My route from Ronneby to work in Karlskrona usually include the bus rather than the train. In the mornings I wait for the bus from Karlshamn to arrive in Ronneby. It is usually a few minutes late.
A recent feature of the bus line is the onboard wireless network. (See also Webbsurfning på bussen in my Swedish web diary.) Yesterday and today I used my Nokia 770 web tablet to listen to web radio on the bus. Unsurprisingly it did not work without interruptions but I expect that web surfing or sending mail works quite alright for the moderately patient commuter. The first idea I got after trying this was to install a WLAN-equipped computer at the bus station to scan for available “bus networks” (very funny, right?) in order to log arrival and departure times for the WLAN-equipped buses. The SSID in the bus is called BUSSONLINEn, where n i a single digit, so they are easy to spot.
This would be slightly more useful if a similar equipment was installed at the Karlshamn bus station too, because it would allow be to find out the average time it takes for the bus to go from Ronneby to Karlshamn, and then predict when the bus arrives in Ronneby based on the departure time from Karlshamn. That way I would know at what time I need to be a the bus station in the morning with better accuracy than the timetable.
All in all, a quite useless idea! It also made me think of the cute Gumstix computers that could be used for this purpose. I still haven’t found a good enough reason to buy one of them.
I leave it to someone else to figure out how to abuse these networks. You don’t even have to be inside the bus to do it…
You dont realize the significance of what you have written. “a quite useless idea!” Exactly the oppsite. EXACTLY.
What you need to do with a gumstick computer is this: Ride the bus to the next stop after yours. Look for the spot on the road where its 10 Mins exactly past your stop. Put a gumstick on a rooftop, with a motorcycle battery. Have the gumstick sniff for the bus, when it passes, ( 10 minutes prior ). it should Log something to a website, as each bus passes, it can update the website for the departure times. All you have to do is set your alarm to turn on your computer, and see when the last log was.
btw, WHERE IS RONNEBY?