Richard Bennett

may be a myth. Rob Flickenger has his doubts:

It all started last Friday afternoon. We were all buzzing about Cringely and his Passive Repeater. What a fantastic idea! The thought that he got one of these near-urban-legend devices working, on the first try, from up a tree, to low-gain panel antennas in downtown Santa Rosa, without a supporting ground crew (or even so much as a site survey), truly boggled our minds. Especially since it’s been a point of debate in various community group mailing lists for months as to whether such a design is practical at the low power level that client cards put out.

Cringeley has been known to pull a little prank or two in the past, so he may be pulling our collective leg again. Linked from Techno-Blog 802.11b.

I found a cool new toy today, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You enter a URL, and it shows you a snapshot of how that URL looked at various points in the past, going back to November or December of 1996. It’s not a complete archive, of course, but it’s close enough; kinda like looking at your old high school yearbook.

are a lot more interesting than without. I set up season passes on each of the NBC channels (local, CNBC, and MSNBC), so everything gets recorded. Watching the show, we skip over all the schmaltzy crap about how the athlete overcame adversity with the help of a good 12-step program and how they’ve dedicated their performance to their grandmother who was eaten by cannibals in Borneo while doing missionary work, the acid flashbacks of the opening ceremonies, and the performances of the former East German secret police hermaphrodites in the 30,000 mile cross-country ski race. So we’re free to focus on the good stuff like the hockey brawls, the lifts in pairs figure skating, and the girl handing her cell phone to President Bush during the opening ceremonies so he can say hi to her probation officer. When you cut out the crap you can enjoy the highspots in about an hour a day which leaves plenty of time to annoy people who stumble onto your web site looking for curry recipes. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Samizdata David Carr doesn’t approve of the Games, and for some very funny reasons.

Bob Cringely wanted to hook his home to the wireless network Sonic operates in downtown Santa Rosa, but Bennett Mountain stood in the way. Here’s how he did it:

A couple trips to Home Depot and about $100 later, I had in hand a pair of double-headed yagi passive repeating antennas tuned for 2.4 GHz. I built two repeaters thinking that, if I could even find a place to put them on top of Bennett Mountain, two repeaters might be better than one.

Now comes the absolute hardest part of this project, climbing Bennett Mountain with two double yagis, a notebook computer, and various implements for attaching the yagis to a tree and to each other. This is the sort of effort most geeks from the Jolt Cola and Three Musketeers school of computing should probably not try. The top of Bennett Mountain is 1.5 miles away, and 768 feet above my house and there is no way to drive any of it.

Ninety minutes later, I found the bronze marker left by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey crew in 1956 signifying the top of Bennett Mountain, but from that spot, I couldn’t see my house or downtown. That required climbing a large oak tree. Once up in the tree, a blue oak, the view was amazing! I could see the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles away, and to the south I could even see San Francisco Bay. Downtown and my house were both visible, too, so I mounted the first yagi and pointed each end in the appropriate direction.

That’s what we Bennetts call “intrepid.” If the mountain keeps you from Mohammed, Cringley lays out the details of his gear here. This was all on Slashdot.