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My senior project, called Controlled Communications, is finally complete. I finished the site on Tuesday and it can be view here.

What we basically did is built a wireless detector/jammer that would detect the presence of wireless communications (i.e. Cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) and then jammer the associated frequency bands used by the particular service. For our project we only constructed a 2.4 GHz band detector/jammer to 1. simply our proof-of-concept design and 2. detour the legal issues with jamming licensed bands.

This put our device capable of detecting/jamming WiFi a/b/g/ and Bluetooth. In short, it worked and we where able to deny service to users within a 10 meter radius. Additional details can be found at the project site.

For a while now I’ve been browsing the market thinking of getting a Smartphone/PDA. First and foremost I filter out Windows Mobile phones. That basically leaves me with the Blackberry, Palm Treo, and Nokia’s OS. I have stayed clear of the Blackberry and Treo because of their massive size (I’m use to my RAZR). I didn’t have much luck with a Nokia phone I had earlier so I really am in a mist of what to do. Yesterday I came across the next series release of the Blackberry, 8800.

This is a very nice looking package and it’s a GSM/WiFi phone. The specs look nice. I will have to go see one in a store before I decide to buy.

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Apple made some significant improvements to their Music lineup on September 12 with the release of iTunes 7, New iPod’s and a new gadget code named iTV. iTunes received a nicely designed upgrade to the interface and features different viewing modes that allows you to “rediscover” your music. All of the iPods received some kind of update including the shuffle. iTV seemed like a cool tool to get multimedia content from our computers to the living room but depending on it’s price point, it may be cheaper to just get a Mac mini and reap the full benefit of a computer on our large LCD TV screens.

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After a couple of months of horrifying laptop stories about Dell laptops catching on fire, Dell has decided to recall 4.1 million batteries, making it the largest recall in Dell’s history. After making this announcement Dell shares fell nearly 2 percent, which just continues to add to their year unlucky mishaps.

The batteries Dell is recalling were all made with cell manufactured by Sony, a very respectable tech company. According to Dell, they issued the recall in cooperation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission because the lithium-ion batteries had the potential to overheat and in rare cases catch fire. These batteries were included in notebooks sold from April 2004 through last month.

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