I got myself a midrange smartphone (motorola defy 250$), went looking for the cheapest sim only plan (3$/month for 60minutes talk) and an unlimited dataplan (13$/month). Since I have unlimited data I don't use text (whatsapp, gtalk, facebook messenger, etc whatever floats your boat) and I hardly use voice as well; skype or even better tethering and video skype on my laptop (the defy doesn't have a front facing camera). In my case having internet on my phone means that I can reduce on all other phone costs (talk and text), so I don't feel it is paying internet twice. I have now (albeit a bit slower than at home) unlimited internet everywhere I go. If your country does not provide such a service upgrade your country (if debian based try: sudo apt-get update 21st-century)

Probably a step too far, but there is a group working on an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies. Basically they designed/build a low cost eye-tracking device and open sourced it. If you still have hand-control you want to focus on that, but once that's not an option any more http://www.eyewriter.org/ might be interesting, especially because it is designed by/for the creative industry.

There are some caveats on this KML export, for instance you're not allowed to bulk export data: "Also, you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude coordinates."
This is a vague limitation; can I get all my tens of bicycle paths back and what about the tens or hundreds friends of me did etc.
I do understand that entering 'public' data (where roads are) is different from private data (gmail). So the DLF is doing a good job on the latter, but I'm curious about the former: user contributed public data. I can see the result of an added road by user X, so why can I not access the raw data?
There is an interesting discussion going on on Ed Parsons (google) blog http://www.edparsons.com/2009/09/liberating-your-my-maps-data/

I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker. Right now the 'community' adds raw data like streets & locations but 'only' get back PNGs with colors representing streets and locations. Granted this is enough for most people. But Openstreetmap has been doing similar work and allows users access to the raw data, resulting in totally different uses than just simple PNG-maps. It would be awesome to tap into the raw mapmaker data and combine it with raw openstreetmap data for for instance routing, vector based maps for mobiles (smaller!) etc