I accidentally deleted one of Nitin’s comments before it got approved, this was a response to one of my posts about hardware, musing about USB, Ethernet, and how much autonomy a device should have:

“Did you get a chance to look at my imgizmos site?
I basically went USB and offloaded all intelligence to the PC.
In fact the USB device only operates a relay based on the PCs commands.
The PC gets its command from yahoo IM.
What I am getting at is that a device connected to a PC needs to have very little intelligence since the PC is way more powerful.
You probably only need smarts in the device if it is not always connected (in which case it cant bring in twitter/I messages anyways).”

Thanks for the comment, Nitin.  I used the power of the PC for the past couple of years (via USB), but have since decided that independence from it is a very good idea.  More and more people are moving to laptops as their primary PC, which are on standby when not in use.  And there is a trend toward no PC at all in several people I know!  iPhone, Blackberry, these are enough for them.  So not even any home internet connection.

The Ethernet idea is based on the assumptions that many people have high-speed internet connections at home, and that modern routers have more than one Ethernet jack.  So a little custom gateway, using the one-way method I discuss elsewhere, is the simplest thing I can think of.

But I have also looked at a Bluetooth-cellular-internet path through smart phones.  This wouldn’t be bad, if more people had data plans, and writing gateway apps for phone OS’s didn’t have so many wireless-vendor-imposed security barriers, and Bluetooth had better range, and making BT connections wasn’t such a headache!