I've always liked Bob Cringely. He used to throw great partied at MacWorld. Plus, he built his own plane (or tried to).
And, he's turned into an interesting technologist.
I think he's onto something with his perspective of "little wireless platforms which run linux". The LinkSys WRT54g he talks about is one such platform.
There is also a version of the WRt54 which uses a different CPU but has two POTS phone connections. It needs to run linux.