One reason I’m very glad I’m not covering daily technology news at this particular moment: I don’t have to be a bit excited about Apple’s iPhone. I’ve seen a lot of hype in my time, but this product pretty much wins the gold medal. Fully years of speculation. So much breathless writing since Apple’s pre-announcement that it’s a wonder whole generations of tech journalists haven’t expired in some kind of mass phonoerotic asphyxiation. And Apple, as always, feeding little bits to the hyperventilating masses, like chum to starved, brainwashed sharks: It will have good battery life. OOH! It will get Youtube. OOH!

It’s a phone, peoples. It’s just another step forward in the Internet-in-your-pants scenario. Look at it, use it if it’s useful, and try not to have to wipe yourself off afterwards.

So, kids, there used to be a day when you could go to the store, pick up a television, bring it home and actually watch TV. No, hear me out, I know it sounds like some kind of crazy fantasy, but it’s true. Once, in those wild college days, we even scoured back alleys for old wood-paneled television sets, brought them home and they actually worked.

This weekend we finally decided to make our big investment, and buy a television. We’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica and various DVDs on our laptops, which is fine, but we need to hear some German television. Is the idea. For learning purposes. So off to Saturn we toddle, and invest in an extremely inexpensive hotel-style set. Ready to go.

Naturally, being the extraordinary but generally counter-productive cheapskate that I am, I argue against getting a DVD player, even a cheap one. My laptop has an SVideo out, and sure, the TV doesn’t have one, but there are converters, I see. Surely I can hack something together.

So we get it home (or technically, the delivery guys get it up the stairs). We plug it in. Blue screen. Kein signal. We plug the long antennae cable into the wall. Nothing. No signal. A little research tells us, belatedly, that there’s no such thing as analog TV in Berlin anymore, everything’s digital, which means that we need digital receiver box to get even the basic channels. Grump.

I plug in the computer. After some fiddling, I get a black and white picture. Not really what I’ve been looking for. I shake the antennae. Because, kids, in the stone age, that’s what you did when the color wasn’t there. No good. I find an SVideo help page and follow some software tweaking instructions. No good. I give up, and then H4X0R 4imee finds a few sites explaining that SVideo’s no good with the proprietary plugs they use over here, there’s some color vs. light transmission issue that strands us in the B&W era, unless we open up the connectors and actually solder a couple of pins together.

So there’s where we are. TV, no signal. No DVD-watching. I guess we’re gonna get really geeky on this one, break something, and then have to go buy a DVD player and a digital tuner like we’re supposed to. Did I mention that I love television?

I’m in Vienna for a few days, covering the extraordinary evolution of cocktail robotics. Roboexotica is an art show and technologist’s playpen, where towers of tubes and slides can make a decent mojito, a little blowtorch attached to a bottle can make what is by reports a truly awful (but fiery!) Spanish Coffee, and the debate over what really constitutes a robot goes on fueled by flowing booze. As all debates should be.

I wrote about the event for Wired News here, with pictures here.

Vienna reminds me how much Berlin has lost. It is a city on a grand scale, spared from destruction. Baroque architecture everywhere, streets and facades that demand horse-drawn carriages (which, tourists fear not, are in ample supply), palaces and statuary and gardens and all the accoutrements of empire. I had a coffee in the Central Cafe today, a room that should be in a palace somewhere, and perhaps once was: arching ceilings, marble pillars, full-length portraits of the emperor and his wife. Some emperor. Some wife.

Berlin has none of this grandeur. What was there once was smashed, thanks to P.F. Hitler’s insistency on staying the course. But it was never a city like Vienna, or Paris, or Rome; Germany’s rulers generally despised it as too free-thinking, not military enough. They preferred nearby Potsdam. What Berlin has is spirit, then and now, and that comes out today in the ubiquitous graffiti and vacant-lot Biergartens, rather than monumental architecture. I like that; but I like wandering baroque streets, too. We’ll have to return here.

OK, a quick word of explanation. Last week I flew to Geneva to visit the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building there, which will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world by a factor of about 10 when it turns on next year. Amazing, inspiring stuff, which I’ll write about for Wired News in a few days.

But a story that won’t make it in: When they were excavating one of the caverns for these massive five or seven story detectors, they hit an underground river. Water started flowing in, clearly a bad sign. Since they were at a collider facility, they naturally turned to supercooled liquid helium to freeze the water and get rid of it, before fixing the leak. The resulting ambient temperature drop was so extreme that even the surface of the roads, 100 meters up, were iced over on that warm mid-August day.

Naturally, when I looked at the elevator buttons going down into the pit, and see the bottom one labeled “Hell,” it set me thinking…

Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close to being evicted.

That’s really not what you ever want to hear when you’re a writer. But here’s where the Internet comes in. A plea for funds, rent money and then some, is going around the Net, led by uberblog Boing Boing. A day later, it looks like he’s in better shape. Go Internet. This is where the community flexes its muscles for good, instead of just hype.