RIP Mark Hoekstra

Mark Hoekstra, a young Dutch guy, passed away last week, after suffering a heart attack. He was only 34.

He hosted the geektechnique.org website, informing the world of his ongoing projects and hacking together of electronic gadgets.

His death is a great loss for the Open Source and hacking community.

RIP Mark Hoekstra, you will be missed.

Ironkey : secure USB key

Ironkey as a robust, secure and tamperproof USB key, that stores your data with hardware encryption, remembers your passwords, contains a portable version of Firefox and can be run over by a car or get wet without loosing your data or stop functioning.
It even protects your data from being stolen : when someone fails 10 times to supply the correct unlocking password or when someone tampers with the housing to get access to the electronics inside, the USB key starts self destructing.
Don't expect a Mission Impossible style self destruction with a voice counting down and a lot of smoke. The self destruction sequence is hardware based and erases the flashmemory, which renders the USB-key unusable afterwards, so watch out when you forget your password or mistype it a few times.

With the Ironkey, you can carry all your personal information completely secured. All your passwords are stored on the key, so you don't have to remember them and you have them with you all the time. This enables you to use different strong passwords for all the websites you use, which is much more secure than using the same simple password for every site you ever visit.
Because there is an imbedded version of Firefox running on the key, you can use it on computers that don't have Firefox installed and you don't leave sensitive information like cookies, stored passwords and surfing history on that computer.

Unfortunately, the USB-key only works with Windows XP and Vista. But the site announces they are working on a version that works on Linux and Mac too.

The basic version has a storage capacity of 1GB, but 2 GB and 4 GB versions are also available. At this moment the shop on their website doens't ship the USB-key outside the USA, but maybe it will be available with other retailers.

Apple iPhone comes to Europe

The Financial Times reports, Apple has signed contracts with Orange, O2 and T-mobile for exclusive use of the iPhone on their networks in Europe. This means the iPhone can only be used on the networks of these providers and not with other mobile providers.
In June, when the iPhone was released in the US, iPhone users could only use their new phone on the network of AT&T. Apple had signed an exclusive contract with AT&T for a two year period.

Initial release of the iPhone in Europe, is planned for the autumn. But it will only be available in Germany, the UK and France. The iPhone will be released in the rest of Europe, in the beginning of next year.
For Belgium this means the iPhone will probably be available in spring 2008, and only on the Mobistar network, as Mobistar is part of the Orange group.

Slurpr

Last week I came along a device, called Slurpr, on the blog of Geektechnique. The creators called it 'the ultimate wardrive box'.
It is designed to access up to six wireless networks, in order to accumulate the bandwith of the wifi's it is connected to and get a massive total available bandwith.
Although wardriving and accessing other people's private wifi's is actually forbidden, this is still a very cool gadget.

It seems other people on the internet have noticed this device too, as this webcomic already mentions the Slurpr.

Gadget keyboard

Optimus Maximus sounds more like the name of an Emperor or warlord from the Roman Empire, but actualy it is the name of a very cool keyboard.
On first sight it seems to be a normal keyboard, with some extra colourful buttons. But what makes this keyboard special is the buttons. A small LED-screen is fitted into each button, making the keyboard-layout fully dynamic. The keyboard can have azerty, qwerty or dvorak layout, but can also show Cyrilic, Arabic, Chinese or Hindi characters on the buttons. All buttons are fully adjustable and you can add your own (moving) images to each buttons.

This keyboard was in a development stage for quite some time now, but starting this week it can be pre-ordered. The first 200 to order the keyboard will receive it in the beginning of december 2007.

There's only one small drawback to this very cool gadget keyboard : it's priced approximatly at 1250 €.

Google's April Fool : TiSP

Today I read a story on Slashdot about Google launching a free wireless broadband service, called TiSP. A link of how it works was provided, leading to a page on Google's website.

On this page was a picture of an installation kit and instructions on how to get your wireless network to work. Going short : You have to flush a cable through the toilet, into the sewage system and connect one end to a wireless accesspoint. The other end is picked up by a Google engineer, located somewhere in the sewage system, connecting it to a large and fast fiber optics network.

It sounds all very promissing and it is presented very professionaly, so it seems almost believable, but it is somewhat unrealistic and inpractical to flush a cable to get wireless internet access. Combine this with the date the story was released (april, 1st) :
This must be Google's April Fool's day joke. Very funny!