It's 9PM at the homestead, and the coyotes are yapping their heads off not far up the canyon, driving the neighborhood dogs nuts. Bet that doesn't fit most folks' image of this place in the world...
9:11:39 PM    

So the WaPo discovers a 'new' cellular data technology and gets the vapors, and the story rattles around the tech blogosphere in a rather uncritical way. Congrats are undoubtedly due to the flacks at Lucent, Verizon and Monet for scoring the placement, but it's actually called 1xEvDO (evolutionary data only) and it's not really news unless you've ignored everything happening in East Asia, the current home of cellular systems innovation. TechDirt Wireless gets it right, though.

1xEVDO is a Qualcomm CDMA flavor building on their 1xRTT (CDMA2000) standards. It's already widely deployed in Korea - hence the Samsung pocket PC/phone blogged by Gizmodo and is the basis of the J-Phone systems driving DoCoMo crazy in Japan.

Other than the WaPo's shortcomings as a tech rag, there are a few things to gather here:

• Qualcomm CDMA flavors and carriers using them seem to be quite a ways ahead of nominal '3G' standards and carriers in successful deployments, and figuring out what real customers will accept in services and pricing.
• The acceptence seems to be biased toward the best-efforts 'data only' variant as opposed to the more voice-oriented 1xEvVD voice + data version.
• US carriers lag as usual. Given their costs of spectrum, the notion that carrier priced 1xEvDO is going to seriously impact the deployment of 802.11 with its expectations of free or flat rate megabit service to laptops is seriously offbase.

7:40:03 PM    

It turns out that you could be printing out living tissues, if you reload the cartridges with the right kind of cellular mash!

This may be the most dramatic reapplication of inkjet technology for creating precision structures, but it's far from the only one. Experiments are busting out everywhere, from polymer circuits to displays to biosensor arrays, even metalizing photovoltaic cells (PDF).

The secret sauce is the goop that goes into the inkjet of course, but it's still remarkable what can be attempted with a scrapped out $100 printer and an empty cartridge. Best if it's an old Epson, though, because their piezoelectric technology poses fewer chemistry problems than the heat-driven approach uses by HP and others. Look here (PDF) for a survey of the best inkjet to use in your precision fabrication experiment.
3:57:46 PM