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.

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.

Tonight I loaded the latest Sveasoft firmware into the WRT54G, and got everything up and running. I had a slight problem getting the DynDns service working. All I needed to add was &system=custom after the domain name, and everything worked. I haven’t configured WiFi yet, but will get to that this weekend hopefully. I’ve got a D600 with an a/b/g card in it to test out running a VPN over WiFi.

Once I had the router up and going I started into building a new software image for some Latitude D600’s that arrived at the office today. I took things a little far with the tweaks though, and seemed to have killed the image that took several hours to build. Most of that time was spent waiting for various patches to download. One I managed to get Safe Mode up (which took more work that it should have), I disabled the LargeSystemCache entry, and everything was back to normal. The other tweaks (most from I am Not a geek’s Windows XP Performance Tweaking Guide. Most of the tweaks are not things I’d do to a corporate image, but some of them are useful.

Bob Cringley writes about the WRT54G in this week’s edition of the Pulpit. I recalled reading a story about the device on Slashdot a few months back. At the time I had just started into hacking apart an Xbox to play recorded TV programs, so I didn’t pick one up.

When a friend mentioned he was using one last week, I ordered one to play around with. It should arrive today - just in time to give me something to pull apart this weekend.