, and a “Close this window” button. There happens to be a fairly large concentration of Starbucks in the Barcelona city center, and so I hit another two – with identical results. A few inquiries have confirmed the suspicion.

Swisscom Hospitality remains the provider of WiFi services to many other businesses in Spain, such as the very important NH hotel chain.

[Edit] AustinTX mentions in his blog that I didn’t quote an information source – I got this information straight from Swisscom, and confirmed it with a Starbucks manager a couple of days later.