# Walking Beacons // 19-8-8

Yesterday my train for commuting back from work was fully packed,
shorter than usual.
I was listening to some radio station and the airport's meteo report
on my wide-band receiver, and as it works up to 3 GHz, I had a look^Wlisten
to the ISM band at 2.4 GHz, where not only microwave ovens live,
but also WiFi and Bluetooth devices. What a packed band it was!
I activated my smartphone (it's almost always on airplane mode),
and I found 86 Bluetooth and 5 WiFi signals!
From where I stood, I could see about 80 people. The coach was a
double-decker, but I doubt these
signals would cross the roof in between.

This means about every person I could see was walking around with
a personal tracking beacon, or some even with several of them!
People don't give a s**t about privacy, for the (IMHO small)
advantage of constantly wirelessly interconnected devices.
Long live headphones with cables!

---

I noticed I had written my last post without any line breaks other than
for paragraphs. Apologies to people who had difficulties reading those
overly long lines!

As I don't want to do much of post-processing for posts written on
the PalmIII, I'm now trying to add sensible hard breaks already while
typing. This may result in some ragged formatting, but that is a
page design feature adding to the nostalgic feeling, not a bug. ^-^

---

Side note about the PalmIII's power consumption:
It's currently at about 25% of capacity on NiMH batteries
(Panasonic eneloop), after *six weeks* of operation.

.:.

*written on PalmIII*