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The Fonera is a compact green and black box. The multiple antennae betray the presence of high-speed wifi-n under the hood.

I’ve blogged about FON recently, but didn’t go into too much technical detail. The magic box behind it all is the Fonera router.

The latest iteration is the Fonera 2.0n, which unsurprisingly uses the new 802.11n standard for higher speeds and better range wifi. That alone is probably worth the £79 pricetag, but this beastie actually has a lot more tricks up it’s sleeve. Features include:

• A seperate public wifi signal, giving the owner access to all FON hotspots worldwide.
• USB port for adding storage, printers, soundcards, etc. With storage added the router functions like a NAS. With a printer added it works as a print server. Or you can plug in a USB hub and do both.
• Transmission bit torrent client.
• Download tool for file sharing sites (eg: Rapidshare).
• Facebook, Picasa, Youtube and Flickr uploaders.
• Plug in a 3G dongle and it’ll create a wifi hotspot from it. So you don’t even need a landline or ADSL connection to use it.
• An open application framework for extending it’s capabilities.
• As a “self-tweeting router” it has it’s own Twitter account, and will tweet you when your up/downloads are done.

On top of this it has all the usual router functionality such as DDNS, QoS, static and dynamic IP addresses, etc.

Overall it’s an impressive and flexible device, and FON seem committed to keeping it an open platform and encouraging people to play about with it. Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to someone looking for a simple cheap NAS and torrenting solution. It does have one major drawback though. Bizarrely, it doesn’t include a modem. You will need an ethernet ADSL modem or a modem/router as well. However, I was surprised to find how well it played with my old BT Voyager modem/router. It’s just a pain to have a second box plugged in just to get the Fonera online. For such a feature-packed device it’d be nice if it could handle the ADSL connection as well.

Despite this weird shortcoming, I think it’s a cool device. Access to thousands of wifi hotspots for a one-off payment is a good deal. Chuck in wifi-n and the bucketload of useful features and I can forgive it for not having a modem.

Incidentally, if it’s access to the FON network you want, they also do a stripped-back 2-port wifi-g device that’ll start you FONing for only £29.95, which is a great deal.

Ever since buying a smartphone and a netbook i’ve been on the constant lookout for free wifi hotspots. Paying the exorbitant rates for paid access just isn’t an option. But what if you could get free access to thousands of hotspots worldwide? FON does just that, in a very cunning way.

To get access to FON’s network (which includes all BT OpenZone hotspots in the UK) you need to buy a FON wifi router and plug it into your broadband at home. These FON routers are actually pretty cool devices, and i’ve reviewed one here. Besides working just like your normal router handling your own network traffic, the FON devices also create a seperate FON hotspot using your connection. It’s totally secure and once you’re sharing your own connection you’ve got free access to all of FON’s hotspots worldwide.

To check out the FON hotspots near you, check out the FON maps.

Want to watch the BBC iPlayer but aren’t in the UK? Or maybe you want to watch CBS from outside the US? Tellyport will sort it all out in a no-hassle kind of way.

Different subscriptions are available, starting at €2.99/month for iPlayer, and going all the way up to the lofty heights of €9.99 for the whole shebang, Tellyport gives you access to a proxy server without all the faff. Simply plug your browser into their service and watch away. Nice.

The logic behind the "singularity" applied to razor blades. Personally I think there might be something in this one...

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the supposedly looming “technological singularity“. For the uninitiated, this is based on a principle called Moore’s Law. Broadly speaking, Moore’s Law states that every couple of years, computers get twice as fast for the same cost. The impressive thing is that in the 40 years or so since Gordon Moore first cooked it up, it’s been remarkably accurate, even though the tech has gone through changes he could never had foreseen.

What gets all the singularity nuts excited is the idea of what happens next. According to Moore’s “Law”, computers will get smarter and smarter, until eventually they’re smarter than us, and begin (according to the singularity folks) designing themselves at a rate we couldn’t match. The machines take over, humanity becomes irrelevant, etc, etc.

Except that’s a load of bollocks, and here’s why:

In the real world stuff never continues to grow exponentially forever. Projections based on unbridled exponential growth are the mathematical equivalent of perpetual motion machines. It’s called a Malthusian growth model, after a bloke who made some very dire predictions about world population back in the 19th century. Lucky for us, the complete lameness of this type of model meant that the world didn’t implode under the combined weight of humanity, and the mathematicians went back to the drawing board. The result was a new, better model they called the Logistic model, which acknowledges the idea that even if something can grow at an exponential rate for a while, eventually forces that may have been too small to notice begin to slow the growth rate. This model has been far more successful at accurately modeling real-world processes.

Sure the idea of the singularity is fun, but the less sexy reality is that your wrist watch is unlikely to ever be able to out-smart you, let alone usurp your position at the top of the food chain by creating it’s own army of super-intelligent wrist watches. Moore’s Law will eventually break down, machines will stop getting smarter so quickly, or even stop getting smarter at all.

A picture of me the next time I buy light bulbs

UK electricity companies are in the habit of sending out packs of free energy saving lightbulbs to their customers. It’s one way they satisfy their climate change obligations to government. During the course of a couple of house moves i’ve ended up getting sent 3 packs of four bulbs each, so 12 bulbs in total.

Now, I already had five spare bulbs, so that means i’ve got 17 spares kicking around now. We currently use eight low-energy bulbs around the house, and i’ve yet to have one die in about three years of use. If one blew tomorrow, that would put my usage at 0.042 bulbs per year. If they all blew, that would mean 2.67 bulbs per year. So in the very worst case scenario I have 6.37 years before I have to buy stock up on bulbs again. If you take the lowest estimate, i’ve got enough for 404 years.

I mean, free stuff is great, but I think i’m pretty much sorted for light bulbs now. If you’re listening power companies: you can stop sending them now. If you feel you have to send us free stuff, alcohol will do nicely.

Short, sharp, and straight to the point.

There’s a hell of a lot of random waffle about technology out there. That’s why I like Shot of Jaq.

A twice-weekly 10-minute shotcast from Jono Bacon and Stuart “Aq” Langridge (Jono+Aq=Jaq) they cover a wide range of geek topics. Recent shots have tackled the impending the rise of ARM netbooks, the nightmare maze of ebook incompatibility, and whether Android is living up to it’s early promise as an iPhone killer.

The guys have an obvious rapport, having worked together before on Lugradio. The initial part of each shot is scripted, followed by the random musings of the two presenters, after which the topic is thrown open to the listeners and continues on the site, Twitter and IRC.

So far it’s been good stuff, I hope the guys can keep finding interesting stuff to argue about every Tuesday and Thursday for a long while yet.

Sod going to multiple inboxes, get it all from one place

Googsystray is a notifier gizmo for Google Voice, GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and Google Wave. It sits in your system tray and notifies you by popups or sound. I particular like the way you can set a threshold of new items in Reader before it bugs you. It’s also the only decent Google Voice notifier out there. Having everything combined into one lightweight notifier is nice and tidy, too.

Available for Windows and Linux. No love for the Mactards sorry!

Google have launched the beta of their Chrome web browser for Mac and Linux.

Until now people using non-Windows machines have been forced to use the open source Chromium branch of the project, but now we’ve got an actual release. As a beta it may still be a little wobbly, but probably less so than using daily builds of Chromium.

The verdict so far: it’s nice. Desktop integration is good, and if anything it seems even faster than Chromium. Yikes!

Get it here:

Linux (both 32-bit and 64-bit RPM and DEB, nice one Google!)

There’s also a Linux repository available to get automatic updates. I’d highly recommend this, it’s important to get security updates for a browser.

OS X