The wifi hotspots in Heritage Village are growing. Our New Year's wish is to bring Internet to all seniors in Heritage Village who have yet to connect. The following map shows current "hot spot" locations from which wifi connection is possible with a laptop or other portable device.

The hotspots are too far apart to form a real wifi "mesh" and bring our on-line costs down. But Rome wasn't built in a day - it took a lot of pontification. Meanwhile other wifi mesh communities are mushrooming across the globe. The San Francisco mesh of Meraki units has now reached >200,000 users. Almost free Internet is close at hand.

Watch inHERITAGEwifi grow at the following public web access:

http://public.meraki.com/network/inHERITAGEwifi

Our Village viewed from above

Here is an aerial view of our clubhouse, courtesy of Google Earth. You can find your own place by clicking on image, hold and move the hand, or use the arrows. Zoom in and out with plus/minus signs. Enjoy.


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inHERITAGEwifi in Clubhouse

WiFi has arrived at HVRC! This month we have installed three Meraki units in the Heritage Village Recreation Club as trial . We'll be monitoring the level of interest and bandwidth requirements. The signal is strong throughout the building. The gateway is from the Office Internet connection using BEC as the service provider. These units are too far from the units in Kerry Court to create a wifi mesh, but they give the clubhouse a "wifi Hotspot" throughout the building.

To access the Internet at the Clubhouse, just open your laptop (wifi enabled - or use a $20 wifi adapter card ). Your computer will recognize two networks: inHERITAGEwifi and Kerry Crt. Kerry Crt is an encrypted secure network used by members of the computer Club for trials. It may be re-named and available in the future for registered users. The public wifi is inHERITAGEwifi and is a typical "hotspot" like those available in coffee shops or hotels. It is intended for our residents and their guests. No security key is needed. When you select this connection and use your browser, a green "welcome" screen comes up. Just click and you are free to browse or e-mail.

Make sure you take typical "hotspot" precautions and have a software "firewall" turned on. This public network should not be used for private banking. To keep our costs down, we also ask people to refrain from using it for intensive downloading such as on-line gaming, streaming video, VoIP (e.g. Skype) or watching long movies. We expect that most retirees are happy to just e-mail and browse the Internet for information.

For kleptomaniacs who may find the Meraki units, we caution you that they have no value outside of this network. The serial numbers of each unit and the geographic location are monitored on-line. About every three minutes they "call home" and any disconnection is reported instantly. Users of the network should also be aware that the bandwidth usage is being monitored and computers identified by their internal MAC numbers. There is no monitoring of content - just the volume of up and downloads. Anyone doing excessive downloading or otherwise abusing the free access, will have their computer connection blocked.

So far usage has been very minor - limited to a few test connections. If you are connecting, please drop us a note at postmaster@inheritage.ca . Some future uses of the wifi connection could be:

• Computer kiosk in the library, for seniors without computers who want to e-mail;
• Laptops available on loan for computer training courses.
• Inheritage Magazine and other clubs having on-line access for gathering and distributing information.
• Wireless security cameras for 24/7 monitoring of the HVRC building or even the entire Village.
• Extending the wifi "hotspot" throughout Heritage Village to reduce everyone's Internet connection costs and give Internet access to homes that have none.
• Creating an 24/7 on-line video camera station in the Theatre room, so our Snowbirds can see the events from anywhere.

At present, there are no costs to running this wifi network, beyond what the office is already paying for Internet connection. As usage grows, bandwidth will be about $2/month per Gigabyte. We are investigating ideas how to absorb that cost and keep the network free. Getting a few computer-savy people to join the Meraki network as a "gateway" by sharing their paid-up connection, would do the trick. It costs them nothing but their excess bandwidth that they are not using.

Finally! A Senior Friendly Operating System

If you watched the September 29 episode of Dragon's Den on CBC, you will have met Raul Rupsingh and Stephen Beath and their 83-year-old beta tester, Hazel Brunt from SoftShell Computers. She demolished the resistance of the smart-ass Venture Capitalists when they initially trashed the concept of a senior-friendly operating system. They caved in and ponied up some capital to finance further development.

Based on touch-screen technology and large icons, the new product will make basic computing available to all those seniors who missed the first wave of the computer revolution. The focus is on the four main interests of seniors: Mail, Photos, Internet browsing and Games. No need to learn the complexities of Windows XP or Vista nor will you be distracted by the flood of hyperlinks and pop-up ads that trash the e-mailing experience when using Hotmail or Gmail.
Control is in the hands (or fingers) of the end-user at a pace that accomodates the frailties caused by aging and connects them on-line to the rest of us.

Based in London, Ontario, the company just incorporated last December, but already has several adult facilities as beta testing partners: Chelsey Park Retirement Community, St. Joseph's Healthcare, Windermere on the Mount, Queens Village for Seniors, Parkwood Hospital, and Revera. This is going to be the next big technology success story to come out of Canadian innovation. A computer work station in our Heritage Village Recreation Club would be most appropriate.

Building our "Virtual Clubhouse" with Joomla!

Some 15 people in Heritage Village expressed interest in building of a website for Heritage Village on our a sign-up sheet posted in the clubhouse in January. Our goal was to seek funding from government programs for Seniors and have the structure of the website built by professionals. But funding takes time and we're hot to trot. Basic websites as marketing "brochures" can be built in hours or days, but a dynamic interactive website that can involve the whole community is a complex effort: FaceBook and MySpace have spent $ millions. Our goal is more modest, but still a daunting task if we want to satisfy the on-line needs of 700 people and post archives as well as daily events.

People are asking me, when I'm going to build their Village website. I'm approaching retirement, so no, I don't want to build it alone - that's no fun. We need to pool the talents of our 700 residents: that's how the best websites on the planet have been built, by collaborative effort. Visit Wikipedia or any software forum to witness the power of "Crowdsourcing" (Economist, Sept.6, 2008).

So how do you build a website, collectively? Back in 1996, when the World-Wide Web was just a baby, I built my first website the hard way, alone, using raw HTML code, and uploading to a university server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Then came shrink-wrapped packages such as Microsoft FrontPage to make it easier. But you still needed to know raw code to fix the bugs. I had to buy the software which became obsolete in 2006 when Microsoft stopped supporting it. That's not a friendly task for Seniors. (If you are using Internet Explorer, just go to "View" and then click on "Source" to see what I mean). I had to buy the FrontPage software but it became obsolete in 2006 when Microsoft cancelled further support, putting my second website on life-support. My next website won't be built under the thumb of Microsoft, at my expense.

That's not how most websites are built today. Even professional website designers now use on-line tools called CMS, or Content Management Systems. Once a domain name and host server have been acquired, a website is built by content added in much the same way that you write an article in Microsoft Word, and add pictures. The CMS tool sits on the host server, not on the end-user's computer. Contributors just use their own computers and log on to the website using their regular browser - no new software is needed - no costs but a learning curve. There's still a big difference between a professional site, and what a group of amateurs initially assemble - but that is in the details - and with time, an amateur site also gets better.

The good news for Seniors, is that some CMS software tools are "open source" and thus free! One of the best free on-line CMS tools is called "Joomla!", the Swahili word for "all together". This tool allows people who are not computer programmers, and don't know or care about source code, to contribute to building a site. Joomla! was developed since 2005 by the collaboration of a core of volunteer software programmers assisted by 200,000 forum contributors, world-wide. Such is the power of the Internet. Visit http://www.joomla.org/ to get more information or seach for Joomla! article at http://www.wikipedia.org/ .

I'll have more on how we get started in my next post. Our website will be developed at: http://www.inheritage.ca/ with your help and input. A meeting of interested Village residents will be held shortly.

Names and the Internet

Although not much progress has been made on the website for Heritage Village, I have re-newed the name registration for http://www.inheritage.ca/ , at my expense. Enough people have expressed support for the idea of an interactive website for our retirees and residents that I felt it crucial to reserve the name. Some folks last year were angry at me because they felt I "stole" the name from the Inheritage magazine, the official magazine of the Heritage Village Recreation Club. The goal is to have a website that when built would be an on-line complement to the magazine and be an integral part of our Village life. "Inheritage" was a name that was selected by a Village-wide contest decades ago but never registered or protected.

With millions of websites now active on the Internet, short names have become scarce and some names are now banned. At http://www.mennoniteheritagevillage.com/ or http://www.heritagevillage.ca/ you'll find the pioneer villages in Manitoba and Nova Scotia . http://www.inheritage.org/ is a design studio that focuses on historical preservation organizations. Finding a name that reflects our community and is still available for registration is difficult. "Heritage Villages" exist world-wide, so we need a domain name that indicates our Canadian location. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority in Ottawa, custodian of the *.ca names, no longer allows registration of names containing "village", "town" or other designation that imply a government. When I discovered that http://www.inheritage.ca/ was still available, I knew we had to protect that name.

So how much is an Internet domain name worth? It depends on many factors: brevity, association to a product or place, website traffic (if already in use). There is an active market in names and anyone can offer to buy via http://www.certifiedofferservice.com/ or other sites. As shown in the chart above, for many names, the bidding starts at over $25,000 US, which is why it was important to lock in an available *.ca name for our website. Now if we could all just focus on building a quality site, we'd have something on-line worthy of the name.

Senior-friendly Computing on the Horizon

I have been following the next-generation developments in low-cost "Senior-friendly" computers as well as community wifi. We 're on the horizon of a new wave of technology.

The OLPC project at MIT has failed to live up to expectations with their first low-cost ($188 us) "XO laptop" and only some 600,000 units were distributed to children and geeks, not the billion expected. But a second-generation machine, that looks and works like a book was unveiled in May, 2008, and is scheduled for production in 2010. Meanwhile, the clunky Open-source operating system "Sugar" written by MIT professors, now faces the commercial alternative of a customized Windows XP from Microsoft. Better software and a book-like format, may just be the near-future solution for computer-shy Seniors.

"Senior" has a loose definition, as my wife and I discovered, during our August 2008 treck across USA and Canada. Hotels kick in a "senior's discount" of 10% after age 50 or 55, but if you are 60+ and savy enough to ask for the "SSV" rate, you get 20% discounts. But in the technology area, some baby boomers <65 color="#009900">"inHERITAGEwifi" has been on-line but essentially dormant these past few months, awaiting new technology developments and community acceptance. We're looking at the next generation access points and directional antennae. The back-end software monitoring system has been upgraded and we're looking at alternative and cheaper hardware as well as Open Source software solutions.

The free Internet access is still accessible for Kerry Court homes and others near Diana Park to Cherry Blossom Lane. The bandwidth is throttled but sufficient to use Google Earth, web browse and e-mail . It is not sufficient for excessive downloading, streaming video or VoIP. The splash-page logo for inHERITAGEwifi comes up once per day, per user.

While in B.C., I had the opportunity to visit Gerry Bakker of Liveport Co., the most knowledgeable fellow in Canada with respect to setting up a wifi-mesh. Since June 2007, he has set up low-cost Internet access for hotels and motels at more than 100 locations across Canada. Thank him for the free wifi connections you can now get at many Choice Hotels and at the 250 room Blackfoot Inn in Calgary.

Gerry's efforts can focus on the technology issues since installation requires only the consent of the hotel owners - free Internet to all their customers is a killer sales-pitch. Our efforts to bring low-cost high-speed Internet to Heritage Village via Wifi has the daunting task of convincing 360 households, numerous condo boards and a skeptical computer club. The Village naysayers already announced it can't be done. They havn't tried out inHERITAGEwifi.

Professor Catherine Middleton, Ryerson University published a review of community Wifi in June, 2008 at the International Telecommunications Society Conference (Montreal). Our efforts with a Meraki wifi-mesh in Heritage Village received mention. But opportunity to be the first adult lifestyle community in Canada fully connected to the Internet, everywhere, 24/7, is fading fast.

Wifi: Enabling Tool for Seniors ?

I havn't posted a new blog for quite a while - I was too busy with making progress in the real world. Some of this progress related to technology issues for Heritage Village: low cost, user-friendly computing and Internet access. Before Christmas I told you about the One-Laptop-Per-Child program which made world-wide news, including two articles in the Economist magazine. My XO laptop arrived in January, and I spent the next two months testing it out via a Meraki wifi mesh over our local community with the help of neighbours.

Technology can be a great enabler for people restricted by age related problems. My neighbour Richard (in photo), on the other side of our cul de sac has no Internet access and is wheel-chair restricted because of a stroke some years ago. But he still has a keen mind, and with a background in military radio, a keen interest to explore new wifi "radio" technology. Our goal was to determine if the rugged little XO laptop, costing under $200 and designed for children in third-world countries, could also be an enabling technology for Seniors.

The XO comes out of the same MIT labs as Meraki wifi mesh technology, and has a built-in router and rabbit ear antennae that can create a wifi mesh with other units, or join any "hot spot". The XO laptop easily connected to our own wifi mesh, which was fed by one DSL link and 4 mesh repeaters. Normal home wifi routers would not have been able to span the distance. Our prototype public wifi generates a "splash page" (above) which showed up on the XO with a strong signal even inside Richard's home. Most "municipal wifi" systems can't do that!

The small size of the keyboard and screen was not an issue - but the unique user interface "Sugar" and the other open-source software was. We discovered, like the reviewer for the Economist, that this laptop was not ready for prime time. The concept of a very rugged small laptop for e-mailing and web browsing - with the ability to "mesh" via wifi, and convertible into a tablet was great. But without an operating manual, with bug infested beta-stage software and with non-functioning keys , the XO laptop was an exercise in frustration for even a seasoned computer user: certainly not yet suitable to help children or seniors new to technology.

I re-flashed the operating system twice with upgrades, downloaded from the OLPC website, but by end of April, I decided to abandon the project for now. The open-source community is still working on bug fixes, and perhaps the other 300,000 XO laptops distributed to date, are getting better usage by now. We'll monitor the XO technology development, but we're also looking at other low-cost computing solutions.