Slashdot Mirror
Handheld Dispatches From (Towards) The North Pole
David D'Angelo writes: "Thomas and Tina Sjogren have take the IPAQ to a new level. You may have read about them on Slashdot in February as they successfully made it to the South Pole. After that they recuperated for two weeks and have been skiing towards the North Pole for over two months and publishing daily dispatches with pictures straight to the web with the help of a Compaq IPAQ and an Iridium Sat phone. They are currently using their backup system as Tina fell through the ice into Arctic waters and damaged one IPAQ. The IPAQs are 3870s with Ericsson Bluetooth technology built in. This communication package is the only system of its type out there. Despite failing upon being submersed, the first unit was able to withstand temperatures well below -30 degrees Centigrade. Check them out as they are now skiing over 10 hours racing the melting ice to the Pole."
Sweet! How much are they funnelling back to VA, anyways?
Someone falls through the ice, and they are worried about an iPaq? Well at last they have their priorities straight. No way Tina was running any sort of Linux distro.
...First Post!
frist post
What is the future of Open Source and Free Software? I asked myself that very question because Open Source and Free Software is the most revolutionary movement today. It is changing everything.
To answer this question I went to slashdot.org, this website, since slashdot is known across the internet when it comes to Open Source and Free Software. I read the stories and the comments. I read the comments at the -1 threshold because I wanted to read real people's opinions and knowledge on Open Source and Free Software, not the sanitized version that gets modded up. What I found was very interesting.
So, what is the future of Open Source and Free Software? Wideness. That's right. Wideness. This concept of wideness is so powerful that it is invading domains beyond computer software. Take HDTV for instance. It is widescreen compared to normal tvs. TV is becoming wider.
The best examples of wideness are from slashdot of course. First, page widening posts. Slashdot pages weren't wide enough so they have to be widened manually. In the future slashdot pages will be wider.
I also found links to the goatse.cx website. Again, another example of wideness, namely a wide open anus. People who use Open Source and Free Software aren't boring heterosexuals. They are homosexuals, bisexuals, etc. As the goatse.cx website shows wideness is being added to the sexuality of Open Source and Free Software users.
Like me, you are probably excited about this wide future. The following email shows the future is closer than you think.
From: "Larry Augustin"
To: "Company - all"
Subject: Acquisition of latest OSDN holding
As you may be aware, our stock certificates are now unfit to even wipe our own asses in the restrooms. However, soon this will all change with our latest opensource acquisition. This is such a revolutionary paradigm shift that we have decided to coin a new term for it: "WideOpensource". The following letter was recently sent to the management of our prospect:
From: "Larry Augustin"
To: contrib@goatse.cx
Subject: Open source business opportunity
Dear Sir,
We at OSDN are continually looking to expand our growing network of opensource-related web real estate. Through intense analysis of comment traffic on our premier site, SlashDot.org, we have determined that your site holds considerable value to the community at large. As recent IDC surveys have shown, your site is one of the 10 most popular on the Internet. That, combined with its decidedly opensource bent, makes it a prime target for OSDN banner ads, our flagship product. We would like to acquire your site and employ you as a member of our OSDN team. Please consider this carefully, you aren't likely to see an opportunity like this every day!
Love,
Larry
ESR Resigns from VA Board of Directors
--
VA Software Corp. (NASDAQ: LNUX) has silently severed
its ties with board member Eric S. Raymond, among others. No
mention of this was made on any of VA Software's OSDN news
sites.
Raymond, who was responsible for "[representing] the
interests and values of the open source community", confirms his recent change of status on his homepage.
What a fucking horid story.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
It would be more impressive if they were laying CAT5 UTP cables as they go, for a regular ethernet connection.
My north pole just dispatched all over my keyboard. No communication errors.
Hmm.. how far can you ski in two months?
And you have taken grammar to a new level. (I'll let you guess whether that level is up or down...)
You could have a StrongArm 333 Mhz chip! For just $19,995 you and a loved one can fly to the north pole and run your PDA at blazingly fast speeds! Play solitaire like you've never experienced before. (or, if you have TWO iPaqs, PocketQuake)
after two weeks of rest, they began
skiing from the south pole to the north ?
Impressive indeed. No wonder the IPAQ
got wet in the process.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I think what everyone really wants to know is exactly how far can you overclock an IPAQ when all the components are at -30 C.
Great, so we can use those here in Finland also..
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
They should've taken these as well.
rant/
This just underscores a long time bitch of mine - when the heck are we going to see reasonably tough electronics? Every watch I've ever owned has been waterproof; why the heck can't they start building other stuff that way?
I understand that a PDA is a bit tougher to waterproof than a watch (I design waterproof electronics for a day job), but it's about time somebody made an attempt. I've just started using my Palm as a flight log for my paragliding - my old logbook was stolen along with my truck; the advantage with the palm is that it gets backed up all the time. And it's smaller than my old logbook. Plus a whole lot of other good stuff - navigational programs, books to read while I'm waiting for conditions to improve, etc. I use an aluminum case, and it has survived several violent crashes so far (no paragliding related ones yet!), but it certainly wouldn't have surved a drop in the creek I had to ford last weekend.
So come on guys, get with the program. Not every pda user lives in a cube.
/rant
They must have a neato solar charger or something... where can I buy one?
Was anyone else disturbed my the "melting ice" portion of this? Is the ice supposed to be melting that far up??? I know that it's summer and it's getting sunlight 24/7, but I didn't think it had that great of an effect on the ice! Can anyone here enlighten me?
Also, I read a while back that (as usual) the north pole is moving...south-west, I believe it was. I wonder if future expeditions will have to take this into account...though I'd assume that the pole moves incredibly slowly...but would a voyage to the "north pole" mean to the magnetic north, or to the top-most point on the planet?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
the first unit was able to withstand temperatures well below -30 degrees Centigrade
...). I would start the car when it was -25C, then ran back inside the house. The headlights would NOT work. When the car warmed up, the circuit would warm up, and the headlights would go on. Really handy :-)
It withstood the temperature, but it did not run at that temperature. Most chip have an upper and lower operating temperature. -30C is too cold to run at.
I once built a curcuit that operated my headlights (fog lamps, running lamps,
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
What the hell. These people can trek across the two poles and have internet connectivity, yet I'm tied to my house every time I go on-call. There's just something insane about this.
If there were only wireless enable starbucks on every street corner.
http://www.bonington.com/piclib/life_5.htm
The team uploaded photos and text reports to the website using some custom Newton software. And all that was on a 20Mhz ARM 610.
->www.chuma.org, ranting and Newtons, what more could you want?
"People don't realize the difficulties involved in doing daily entries and pics from a mobile Polar journey.
-The tech must be treated like a baby, tediously protected from cold, moisture and dirt. At the end of the day, we are very tired and want nothing else than to eat and sleep.
Instead we must set up a mobile office, keep it charged in all weather, think of something to write and shoot new pics in a pretty monotonous landscape.
At Antarctica we encountered all the tech problems of an ordinary office environment. We had server down situations, software failure, hardware trouble. In addition to that, the slots filled with wool, the screen was dripping of our sweat, cables broke and interrupted sat phone connections cut our dispatches. We had to create spare parts, patch between systems, think of unusual ways to solve arising tech problems without the aid of a workshop or tech suppliers.
Our fingers froze, our minds went blank but we still had to do it.
Our mission was not a single day without a dispatch and at times we worked until the early morning hours to accomplish that."
The team used wearable computers for the tech work. They also tried out PDAs. These personal devices are much lighter than wearable computing, and require less power. The question was however if the devices would withstand really cold temperatures. They did, and so the Arctic expedition will rely solely on PDAs.
The sun in the Arctic will stand lower than it did on Antarctica, especially in the first month of the journey. Charging possibilities are limited and so the PDAs are the only choice for the unsupported expedition.
The team will use Compaq Ipaq PDAs with Ericsson Bluetooth technology for wireless transmissions
- solar cells, sat phones and a digital camera. There is a custom made ExWeb software that allows off line editing work and instant publishing, this eliminating the need of a web master and keeping transmission costs to a minimum.
The technology experiences drawn from the expeditions have been valuable to the Military, Fire Fighters and other people working in rough conditions.
Some of the wearable technology is tested for space flights.
For consumers it is valuable to know that new technologies like "Bluetooth" not only work - but work in the fiercest of conditions.
At around the same time we see reasonably tough nerds to use them. :)
Does anyone know how water proof zip-lock bags really are? The question is very relavent, as one solution to preventing this sort of problem ( getting water damage ) could be carrying the iPaq, or any other PDA, around in a zip-lock bag and keeping it in there while scribbling down notes. Sure it doesn't look very 'cool', but I am sure the temperature is the only thing that needs to be cool in that sort of environment ;-)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I mean that's like saying "Edmund Hillary took a paper notepad up Mt Everest."
There was a great article earlier this year on slashdot about a guy who put his palm pilot in the oven to dry it out. Sure it melted the thing out, but you never know.
I'm curious. I know what bluetooth is and how it works, and what it was designed for.
But...
Can anyone point to any actual useful uses it's been put to so far?
Note: Internet access for a laptop is NOT a useful purpose. 802.11 is much better suited for such things. The same goes for handhelds.
I mean uses like your cellphone talking to your pda talking to your laptop; pdas able to exchange information just by being in the vacinity of each other, etctera.
A cordless mouse that uses bluetooth is not useful. We could do this without bluetooth.
Same goes for keyboards.
Anyone?
I highly doubt that the Ipaq is kept outside the clothing dangling un-insulated in the cold. the LCD will freeze and crack at temperates well above the -40. Keeping on the person inside the coat and using it for 5 minutes in the open air WILL NOT get the lcd down to even near freezing from the balmy 60-70degrees it enjoys inside the coat.
Leave one outside the tent overnight tied to a pole so snow cant cover it and insulate it... then I'll be impressed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I bet they have some problems skiing in Peru...
It's pretty obvious you dont know what you're talking about. Read their website and the dispatches.Try to imagine what it's like before you open your mouth. Btw, do you grab a cab to McDonalds?, or does your mommy take you?
Here's the link to see Tina Sjogren.
For the link wary: http://www.thepoles.com/images/661EvTi.jpg
I thought she was all fat and clumsy since the web site talks about her falling into the water a few times already. Suprisingly, she looks better and is probably in a better shape than any of the slashdot readers.
Besides that I think that any of the less good-looking slashdot readers would be very unimpressed with her ability to handle high-tech gadgets.
It should have been either her or IPAQ in the water, but apparently she went for both. DOH!
This system is not one of a kind, and it has been implemented since several months before the iPAQ was available commercially. The iPAQ/Iridium combination is fairly standard. In case you are wondering....yes there are iPAQs in hardened/waterproof green cases with break-resistent screens.
"No Comm, No Bomb"
i) cheaper than 802.11b to produce. there was a guestimate that the chip would cost $5 in bulk. Far cry from 11b I'm sure.
ii) Suppose to use less power!!!! That's a big one. If you ever used an 11b enabled pda, then you know what I mean.
there are proper other reasons I can't think of right now.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
..network camera. I just read about this a couple of days ago. Live from the North Pole
The company that makes the linux powered network camera is stardot
it's a good thing the north pole currently has 6 months of light - I've heard that some of them there iPAQs have had issues with their back lights.
Is compaq/HP offering an on-site warrenty to these folks?
----
I didn't post this, a big boy did it and ran away
Similar story about a British explorer who didn't make it to the Pole but emailed a picture of his location to get himself rescued. ( articles are a bit low on techie detail)
3 ,4 417717,00.html
3 ,4 422721,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,427
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,427
"I deny nothing, but doubt everything." Lord Byron
First of all, let me challenge some of your "non-useful" assumptions:
Bluetooth was designed so that the Bluetooth device (read: network adapter) could be very small and use as little power as possible. This effectively means that YES, it is useful for internet access from your laptop, because your cell-phone is not going to be doing battery-powered 802.11 for a couple of hours in the near future. It's not about what the laptop can do, it's about what the internet access device can do.
Of course, since your cellphone has bluetooth, if your PDA has it, you can go on the net with it (and edit your dial list, and dial straight from your PDA, etc).
And if your laptop has both bluetooth and 802.11, it can be usead as a bridge to let your PDA talk to your 802.11 network, and so on.
And, of course, it makes sense to use bluetooth for mouse/keyboard/whatever, since you have on all your devices anyway. Why bother with another radio protocol? Besides, you can now use the keyboard to type into your PDA if you want to, no cables involved, no adapter needed on the PDA.
Now for the creative usages:
Redefining "phone": Your phone can now be just a black box that sits in your pocket/briefcase/backpack. Your phonebook is in your PDA, of course, and you talk into a wireless lightweight earset/mic combo. The phone is nothing but a relay station and gateway to the cell network.
Ubiquity:Bluetooth adapters are cheaper and smaller, which means they can be embedded into mostly whatever you want. Your camera will have it, so you can send pictures immediately to your PDA and even store them there instead of in the camera. And you can even print them from your PDA, all you have to do is go near a printer.
Information Exchange:Yes, you will be able to exchange information with other people using bluetooth from your PDA/cellphone/laptop/whatever, even if it's a different brand. More, you will be able to go to a museum and download info and a set of links about a particular piece on show. Or get detailed specs about a video camera you see on a radio shack shelf.
The uses for any technology are unlimited, as long as standards exist. Standards are the basis for interoperability, and that in itself is the basis for competitionand innovation, which in turn stems progress.
If one takes the "oh, we already have a protocol for that, I don't care if it's proprietary" approach, we would never have had TCP/IP and would be stuck inside millions of little islands running OSI and SNA. Or, god forbid, NetBEUI.
free the mallocs!