There's an app for that...

Kahless says that Palm’s WebOS is the phone of choice for true Klingon Warriors.  This is evidenced by the recent homebrew app that provides your Palm Pre or Pixi with a true Klingon font as well as a translator to help you write Hab SoSlI’ Quch! in response to your friend calling you a petaQ over SMS.

I’d install this myself, but alas I have no friends both geeky enough and cool enough to have this app and a WebOS phone. I guess that will save Kim some eye rolling though.

Besides, it would cut into my time playing Angry Birds which is surprisingly life consuming—if only because I’m hoping if I ever get to the end of the game, maybe it will tell me what those poor little green pigs ever did to piss off those birds!  They are after all, very very angry, to the point of being suicidal.  Although I guess maybe it’s homicide as you have to launch the birds.  But they volunteer for the duty so there’s still a high level of dysfunctional bird behavior to explain here.

Photo by Andy Martin

Chemists are working on two different approaches to generate electricity from urine.  While your pee doesn’t have enormous amounts of pent up energy, you do have enormous amounts of it.  Collectively, humans excrete over 10 billion liters of the stuff every day.

Gerardine Botte, a chemical engineer at Ohio University, is working on using urine to generate hydrogen, which could then be used in conventional hydrogen fuel cells.  The advantage of urine over water is that it requires only 25% of the energy required to liberate the hydrogen from a water molecule as from a molecule of urea.  This makes the process much more energy efficient.

Even more interesting is the work of Shanwen Tao of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.  Tao is developing an electrolytic cell that directly converts urea to electricity.  The power outputs are relatively low so you’re unlikely to power your home with the family toilet anytime soon.  But it is about the right level to power small electronic devices.

If this works out, you may never have to leave the couch again.  Rather than getting up for a potty break, you just whizz in the phone or the remote or the DVR, or whatever is looking low on juice.  Who says the future doesn’t sound exciting?

Back at the dawn of computing we had dial-up service (with acoustic couplers for my fellow old geeks out there). Sure it was slow, but it was portable in a way that we’ve lost with current data plans. That is, as long as you knew your access number and login credentials, you could connect any device you wanted to the network. Companies even facilitated this portability by providing local access numbers or toll-free numbers so you could connect anything from anywhere you had a phone line.

When broadband came into our homes, by it’s nature it was anchored to a single location. Providers initially toyed with charging for each connected computer, similar to the way the phone company of my youth used to charge for each telephone in the house. But that quickly gave way to allowing home networking and allowing you to connect all your devices over a single broadband connection for a single price.

Then along came cell phones and wireless service.  Initially, as a second phone service, and often a second company, cell phones charged independently from your home phone.  Further, the need for each phone to have a publicly known number and for calls to be connected to the device reasonably meant that each phone was billed separately.  This would have been analogous to adding a second phone line to your house.

However, phones have now progressed to where even calling them phones is a bit of an anachronism.  They are small handheld computers or data devices.  Even voice services, thanks to Skype, Google Voice and other mobile VoIP services, flies over the data side now.  And data networks are inherently organized such that multiple devices can connect without additional service provider overhead, the same as they do in the broadband case.

Further, people are now more likely to have multiple devices to connect.  Sure, they have a smartphone, but increasingly they also have an iPad or Kindle, and maybe a wireless data card for their laptop or a MiFi.  Although one of the largest barriers to people grabbing on to all these tech options is that the wireless providers are still insisting that each device is a separate phone line and needs a separate wireless plan.  There’s no technical reason for this, but it helps them pad their bottom line.

Adding to the confusion is the roll-out of various 4G services.  This means wireless data at DSL speeds.  Given that many people have already tossed their landline phones as a cost saving measure, how long before people start to wonder why they pay for broadband at home when wireless service in the house is just as good?  But under current business models you’d be back to paying to connect every device in your house as a separate billable connection.

At some point, it seems that either competition, regulation, or a maybe a consumer revolt should come along and start consolidating all the data plans.  Voice, texting, television, broadband data, and wireless data are all just different content running over the same network.  It makes no sense to pay multiple connection fees to the same thing.  There needs to be a new pricing model.

Ideally, I want to pay a flat fee for access to the network.  That could be at the family, household, or even at the personal level.  But having paid that fee, I can use data anywhere on any device I choose.  I can talk, text, blog, or watch TV.  Data is data.  Then in addition, I’m fine with certain content providers charging for access to their content.  NBC might choose to offer their programming free and offset that with ad revenue, while the New York Times might charge $2/week to see their articles.  Meanwhile the Travel Channel will sell me a season pass to Man vs. Food.  Then it becomes my choice.

Right now, a great deal of the innovation happening in this country is happening in the wireless application space.  Cloud computing, tablets, netbooks, smartphones are all offering to make our lives more connected with more access to our stuff in more places.  But the advances are being dramatically gated by the lack of affordable data connectivity.  As I’ve said before, the Internet is every bit as vital a part of our national infrastructure as electricity.  We can’t afford to treat it more casually.  And the challenges we face are not simply technical, but are business model challenges as well.

I learned to type on a typewriter sometime after they became electric but before they had spell checkers.  I was never very good at it, but it got me through a metric boat load of term papers. Particularly important since my handwriting has been pretty illegible since I learned to hold a pencil.

In college, I learned to program in a variety of arcane languages all of which depended on entering large quantities of numbers and special symbols into a keyboard.  Touch typing was pretty useless, at least the version I was capable of because I never really got much past the letters and an occasional period or comma.  Out of a sense of self preservation I developed my own technique that involves 4 fingers and one thumb across two hands and requires me to stare at the keyboard while I type.  I can still manage 30 wpm which gets me by for what I do and provides an unnatural source of amusement for Kim who can type 1,530 wpm while looking at me, carrying on a conversation, and knitting an afghan.

Anyway, along came 2-way pagers, smartphones and other things that forced me to learn to type with just two thumbs.  The technique is different enough to require a learning curve, but I managed.  Still, I’d barely hack out a sentence while Kim explained the finer points of why the Celtics have been the dominant force in basketball for the last 3 decades with just two digits.

Well, now we’re up for stage 3.  The Swype technique.  The new Droid X phone is sporting a new keyboarding method where you don’t touch each letter of the word, but rather trace a path through all the letters of the word.  Samsung and HTC are also planning offerings.  This is the method that recently shattered a text messaging speed record. And yes, here’s yet another learning curve, but I’m hopeful as this seems somehow different enough to maybe give me an edge.  Oh who am I kidding?  She’s gonna smoke me again.