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France. Last Saturday saw the official inauguration of the Paris Wi-Fi project. Free wireless internet connection is available to anyone in the vicinity of one of the 350 antennae covering 225 public places, parks, libraries and museums in and around Paris. The full 400 antennae for 260 sites will be up by the end of the month but the operational 8 Mbits/s announced by the Mayor is said to be closer to 6 Mbits/s says the Telcom SFR, responsible for the network. There’s also a 2 hour connect-time limit and the hotspots around municipal buildings will be up during open hours only. The site that lists the Wi-Fi ‘bornes‘ is in serious need of a simple Google maps mashup like this one: Museums with Free Admission in Paris (any takers?), or maybe they could mash Géoportail if Google gives the civil servants a rash? (possible).

source > Ecrans

Britain. Fon teams up with British Telecom. No new Wi-Fi routers (La Foneros) will be needed, for over 3 million BT Total Broadband subscribers, who can now join the Fon community for free using their in-house router, it was announced yesterday.

The Fon blog is touting for a future ‘Wi-Fi everywhere in the U.K.’ A quick search for hotspots on the BT FON Google maps mash looks bare at first glance, but a location search for my home town for example, tells a different tale. This is before any BT users have decided to activate their Fon membership.

source< BoingBoing

Germany. Well it wouldn’t be a Parade without a little rain. Last month the German government warned against ‘electrosmog’ and advised people to avoid using Wi-Fi wherever possible because of the risks it may pose to health.

The Environment Ministry recommended that people should keep their exposure to radiation from Wi-Fi “as low as possible” by choosing “conventional wired connections”. It added that it is “actively informing people about possibilities for reducing personal exposure”…

“…the most damning (decision) made by any government on the fast-growing technology “.

FUD or food for thought?…

source > Belfast Telegraph

Could be of interest to some, a post from Lifehacker last Wednesday: Top 10 Wi-Fi Boosts, Tweaks and Apps

Last.FM, the UK based, social-music platform - with over 20 million registered users - have launched their ‘Campaign for better music’ with the ‘Now form a band’ web site, designed to be a leg-up guide to the sites and softs that could prove helpful in the promotion of unsigned bands. From the site manifesto:

In the old days, if you wanted a career in music, there were only a few ways to do it. And once you managed to get the attention of a record company, lots of other people – like managers, A&R reps, producers, label executives (even accountants !) – would get involved with your music. Some of those people were great. Some of them weren’t.

Things are different now. Music is changing.

The Campaign for Better Music is here to say: it doesn’t have to be like the old days. We’re going to show you how to produce, promote and distribute your music, without spending a load of money, and without lots of other people getting involved.

…Things are changing in music – you should be a part of it.

Things are changing, the goal posts have moved - it’s true. Now Radiohead have gone the last mile and ripped the rule book into shreds.

In Rainbows is perhaps the most anticipated album of the last five years, but now it’s on its way out, what’s causing the headlines is this:

…what makes In Rainbows important — easily the most important release in the recent history of the music business — are its record label and its retail price: there is none, and there is none. #

Radiohead.com has a redirect to a tailor made site for the album sales. Here, you can either pay for a “discbox,” which will include the new album on both CD and vinyl, as well as an additional CD of seven extra songs and photos, artwork and lyrics, or downoad the album in mp3 and pay as much as you see fit! It wont be available until the 10th Oct. but you can pre-order.Hit me with your memory stick, it’s nice to be a lunatic …

Remembered: Creep winner of the Art category in the FlashForward film festival awards (Boston) last month (you might have seen it before, its been around a while now), from www.lowmorale.co.uk

How do you upgrade to the latest WordPress version with as little effort as possible ? [btw: WP 2.3 ‘Dexter’ was released yesterday, appears to be a fairly big upgrade]

German opensource consulting team Zirona have been working on this and have released a plugin - InstantUpgrade - that looks serious and so it should, when your letting it wipe out files and twiddle with your data base.

Please note: Upgrading a web application is a critical task. Of course we did our best to create a stable and careful software, and we haven’t heard any very few, and non-fatal complaints so far. Still, please be sure to have working backups.

Screenshots of the admin panal - Manage InstantUpgrade - pages.

The time for instant upgrades in nigh, me thinks.

via | rich gilcrest - a good write up by someone who’s used it.

Streamripping, as you no doubt know, is how folk record Internet radio to their hard drives. There’s plenty of available software to do this. A quick search for ’streaming audio recorder’ on SourceForge for example, has links to more than two thousand on-going projects, an idea of how popular it is. An open source project that doesn’t top this list, but perhaps ought to, is StreamRipper. That said, a quick scout on the home page and you could soon have that ‘lost in geekery‘ feeling coming on.

So lets say, you use Last.FM (superb web radio/music recommendation site from the U.K.) and you just want a simple way to record the odd song for off-line listening. You don’t want to faff about with Audacity neither (v.good open source soft). Well there’s a team from Danemark might just have what it is you is lookin’ for, sir.

TheLastRipper can save Last.fm streams to mp3’s, while downloading album cover, appending ID3v2 tags and organizing your music after Artist/Album/Track. TheLastRipper will also help you generate playlists from the data available from you Last.fm account.

Legal? Well, they sum that up on the FAQ with this statement:

That really depends in which part of the world you are living in. As for us, in Denmark, the law is that it is legal to record radio and/or TV, depending on the interpretation of the law.

Whatever. It’s all on the house, needless to say. There is more detail on the legal issue in the Google code page (wiki/LegalNotice).

Just came across the work of Moritz Stefaner a freelance information visualizer and designer from Germany - impressive stuff. If you’re interested in visualization design then take a look at his Thesis page - a roundup of work for his M.A. in Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam.

The FOLDING TIME experiment for web feed data is a more practical and usefull design than I’ve seen elsewhere for feed readers, but then, desktop or online feed readers have a shabby team of deveopers behind them, not a student from Bremen… We’ve seen other visualizations experiments simular to ELASTIC TAG MAP but not quite so well finished off as this one, it seems. The ELASTIC LIST demo of Nobel prize winners shows a clever display method. Stefaner’s LIFESTREAM_MASHUP could give more mashing ideas to some of the those ‘buzzing’ the ‘L’ word.

via|neoformix

Bumped into - Islands of Consciousness from serial Flasheur, Mario Klingemann, alias Quasimondo. Stream of associated images pulled from Flickr tags. Intermingling, distorted photos manipulated in real time by the random soundtrack. Collaboration between Klingemann’s Flickeur project and a musical piece called Islands by Oleg Marakov, a musician and composer from the Ukraine - Got mesmerized.

More mesmer - incubator: Kingemann’s ‘collection of computational craft‘

>> Chipwrapper - set of tools to search the sites of major UK newspapers [BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky News, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times] includes a Google CSE, a Yahoo! Pipe for the Headlines and IE7 / Google Toolbar plugins.

>> Zemanta from Slovenia [one of the six start-ups that won funding at Seedcamp last week] - a ‘content intelligence’ platform that can analyse text and propose relevant links, images, keywords and related content. Could be a handy tool for bloggers (when other languages have been added to the Slovenian version)…

>> EU trains to get broadband internet by 2008: a combination of satellite, GPRS, UMTS and Wi-fi will provide a continuous connection, even at top speeds of 300 km/h, between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne.

>> MyP2P: Dutch live streaming sports site [how legal / for how long?] - might be worth a shot if your struggling with TV coverage of the new season’s highlights… Rugby World Cup, Euro 2008 qualifiers, Champions league etc.

>> BBC IPlayer Will Support Mac and Linux - glad to see ‘Auntie’ came to her senses on that one.

Wi-Fi transmissions across the Tyrannian sea have set a new world record. Habitants of Sardinia can now stay in touch with the Italian Peninsula using a 5GHz WiFi connection that maintains a transfer rate of 5Mbps over a distance of 188.89 miles (304km).

The world record achievement was made possible by the Italian Center for Radio Activities (C.I.S.A.R.) a non-profit association founded by a group of Italian radio amateur operators and Ubiquiti Networks, who provided the XtremeRange5 (XR5) High-Power Carrier Class mini-PCI radio module and 35dBi 5 GHz parabolic dish antennas.

The alignment was made by providing a beacon through a semi-directional antenna (short-backfire 17dBi) on the Sardinia Island and one of the two 35dBi antennas on Monte Amiata, which is about 5,220 feet (1,740m) above sea level.

via | gizmag