[Thumbgps-devel] Project clarification

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 7:28 PM, tz <tz2026 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone remember Metricomm?  The interner from the light-poles.  I still have
> two (user) modems.  They all had their gps coordinates as part of their
> connect data.
>
> A Low-cost, versatile, 'hacker' gps would be welcome many places

I did a lot of work on mosquitonet, which was based on those (Very cool) radios.

from:

http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html

04/18/98: "We plug greg's ricochet into screamingslave and tweak and
hack and get a connection that stays up (mostly). It's connected to a
cell nearly 20 miles away! (this is on a device rated for .3 miles)

The wonderful service of ml.org provides us a stable domain name for
our unstable ip addresses. Now we have mail, basic web service, and
the ability to get to our machines at home from anywhere. Yea! It's
very s l o w, however, 400-800 ms turnaround time. Ugh. Going up and
down confuses the ip_masquarading code in linux 2.0.30 terribly.
Ultimately we just live with a conventional web proxy and ssh into the
main box to get to the outside world.

Fired off an email to ricochet telling them of our amazing success,
they don't believe us, greg put up our chart of the line of sight
modems we detected.

http://www.rage.net/cells.gif "


Yes the GPS feature was darn useful then and darn useful today.

...

While I'm often quite happy with what happened with wireless after
those good ole days...

I sometimes sadly think the structure of today's wireless APs is my fault.
And so do some other people.

http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html

What we'd done then with one access point, and published widely,
became the standard AP.

What we hadn't published, that are everpresent-ly discussed in the
emails that got unearthed as part that court case - things like real
dns, and a web proxy, and bandwidth management - are what never made
the marketplace.

And the lesson learned in 96-98 from the behavior of tcp over such
unreliable wireless links has led to such massive overkill today as to
further break tcp. A little ARQ goes a long way....

> On Mar 13, 2012 9:10 PM, "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 1) jg and I were involved in olpc and one of my long term other
>> projects has been to finish spreading the internet around the world.
>> Doing that in many places gets hard. I was working on mesh networks,
>> and having small gpses actually on routers on the poles/trees/etc
>> would have helped a lot on finding the devices again. (this is
>> something of project creep, see 3). In the long run (after this
>> project!) I'm thinking something 'smile plug'-like+gps.



-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
http://www.bufferbloat.net