Category: London

Here’s an interesting trend: I am seeing more and more laptop usage in the Tube these days. To the New-Yorker in me, it would be unthinkable to get out my laptop and start typing away on any kind of public transport — the rest of the passengers in the car would start fighting over who got to keep your hard drive. But hey — this is London and people are little more polite I guess. Anyway it got me thinking about how to bring WIFI connectivity underground. I figure you could do it with a kind of wireless mesh network set up in the tunnels. The Tube drivers know when to stop and go because of signal lights that are placed set distances from each other along the track. You could put a network node on each signal light and voilá — ubiquitous connectivity underground. I wonder if this could be done with “off-the-shelf” equipment?

The London Science Museum is featuring an exhibit called “Dead Ringers?” which highlights the problem that discarded phones pose to the environment. By their count, 1712 mobiles a day are upgraded, and if not properly recycled they can leak poisonous materials. It’s a great little exhibit but unfortunately it didn’t do enough to highlight how people can recycle their phones now. For example, at Vodafone (in the U.K. anyway) there is actually a program in place to accept phones for recycling at any Vodafone store where any money made goes to the Autistic Society. One of the coolest things in the exhibit though was a showcase of some technology under development to make phones bio-degradable and/or easier to recycle. Of particular interest to me was an exhibit of a prototype Pasta-based circuit board. Personally, I find this very exciting because it combines two keen interests of mine: mobile technology and Italian food. Lots of other cool stuff on display as well – I highly recommend checking out their site and visiting the exhibit.