We are here with Nina my fiancee and the two boys, Tom and Leo. We are staying at a huge hotel called the Fontainebleau. It is the ultimate Miami hotel. Only its renovation it´s supposed to have cost a $1bn and they brag about it. Kids love it. Nina seems to enjoy it as well. I alternate. I don´t usually go to hotels and this is the mother of all hotels. It´s gigantic. Crowded. But some of the restaurants, especially Hakkasan are world class.

Here are some random thoughts about Miami. It is hardly an intellectual place yet it seems to be populated with visitors who want to get away from highly intellectual places, for example NYC. It is fashionable when it wants to be but it is also one of the cheesiest places on earth. Sometimes the changes from fashion to horror happen in seconds. The forecast these days is incredibly monotonous and yet the weather changes all the time. People say it´s unbearably hot. I instead think that what is unbearable is how cold every place is. Americans don´t seem to want to manage the weather, they want to defeat it. Miamia is probably the city in USA with the most empty homes at any one time. Especially now in the summer, the low season. Many more people want to have a home here than live here. Spain where I live has a similar problem.

Here are some pictures. I especially liked the beach architecture, the art deco. But I was surprised at the mix of not so much the old and the new, but the fancy and the abandoned. From South Beach to the Fontainebleau, a walk I did this morning I saw the simplest Days Inn type hotels next to amazing new developments like Satay, the W, and others. One plus, the water is amazingly clean for being a major city.

Pictures were taking with my favorite small camera a Canon G10.

Share This

Here is an early beta of the iPhone application.

Share This

It can be useful for elderly people in need of assistance or shop owners who want to alert someone of a robbery.

The only equipment needed is an RF emitter, a receiver and a Fonera with the OpenWrt firmware.

Share This

The Zero CO₂ project’s objective is to sail around the Mediterranean using clean energy. The yacht is powered by an electric motor driven by a hydrogen fuel cell. It also uses renewable energies (solar, wind and hydro) for on-board power.

The boat is equipped with a fully integrated laboratory and will capture important scientific data on man-made pollution throughout the 10 month expedition. It will travel around the Mediterranean coast as far as Turkey on a journey that will commence in March, 2010.

Share This

As a congressman, Sanford voted in favor of three of four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, citing the need for “moral legitimacy.”

Pathetic.

Share This

But now that the selections of the obvious apps are ready, I was looking for other killer ones - apps to sync folders or send large files from computer. Point here is that instead of being glued to your computer as the huge files are sent, say when you use Pando, your router does the job sending that family video in HD while you are away from home. Moreover you can then access your Fonera from the office say to see how your downloads, uploads, torrents and file transfers are going. But while Pando is great and so is Dropbox, FilesOverMiles is the piece of cake type of app that could be a killer in the Fonera 2.0. It just sends files from browser to browser.

Now we have to see if it´s Open Source and if we can include it in the Fonera. But try it. It is a brutally simple way of sending files from your browser to somebody else´s. Pity it seems to be capped at 1GB and that it only works if you open ports which is not something everyone knows how to do. Other than that you can also get lucky as FilesOverMiles tries to pierce your ISP´s firewall and sometimes succeeds.

Btw we are launching the Fonera 2.0 in USA and UK in September. Sorry that it is so far only available in Continental Europe and Japan.

Share This

Here is one article from Barak Kassar to begin with.

The following two are in Spanish: One by Mariano Amartino and another one by Santiago Bilinkis, co-founder of Officenet in Argentina, a great e-tailer that was sold to Staples.

These are some great pictures from Rodrigo Sepulveda. And here are some others from Eduardo Arcos and Alec Oxenford.

Share This

eRepublik is special in that it has been created openly and interactively from a very early stage. The founders began with a live prototype that they improved based on user input. This, combined with its heavy emphasis on user generated content, has allowed eRepublik to quickly and cost effectively grow into a rich gaming experience.

While I am not an investor in eRepublik I am a friend of Alexis Bonte and it is great to see your friends doing very well in tough markets. Alexis was a the Menorca TechTalk.

Share This

Aircraft in transoceanic flights should send location, heading, speed and other relevant data by satellite; automatically and every few seconds. They should be capable of downloading real time weather data to increase the efficiency and safety of flights and pilot autonomy. Weather radar is a very primitive way to fly, especially without ground support. Weather radars from the plane should be contrasted with satellite info received in the aircraft. There should also be a secondary means for voice communication, also by satellite to be able to quickly contact an airliner crossing the ocean. Furthermore, making these flights safer should impact insurance costs, and increases in operational efficiency would lower fuel consumption.

In this post I present a few possible solutions to these problems. Of course, this is only one of many series of measures that can be taken to make these flights safer.

Voice communication and transmission of important flight data

The Guardian Skytrax 3Xi is a device that transmits GPS location, altitude, bearing, wheels up-wheels down, time and velocity information over the web, where it is accessible through a secure internet connection using IE or Firefox. A transoceanic airliner requires the 3Xi model, which works with external antennas and costs $2395. It can be configured for a message frequency of your choice (eg. one message per minute). The messages are $0.06 each, and there is a one-time activation fee of $110.

This device comes with the Maptrac system for tracking and reports, which costs $39.95 per month. Maptrac is a web-based mapping tool requiring no server, software, data purchase or IT investment. It allows airlines to see all their aircraft simultaneously, whether it be their active or historical tracks. There is a screenshot of Maptrac in action below. Guardian Mobility, the makers of the Skytrax, also have a Google based mapping system called Rimtax which can be used on iPhones and Blackberrys.

The Skytrax is offered standalone and in a package including a satellite phone. This package, including the additional antenna, goes up to about $4000 plus installation.

The cost for installation and certification of this equipment on an aircraft like the A330 is about $8000. The certification required is called a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) and only needs to be done once for each aircraft model. After that, the cost of installation would approximate $2000.

It is also possible to send location, speed, etc. via Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) messages. ACARS is a protocol in aviation communications for the transmission of short messages between aircraft and ground stations via Very High Frequency (VHF) radio or SatCom (Satellite Communications). This can be done for about $0.15/message. At one update per minute it would amount to $108 for a 12 hour flight.

Most planes on transoceanic routes are equipped to transmit ACARS via satellite, so this option involves no certification or hardware upgrades. It is still however more expensive than the Skytrax solution. Assuming two flights per day, one message per minute and the aforementioned prices you would save around $3900 a month by using the Skytrax 3i instead of ACARS. According to this, the Skytrax system is the better choice.

Receiving real time weather data

Real time weather data would require about 512kbit/s. The commonplace SatCom equipment in transoceanic flights uses a band of the electromagnetic spectrum named “L band“. Bandwidth here is too low and expensive to handle the data rates required for this application.

The “Ku-band” is another band that has been used to provide passengers with broadband connectivity aboard commercial flights in the past. It isn’t certified for flight critical functions but it is ten times cheaper at about $0.5/mbit of transmitted data. The intention here is not to replace primary, safety critical systems; but to complement them. Hence, Ku-band could be a suitable type of connection to download real time weather data.

The problem here is that although most of the aircraft that fly over the ocean are equipped with L-band avionics, very few are equipped with the systems required to connect to Ku-band signals. And they are expensive: About $0.25M each. However, this cost can be recouped by selling broadband to passengers, generating ad revenues from adverts placed for the passengers, more efficient flight routes and the lower insurance costs that should be associated with safer flying.

Share This

I used to think that fanaticism and hatred tempered with age. I was wrong. The murderer is 88.

WASHINGTON — An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, opened fire with a rifle and fatally wounded a security guard before being shot by other officers.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sources: Shooter is white supremacist (cnn.com)
• Two shot at Holocaust museum (msnbc.msn.com)

Share This