9.04 – The great joke here is along the lines of ‘Evian’ water’s name. The first commercially available bottled water happened to be ‘naïve’ spelled backwards. A little cheeky but not offensive enough to stop its creators from claiming millions of consumer dollars. The latest version of Bluetooth technology introduces some fancy stuff like, “reducing the power consumption when devices are in the sniff low power mode,” and, “allowing role switches on an encrypted link.”

Only after the third revision do we hear what great pun Bluetooth’s creators enjoyed. Danish King, Harald Blåtand inadvertently loaned his initials to the Bluetooth logo. Where Blåtand negotiated between warring parties, Bluetooth negotiates between otherwise incompatible devices with no shared standard other than the Bluetooth standard. Harald Blåtand was remarkably advanced, eh? Hardly. Many sources put his birth in the year 911!

WIKI’s short description of Bluetooth’s origin along with several other sources state that “blue tooth” is a near translation to Blåtand. Our Danish/English dictionary confirms that, yes, ‘Blå’ is blue and ‘tand’ is tooth. So it’s not quite a stretch to imagine the look of this pre-Colgate grinning Rex. In the interest of teaching something other than trivia, here’s some standard information that regular Bluetooth users already know…

Bluetooth can best be described as a very smart, lightning quick card dealer (1,600 cards a second nominally) to whom you give the cards back. Each player at the table represents a different channel and the game itself in the network or ad hoc environment for a user. No matter if it’s a mouse, an ear piece for a phone or a laser emitted keyboard for the PDA, each packet (or card in the game) is sent and returned and the channel (or player in the game) is instantly changed reducing interference greatly.

What kind of information being sent in packets doesn’t matter. The signal is strong and fast and come in low-power and medium power modes changing to cover differing physical conditions (small room, big room, house). The frequency range in which Bluetooth chitters and chatters and ‘deals out cards’ is open and available the World over ensuring an ear piece to work in Hong Kong as well as Miami, Florida. Microchips of assigned devices are immediately recognized on set-up.

Bluetooth is about being productive without wires. The Bluetooth site should well be considered the, “Bluetooth Classroom” of choice. With Bluetooth Version 2 transferring at 3 Megabytes per second, it’s a solid choice for smaller productivity environments like printing from the PDA and using the phone hands-free in newer cars. With over 500 million units at the end of 2005, old Harald Blåtand is somewhere smiling pretty.

8.23 – A commercial around here from Comcast cable services has renewed a little knowledge about DSL and data speeds. For broadband cable, there are several choices you have when deciding how to receive it. Digital Subscriber Line through the phone company (typically), your cable company can transmit a signal through the same wires your television channels travel, and more complex options exist for businesses and remote locations.

Different connections travel at different speeds that depend on many factors. The most important factors are the type of wires used and your distance from the provider. Although electricity would love to move at the speed of light, data is purposely slowed down to prevent burning things like lightning along the way. DSL’s two tiny wires require that it be the slowest of all broadband.

Anything that travels is subjected to a force called attenuation. As something, like light, moves farther from its source, its strength dies out or attenuates. Again, DSL is the slowest player since its signal is the first to attenuate into uselessness. The Comcast comercial features the Slowsky’s; a happily married pair of turtles move as far away from the DSL terminal as possible to get the worst Internet connection possible. See the Slowsky turtles.

Testing your own broadband connection is a breeze with a free test from BandWidthPlace.com’s SpeedTest. Their test doesn’t request that you lower your firewalls and protections like most other sites. My computer at home came in at 2.7MB per second. I had the results ‘explained to me’ and a neat and tidy little clarification page came up here. C|NET also offers a good tester here. It reported the same broadband connection to be 2806.1 kbps or 2.8MB per second (if you shift the decimal point around).

Both C|NET and BandWidthPlace rate my home connection solidly in the range of a T1 connection which is nice to know! A sparse explanation of various high-speed connections here, and a discussion about that page here at DIGG.com

Where T1 used to be the bragging rite of geeks looking to sound a part of something marvelous, it’s now T3 they claim. According to BroadbandLocators.com, “depending on your location and T3 provider availability, your full T3 service will normally be priced between $3,000 and $12,000 monthly.” So it’s safe to say, “bullshit,” to the faces of folks who don’t fess up to the fact that they’re merely sharing in part of the resale of some big company’s T3.

So this T1 that my home Cable connection exceeds… It’s cost ranges from $300 to $1,200 a month and I’m paying about $22.95 for the next five months thanks to a promotion. Then it’s about $40 a month. If you’ve had a bug about starting an online Internet business or wondered what advantages you have in your favor to working from home, start with some knowledge about the value of your dollar. Test your connection speed, switch if you like and enjoy working in your PJ’s with coffee close at hand as I’m doing now….

Really dry further studying on DSL attenuation: From Harvard; A Forum at Whirlpool.net; At UserTools.Plus.net; and pages of DSL testing stuff from TeleByteUSA.com