Inside View

Essential Tip When Visiting Europe

Inserting Your MAXroam SIM from Cubic Telecom on Vimeo.

ONE OF THE UNFORTUNATE by-products of a trip through Europe is data shock, the sensation illustrated at left. You can get data shock when you use your cell phone to call people when you are traveling in Europe. You can avoid that problem by getting MAXRoam for your unlocked mobile phone. MAXroam makes your phone think it's still back at home. MAXroam also makes your phone think it's a landline in the city you're visiting. It's rather remarkable because it works just like you'd expect when signing up for an account. Over on the MAXroam website, you set up an initial account for €29.99. That gets you a SIM sent to your postal address along with €5 of initial calling credit. From my personal experience, this is around one-third the price of comparable products that try to do the same thing. I signed up for a SIM and when it arrived at my home, it thought it was both a US and an Irish phone number. Then I went to the MAXroam website where I added a few more numbers, based on where I was traveling. So when I landed in France, the phone thought it was a Parisian number and when at Reboot in Copenhagen, the phone thought it was a Danish number. That meant I could ring ahead to people I was meeting, give them the number and when we were in the same city, they were calling local numbers to ring my phone. (These services were part of the Roam4Free package that preceded the bigger MAXroam offers.) If I miss the call, MAXroam sends me a text message about the missed call and also lets me know if there's a voicemail waiting for me.

My brother and his family will travel to Ireland within a few months, so I'm setting him up with a stateside number that gives him free call forwarding to my home in Ireland. That way, his data centre will think he is still up the street ready to jump into his car to put out fires.

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MAXroam -- "How does it work?"
Maplins have MAXroam handset in their shops in Ireland.

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Four Years Ago Wifi Streets

FOUR YEARS AGO, I stood in John Street, Kilkenny, and got onto the internet because there was an open wifi node at Powers Newsagency. I would stand outside and use the signal once or twice a month and sometimes head inside for a coconut Bounty bar and use it on my Sony Clie or my Nokia 9500 while standing next to a computer there. On some days when walking around Cashel, I can get an open wifi signal too. It's often available while seated on the lovely black benches on the bandstand behind the old town hall. I think all public libraries should offer this kind of information service as well but I don't think it's part of any kind of government strategy. We all lose because of that failure to execute.

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Previously -- "First post from Powers Wifi"

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Stumbleupon Problem

I HAVE A PROBLEM with Stumbleupon that I would like see addressed--it's far too easy to spam your friends with an invitation to Stumbleupon because the service is set up for send email to all  your friends as a default if you give Stumbleupon permission to access your address book. This kind of default spam-all behaviour has caught me out before and has victimised me once again. While my laptop was recovering from a flat battery, I used a four-year old Nokia 9500 to check out a few things that Statcounter showed me. Statcounter discovered hundreds of people stumbling upon a blog post from the weekend so I sniffed around, signed up for Stumbleupon then started seeing a few results. Here's my take on the Stumbleupon service.

When You Decrypt

I HAVE A SET OF SIX password-protected final examination papers that I work on my desktop after I boot up to my college working enivronment. I do not log onto the college network while editing these exam papers because data encryption secures information only when the data remains encrypted. When you unlock the data on your personal computer and decrypt your data, then anyone with physical access to your computer will also be able to access your data. There's another concern I have in my specific case. When I sign onto my local area network, my temporary cached files are stored 35 miles away and part of their transit is wirelessly over an unsecured link. If my local area network collapses, there is a potential for unencrypted data to be left exposed in several places along the route between my desktop and the temporary cache files. Back in the early 90s, I was suspended from a sensitive planning cell (under the tall pine trees behind me at left) after elements of my workspace ended up in a file storage system without data encryption. The security violation was not my fault. It occurred because of a power failure compounded by a data disk failure. Nonetheless, the three weeks I sat idle left seared in my mind an indelible operating principle. I don't open encrypted files when networked and when I have an encrypted file open on my laptop, I ensure I am not running a wireless data connection (wifi or 3G) either.

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John Markoff in the New York Times -- "A Method for Critical Data Theft", 22 Feb 08.
John Naughton -- "So you thought encrypting data on government laptops would make them safe?"
Ed Felton -- "Cold boot attacks on encryption"

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Coloured is Better

FROM AN ITALIAN washing powder advertisement, we conclude coloured is better.

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via Coloreria Italiana.

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Nine Lives in the Sunday News

SOMETIMES A CAT DANCE awakens us in the morning as Jack the stray black-and-white tuxedo tomcat does his aerobic routine (step 4 of 5 at left). He's a stray cat who adopted us two houses ago and he's survived the manic traffic outside our front door for over a year now but his day is sure to come. We're looking out for Jack, and for his potential of truly enjoying nine lives. So we bought the story of finding a proper cloner and that search might take us to South Korea were experts there hope to remake 500 pets a year. "In a happy mix of science and commerce, man's best friend can live and live again," says the story. [1] Getting Jack cloned will cost the whole amount of a college fund I have started saving for Mia, who might have another opinion on the cloning. The South Korean team have definitely produced a genuine clone of a dog. Ra Jeong-Chan, the chief executive of the  Korean company that plans to charge around €100,000 for each animal cloned, expects his company will "receive orders for specialist dogs such as drug and bomb sniffer dogs," but he also plans to clone up to 100 "companion dogs" starting in early 2009. That's why we're looking into booking Jack now. And we hope the tsunami of traffic from Stumbleupon this morning does not add to the queue of cloner customers.

Dial a mobile phone in Ireland

VISITORS OCCASIONALLY ASK "how do I dial a mobile phone in Ireland?" When calling from outside Ireland, you need to add the country code 353 to the mobile phone number and drop the zero in front of the mobile phone number. From some countries, you dial 003538 and the rest of the mobile phone number. From the States, most people dial 0113538 and the rest of the mobile phone number. But clever people often have mobile phones in their pockets that ring when you dial a number based in another country. You can do that if you have a MAXroam account. Sometimes that means getting a MAXroam phone and other times it means just putting a MAXroam SIM into your phone that tells your phone it's actually a landline in another country. MAXroam converts your mobile phone into VoIP service.

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More about MAXroam.

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Glow in the Dark Drummer

WE HAVE A DRUM kit in a dark room where this routine would work well. Enjoy!

Why We're Not Flying American

WE HAVE A FEW trips planned to and through the States before the end of 2008 but we won't use American Airlines. Jake McKee provides us our rationale. Jake recently traveled from American's hub in Dallas to NYC to chat about some of the work he completed at the Lego Company, inspired in part by The Cluetrain Manifesto. But Jake had a problem with American Airlines after his conference talk. The airline charged Jake an extra $359 when he changed his departure date from New York (he moved it ahead) in order to attend his grandmother's funeral. The airline told him, “American reviewed the policy a few years back and decided that since funeral homes, doctors, and clothiers don’t discount their rates, we shouldn’t either.”

Easy Driving

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, occasional gridlock slows you down. What better way to leverage the frustration of daily travel than by some technology that helps you through the daily papers while behind the wheel? With a simple twist-on attachment, you can enjoy hands-free reading while stopped in traffic. The Easy Reader takes the pressure out of juggling things while driving. It lets you relax comfortably without the need to ever hold what you you have close at hand (e.g., coffee cups, jumbo breakfast rolls, your Asus Eee PC 710 ultraportable computer). Confused tourists in Ireland (or savvy country drivers visiting Dublin) can assemble their thoughtfully-folded road maps dead centre on their steering wheels and avoid the annoying voice of their GPS map units. I spotted this clever technology while reading a review from a guy who bought his Easy Reader "six months ago and its great. I can read while driving and best of all, I can move it to a new car every time I crash my current one. So far, I've gone through five cars in six months, and this thing attaches to every steering wheel. My insurance company is threatening to drop me, but without this item, I simply wouldn't be able to fill out my insurance form while driving." That's a good enough endorsement for me.

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Maxi-Aids -- "Easy Reader" for $30. It has earned three five-star reviews on Amazon.com. Get yours today. Operators are standing by.

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