Cory Doctorow links to this project to use bicycle-powered WiFi networking as a telecommunications bridge for Laotian villages. A demo is planned tomorrow, Tuesday, December 2, at 10 a.m
at the Jhai Foundation, 921 France Ave., San Francisco, CA.

I'd love to eyeball this somewhere on the east coast. I can think of a number of rural applications for the technology here in the US (and a number of other places) as well. Cross it with voice over IP, and you've got instant low-cost telecom infrastructure for nearly anywhere.

It's this type of application that Linux is really built for–an open-source, low-cost way to use technology to help people. This is why it's so important that the Linux kernel runs on a 486, on a small footprint–not just because it makes a nice set-top box or PDA operating system.

My colleague Dave Carr went to Africa a month ago to cover the UN's use of temporary telecom infrastructure for peacekeeping operations. The UN doesn't have as low a budget as the Jhai Foundation, but it certainly is cost-constrained. It could easily put a juiced-up version of this technology to good use, as could many governments and non-governmental organizations.

Of course, Microsoft is trying through lobbying (and other efforts) to keep too many governments from taking that route…

I went with my two boys to watch The Matrix: Revolutions last night as a break from the story I'm working on.

I never saw the second “Matrix” film; my older son filled me in on the details. I'm sure I'll see it on DVD when it comes out, just like I did with the original. But even without the full reference points of “Reloaded”, I was able to just unplug my brain and enjoy the film.

My kids enjoyed it, too, though I suspect they were less enthralled with the cinematography than I was. The fight scenes were even more absurd than the original; Jonah, my younger son, said he thought some of the Neo-Smith fight scenes were torn directly from Dragonball Z (which I had to concur with). He thought they were “cheesy.”

I guess people flying around, running into each other at supersonic speeds, making craters in the pavement and such could be seen as “cheesy,” detached from the complete look and feel of the film. It wasn't exactly stunning dialog, either. But it was fun. And I'll get a lot of mileage out of my Agent Smith imitation with the kids for months to come…