Personal Servers, Bluetooth, and Key Fobs
Posted by Doug Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:12:00 GMT
The project I’m on at work is basically creating a customized PC fit for use in an Operating Room. It takes an amazing amount of effort to put pieces-parts together that the FDA thinks is OK. Our “infant mortality test” for the constructed machines uses a USB memory stick with all the tests on it. The manufacturer plugs the memory stick in, (assuming all is well) we automatically recognize the device and run the tests that are stored on it. It’s a fairly nice solution. The point of sharing all that is I now have in my possession a 64MB USB key fob. I had been toying with buying one personally. My thought was to put things like my PGP keys, my big list of usernames and passwords, and other paranoid stuff like that. Of course, that would pretty much mean that I would need to have the key fob plugged in any time I was working at my machine. I’m too lazy for that. I’m already agrevated to plug in power, network, and external speakers on my notebook when I change desks. It’s the main reason I don’t use an external mouse, keyboard, or monitor. So, I’m having a hard time coming up with a good use for these USB key fobs. There’s just not enough space. What you can store in that space isn’t worth the effort. My boss likes to use them for sneaker-net. Most of our machines don’t have floppy drives. So tranfering data is pretty easy with the key fobs. With all that in mind, I’m reading about More promiscuous data exchanges with strangers on my favorite news source The Register. It looks like there are several projects under way to build a device like Apple’s iPod, but with bluetooth and zeroconf/Rendezvous. What this gives you is something that can store many gigabytes of data with wireless access and very little setup required. Yum! I’ve always felt badly about all the personal data I keep on my company laptop. I’d love to pull it all off onto an iPod. Something like this would be great! Of course what they’re talking about is using it as a pocket Napster for music sharing with people around you. That’s cool too I guess. Wired magazine has an article called Feel Free to Jack Into My iPod about a “trend” for strangers sharing iPods. I guess the novelty is listening to what other random people are listening to. We’re a fairly disconnected society for all our interconnectedness. What I mean is most of us get in our cars and drive to work by ourselves. We socialize with the people who’s desks are near us. We drive home, put the garage door down and don’t come out until morning. I think a lot of us pine for the days of “Mayberry” where people recognize each other as they walk down the street and stop to talk. I guess this is a good way to overcome that. There’s a new article on Wired called TunA Lets Users Fish for Music that calls jacking into strangers’ iPods “so two weeks ago”. It’s basically talking about the same stuff this little note is. I guess I like the idea of jacking into someone elses iPod better just because it’s more of an intimate social thing than anonymously peeking into someone’s music list.
For those of you who don’t know, my primary “axe” is an 
