It’s been a while since any wardriving. I ordered an Axim X30 last week for monitoring the network at work, I decided to run MiniStumbler on the way home to see what’s changed in the last 18 months. I picked up 188 networks over the 40K drive along the highway.

On the weekend the Globecord crew went searching for a cache we’d placed a while back that has been moved around a few times. I’d printed details to all caches but ours, so we didn’t have all the logs to review while hunting. We made a trip into Port Hope, and after a few minutes driving around searching for APs, we connected to the Internet over an open WiFi point to download the missing page. Unfortunately the extra information didn’t help us locate the cache.

Within Toronto, one could probably find Internet access from just about anywhere within a few minutes of searching. The problem is that most of those open access points are probably that way unintentionally, which isn’t a good thing. Free access is a great idea, but it needs to be configured by someone knowledgeable so that the data and wallets of the person(s) who own the AP are protected.

I’m thinking I may toss a second AP up at home so that people in the area can connect.

I took my son Geocaching to find some treasure in honour of Talk Like a Pirate day 2004. I’d been ready to get rid of my Magellan 315 until I discovered I’d left it on the wrong map datum setting for Geocaching. Amazingly enough, the device was quite accurate this time. Armed with a compas to help narrow the search, we were able to come close enough that the search area was a few metres wide at most.

I learned my lesson - it pays to review the settings on gadgets when they cause you to gripe!

Slashdot reports that Firefox usage is increasing. I’d installed it a while back, but hadn’t used it much on anything but my Linux based workstation and notebook. After the trouble I had earlier this week, I’ve switched to Firefox as my primary browser on all machines both at home and at the office. Outlook Web Access doesn’t render properly, but everything else seems to render fine. A few links to files in our wiki also fail, but I suspect that’s a configuration problem.

TWiki has taken hold at the office. The guys on the team bought into it when I demonstrated some basic data stored in it. No convincing them of the value was needed.

We’ve now loaded a fair amount of the general information the department had into the wiki. Better still, some information that hadn’t been written down before but often tossed around in conversations suddenly found a home.

I started using MS OneNote for a while as a central repository of useless trivia both personal and business related. The interface is nice, but has its quirks. Tables and the like are sometimes a pain to work with, and cutting and pasting data doesn’t always retain formatting. Sharing data was also a bit of a pain. The other big drawback from my perspective was the need to have my notebook with me at all times.

I started to look into other tools for central knowledge stores, and have started playing with TWiki for both business and personal use. Getting it up and running was simple enough. Navigating took a bit of getting used to, and the formatting rules for tables and text still require periodic lookups, but overall I’m pretty impressed. I’d seen Wiki’s in use on a variety of sites, but hadn’t really explored their power before now.

This is still an experiment, but I can already see advantages over OneNote.

eWeek reports that MARID dumped Microsoft, and has instead opted for a hybrid solution for sender-authentication using SPF with modifications for checking other header fields (a variation of United SPF). The Microsoft extensions were patent encumbered and although a royalty-free license was available, obtaining the MS license agreement was a concern for the open source community. The Apache Software Foundation published an open letter a couple of weeks ago stating they would not be implementing Sender ID in their products under the MS license agreement.

I updated the firmware on the WRT54G router today to the latest release of Sveasoft’s code. Dyndns updates are working again, after being broken in Alchemy 5.2.

I modified the firewall to block the XBox’s access to XBox Live (ports 88 and 3074), since I don’t want my son connecting to it by accident. I had blocked all access to the Internet from the XBox, but that also broke the weather lookup in XBMC, which is becoming handy as we move into fall.

Part of the process for filtering XBox Live involved defining new services through the web interface. I kept getting errors on the page when I tried to apply the updates. After a fair amount of searching, mainly because I didn’t make a good choice of keywords, I found the problem is a bug, or limitation, of IE. Apparently it can’t handle Java variables of 2.3K in size very well. Repeating the process in Firefox worked perfectly.

Every so often I go through my bookmarks and see what sites I haven’t visited in a while are doing. A lot of sites seem to be not responding, or taken over by one the so-called “search” firms, or just decaying slowly as those who used to maintain them update less and less.

I had planned to hack up an Xbox for a friend to give as a wedding present (what else does one give a geek who hasn’t registered for china and silverware). Of course, since we’d talked about it on and off for a year, he decided the week before he gets married is a good time to go out and buy one, leaving me having to shop for art or something.

Since he was placing an order for a chip to mod the machine, I had him order me another as well so I can put a second unit together to go either in the office or living room. I’m on the hunt for an LCD module to put in the unit as well, since it will likely go in a location without a TV on all the time. The Crystalfontz LCDs are nice, but I understand the PCB is a bit large, making installation troublesome. I’ve seen one hack where the author trimmed the board and connected traces with jumpers, but that would be a last resort for me. On the other hand, the LCDs that do fit tend not to have finished faceplates.

carbotPC.com was covered on Slashdot and the NYT today. They’re another entry into the PC-in-a-car market, and look to have a pretty nice product, at least on the surface.

The title of the Slashdot article (Your car is reading your email) caught my attention, because one of the other projects I’m working on involves putting a PC in cars and using voice commands to communicate. The inclusion of a GPS receiver and WiFi capabilities would simplify things for me quite a bit. All it’s missing is a cell-based Internet connection, which wouldn’t be too hard to add, although a PCMCIA slot would make things much easier.