New Hanover County, North Carolina, just rolled out Super Wi-Fi, which is its actual name, not just a patronizing euphemism I'm deploying because I think you can't handle "a new Wi-Fi standard operating in the 'white spaces' between 50-700Mhz, where previously only television stations were allowed to transmit."

Aside: here's a very accessible primer on what Super Wi-Fi is and why you should care about it.

This could mean super fast wireless connections for the county's residents, and also the potential to connect to Wi-Fi towers that are miles distant—something that is impossible with conventional Wi-Fi, mostly because the power of normal Wi-Fi transmitters are limited by the FCC.

From the press release:

Wilmington was the first city in 2008 to make the successful transition from Analog to Digital Television. As a result of this transition, the city had early access to the broadcast spectrum “white spaces” that emerged from the shift. These white spaces are ideal for Super Wi-Fi deployment since their physical properties allow for stronger signals that provide better penetration and allow Wi-Fi to travel further distances than more common, traditional Wi-Fi networks. A subsequent trial of the Super Wi-Fi network took place in 2011.

There's a bunch more in the release about how Super Wi-Fi is the greatest thing since penicillin, but I have to temper the hype a bit by referring to an earlier piece in Tech Review by Scott Woolley that notes that Super Wi-Fi can't really live up to its full potential, at least as a medium for long distance connectivity.

Under government rules designed to protect local TV stations from harmful interference, high-power Super Wi-Fi signals (up to four watts), which can travel for miles, must give TV channels a wide berth. Low-power Super Wi-Fi signals (less than 40 milliwatts) face fewer restrictions.

The result is that while there are 48 channels potentially available for long-range Super Wi-Fi, zero or one channel will be available for long-range use in the places most Americans live—so Super Wi-Fi networks significantly bigger than today's home Wi-Fi networks won't be practical.

So it turns out that most of the spectrum that the FCC was trying to free up for Super Wi-Fi remains unavailable. That hasn't stopped companies like Microsoft from creating WiFi hardware that could take advantage of a theoretically more-liberal policy on the part of the FCC, so hopefully this is one case in which the technology will push lawmakers to act.

For more on this rollout, check out New Hanover County, N.C., First in Nation to Deploy ‘Super Wi-Fi’ Network.

CNC toaster / 2D thermal printer cc Windell Oskay

Update: Tim Maly has published an excellent counterpoint to this post over at the Tech Review Guest blog.

There is a species of magical thinking practiced by geeks whose experience is computers and electronics—realms of infinite possibility that are purposely constrained from the messiness of the physical world—that is typical of Singularitarianism, mid-90s missives about the promise of virtual reality, and now, 3-D printing.

As 3-D printers come within reach of the hobbyist—$1,100 for MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic—and The Pirate Bay declares "physibles" the next frontier of piracy, I'm seeing usually level-headed thinkers like Clive Thompson and Tim Maly declare that the end of shipping is here and we should all start boning up on Cory Doctorow's science fiction fantasies of a world in which any object can be rapidly synthesized with a little bit of energy and raw materials.

This isn't just premature, it's absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what's going on at present is pretty cool—whether it's in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces.

But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a "mature" technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter.

Let's start with the mechanism. Most 3-D printers lay down thin layers of extruded plastic. That's great for creating cheap plastic toys with a limited spatial resolution. But printing your Mii or customizing an iPhone case isn't the same thing as firing ceramics in a kiln or smelting metal or mixing lime with sand at high temperatures to produce glass—unless you'd like everything that's currently made from those substances to be replaced with plastic, and there are countless environmental, health, and durability reasons you don't.

Advocates of 3-D printing also neglect entirely the fact that so much of what we use continues to be made out of natural substances, and for good reason. By any number of measures, wood is pound-for-pound stronger than steel, and the move toward natural products for packaging suggests that the strength and affordability of paper, bamboo and even mushrooms mean that in the future there will be more and not less of all of these.

The desire for 3-D printing to take over from traditional manufacturing needs to be recognized for what it is: an ideology. Getting all of our goods from a box in the corner of our home has attractive implications, from mass customization to "the end of consumerism." With stakes like those, who wouldn't want to be a true believer?

Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I'll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact.

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Sure, it's a janky Photoshop, but you get the idea: The Atavist Platform will soon publish to more formats than any of its competitors.

The Atavist Platform for publishing enhanced ebooks is what Apple's iBooks Author program should have been. Out this spring, this Web-based tool for transforming any collection of words, images, sound, video, and other media could be the key to unlocking ebook publishing for the rest of us. Which is either the Ragnarok of traditional publishing or the dawn of a democratized, blogified new age of books-as-apps.

I got a more or less exclusive look at the Atavist Platform last week at Science Online (which is kind of like Burning Man, but for science journalists) and the ambition and potential scale of the project just about popped a blood vessel in my brain.

When Apple made its big announcement about creating software that would make it easy for anyone to publish an enhanced ebook, I tweeted that Cupertino had just dropped an H-bomb on the business model of companies like the Atavist, which currently generates a significant portion of its revenue by licensing its competing platform to publishers and other institutions.

My preview of the Atavist Platform illustrated just how wrong I was. In contrast to Apple's iBooks Author software, which will only let you publish an ebook in the iBooks store and comes with a content license so draconian it makes Dear Leader look like a doting uncle, the Atavist's solution will work for any computer with a Web browser.

The Atavist is best known as an app that sells enhanced long-form journalism, and the Atavist Platform is the company's effort to make its internal publishing content management system available to anyone.

Here's the crazy part: This system will publish any enhanced ebook you make with it to just about any platform you can imagine, including the Web. Here's a screenshot of the still-very-much-in-progress platform back-end. Check out all the options to the left of the red arrow.

Here's the full list of platforms The Atavist's consumer-facing platform will publish to:

• Kindle

• Nook

• Kobo

• iBooks

• iBooks Enhanced

• iOS App Store

• Android

• the Web

Let's put that in context: Right now Adobe and WoodWing are charging magazine publishers something like six figures just for a system that will transform their magazines into apps that can be sold through Apple. And magazines are basically just enhanced ebooks. Meanwhile, companies like OnSwipe are trying to become the de-facto system for publishing content to tablets—but only on the web. Companies like Arcade Sunshine, whom I've written about before, are also limited to Apple's App store. 

The Atavist Platform, meanwhile, promises to do all of that, and then maybe turn its competitors' bones into bread when it's done.

Granted, this isn't at all the way the folks at the Atavist characterize their business—it's just my interpretation of the disruptive potential of what they're up to. I spoke with Olivia Koski, a producer at the Atavist and one member of its tiny, five and a half person staff, and she said that "we want to make money, but we also just want to share our tool with people because we're really excited about it." Silicon Valley plans to upend every business model five minutes older than theirs and business cards drenched in status-seeking, this ain't.

The Atavist Platform is a classic example of a team coming up with a solution to their own problems and then figuring that other people might want to use it, too. The company's founders have magazine and publishing backgrounds, and include Evan Ratliff, a contributing editor at Wired, Jefferson Rabb, a programmer and designer who built sites for top-shelf authors, and Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at the New Yorker. Most people know the Atavist as a publisher of long-form journalism, and that aesthetic pervades their platform.

The Web view version of eBooks published with the Atavist Platform, which I only saw briefly, has a clean design and seems to stick to the river-of-text-plus-interstitial-multimedia format that characterizes a lot of what the Atavist has published so far.

I suspect that the Atavist's format is in a way the secret sauce of the Atavist Platform, and one of the reasons that such a small team has been able to create a system that can push to content to nearly every device you'd like. While Adobe has had to contend with publishers wanting to faithfully reproduce complicated print layouts on tablets, the Atavist is obviously committed to the text itself—hence the availability of many articles from the Atavist, sans multimedia, for a buck less as Kindle singles.

The Atavist is actively seeking beta testers for its platform, says Koski, and they can sign up at atavist.net/beta.

If the team can pull it off, it doesn't seem like the Atavist Platform will be remain limited to authors who would like to use it to sell Atavist-style enhanced eBooks and long-form articles. The system can handle a variety of content, from timelines and maps to full-page images and audio soundtracks—even custom HTML5 widgets.

"We're excited to release [our platform] out into the world because people will do things to it that we could never imagine," says Koski. Those things might include eBook versions of "Our Trip to Disney World," but that's kind of the point. When a team transitions from building tools for itself to building a platform, it's got to be easy enough for anyone to use it—just like Twitter, blogs, and every other medium that has been perfectly suited to a particular class of devices. That Twitter flourished because of the dawning of smart phones, and blogs the spread of the web, just illustrates how high the stakes are as the Atavist and its competitors jockey for position on the latest device to redefine how we consume media—the tablet.