I’ve been following the news from Mars this morning.  Everything looks good, but the rover won’t be heading out for another 7-9 days.  You’ve got to power up and check out the skateboard, after all.  Here are the links that I have been using to keep myself informed:

• Mars Exploration Rover Mission at JPL
• SPACE.com: Mars Rover Special Report.
• NASA TV (Real Player link)
• Maestro is a java-based program for viewing data from the rover.  You can currently download it and play around with data from the test/sim environment.  You should be able to feed it real data within the next day or so.  #maestro on irc.freenode.net can keep you up to date.
• Press release images from JPL’s MERM site. (these are smaller images)
• NASA Planetary Photojournal: Mars has larger TIFF files from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
• Another JPL MER site has links to photos and news updates.
• Raw images from Spirit.
• Via Joi Ito, animations by Maas Digital are quite amazing.  I had seen the EDL part before, but there is some awesome animated footage of the rover coming to life and moving about.  Tres cool stuff.

The MER is sceduled to wheel around mars for 90 days, but scientists hope that the rover will last longer than that.  Sojurner was designed to last 30 days and lasted around 90 IIRC.  Another rover will be attempting bounce-down in less than a month in a different location.  Hopefully we can decrease the near 2/3 failure rate of Martian probes.

Wow.  It looks like NASA’s latest rover managed to touch down after a Rube Goldberg-like landing sequence.  There was a lot that could go wrong in those crazy six minutes.  I’m glad everything went as planned.

It’s going to be several days of diagnostics and power-ups.  Release the skateboard!

Yep, windows and tabs have been accumulating again.  It’s time to clear them out:

• UMLet 2 ” is an open-source lightweight Java tool for rapidly drawing UML diagrams, with a focus on a sound and pop-up-free user interface.”
• Edd has quite a conference lineup this year.
• The 8bitpeoples have some awesome retro-fun mp3 albums, including some excellent Christmas interpretations.
• It looks like Groovy is filling out quite nicely.
• I need to set up an account on Mobile RSS so I can keep track of things on the go.
• PDAPortal.us currently lists 463 PDA-friendly sites.  It looks like Opera on a mobile phone would rock with some of these sites.
• Russ lists the apps on his 6600 that he uses all the time.  I need to compile a similar list for my 9290, retro as it is.
• Best. Panoramic of Times Square. Evar!
• OPL Wiki: Dialogs.  They’re currently in the 1.0 release for Nokia Communicators, and should be arriving on S60 in the next few months.  I can’t wait.
• As pointed out on #mobitopia, WiGLE.net is a place to dump and search your raw wi-fi stumbling data.
• Todays Get Fuzzy is funny… and not.  So true.  Right now I’m getting double doses of Get Fuzzy every morning… one in my aggregator and another on the ‘Scratch a Day’ desk calendar.

*Whew*  The buffer has been cleared and culled.  I hope that everyone is doing well in the new year.

Wi-Fi Free Spot is a listing of commercial but free (as in beer) Wi-Fi hotspots.  See also the Wi-Fi Free Spot Weblog.  They seem to have the obvious things listed in my area.  YMMV, of course.

Yep, it’s a few hours belated in GMT-5, but happy new year to all!

Via PCLinuxOnline, Linuxbeginner points to RetroBox.  RetroBox is a website that sells old computer gear for amazingly reasonable prices.  And by amazingly reasonable prices, I’m talking about $25 or so for a solid PII with some RAM and a decent hard drive.  It’s definitely enough to run a fairly modern Linux system on.

They also have amazing prices on used Sparc and UltraSparc systems.  For just under or just over a hundred bucks, you can pick up a solid UltraSparc system.

The only drawback is shipping costs.  I wonder how much gear one would have to buy to make a field trip to Columbus worthwhile…

Jason Bell’s new P900 has arrived.

*drool*

Leo Laporte is now going to be the tech guy for KFI 640AM  in LA.  His new gig from 12-3 on Saturday and Sunday make for a 7 day work week, but what work it is!  It’s wonderful that technology is to the point where someone can do a three hour radio broadcast from their home most of the time.

Speaking of tech, their live stream works just fine from across the country.

Fool.com:

Though the holidays and their emphasis on packages are almost behind us, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) is still in a buying mood. Today, the company announced that it is shelling out $2.4 billion in cash to buy privately held business services provider Kinko’s. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2004.

Wow, that’s kinda cool and kinda scary.  I tend to feel pretty ripped off every time I leave a Kinko’s.  This is probably a good move by FedEx.  It will allow them to compete with all of the Mail Boxes, Etc. that are now UPS Stores.

Overall it has been a quiet weekend, but I have managed to post two things over at Mobitopia this weekend:

• Motorola V300 in short supply… wait for the V600? (posted Saturday, updated Sunday)
• Used N-Gage games trickle in

Via James Robertson (who in turn found it through ISerializable), Dropload allows you to drop off files to be picked up by someone else.  Files expire after 48 hours.  Very cool!

Wow, has it been 10 years already?  I don’t think I was around at its inception, but I’m pretty sure that I started dropping by a year or so after photo.net went online.  I’m glad to still see a picture of George on the photo.net index page today, just like I remember it years ago.

Thanks, Phillip.

Werner Vogels got a rocking Archos AV380 for Christmas.  These gadgets are not cheap, but the quality of video and audio is amazing.

Merry Christmas to all that celebrate!  Except for my cat-induced 4am postings, I will probably be spending most of the day offline.

Happy holidays!

Jeremy Zawodny took advantage of the holidays and did some back seat wardriving yesterday.  It’s reall amazing how different wireless ecosystems can be from one small region to another.  For example, in most residential parts of Montgomery County, Maryland that I’ve casually explored, Linksys access points outnumber all others by a pretty good number.  Almost all of those Linksys APs broadcast thei SSID, hand out IPs to anyone who strolls by, and have no security.

Doc Searls‘ slow-mo wardriving is quite easy around here.  Pick yourself a random residential road in pretty much any lower-middle class neighborhood or upward.  Start sniffing.  Start driving at 5-10 MPH or so.  Within a block or two you should have a Linksys AP calling out to you and offering you an IP when you ask for it.  Of course if it doesn’t give you an IP, setting your IP to 192.168.0.something usually does the trick.  I have found that for the most part, these totally open access points are usually attached to a Comcast cable modem.  I’m not sure if DSL customers are any smarter, or if they just have a lower tendancy towards wireless networking.

Of course wardriving in commercial parts of Montgomery County tend to yield tons of T-Mobile hotspots (there is a Starbucks every few blocks after all) and mostly well-configured access points with some form of encryption.  Of course I said mostly.

Overall this county seems to be pretty wardriver-friendly.