Took me long enough, but I’ve bought an Asus EEE 4G.

What an amazing little machine. Great size, light weight, surprisingly good build quality. Ram and an SD card are on the way to max it out, and with the help of Nathan at work, we installed eeeBuntu instead of the default Xandros Playskool OS.

The compiler of eeeBuntu has done a sweet job, making the OS very Mac-like, which is great for me as I’m used to the icons, so learning a new OS isn’t as alien.

Next step, get the GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS running with some linux logging apps.

I know I’m late in mentioning this, but I’ve been very busy in both professional and personal life, so things like spewing bile on a blog have to wait.

Anyway, Kismac has been moved away from it’s German roots, due to draconian and rather pathetic laws that have been passed there, from the Kismac team;

“As you may well be aware, we have moved this part of the site offshore to Switzerland. The German politicians have shown their lack of understanding of security matters by deciding to ban anything that can be used to breach security.”

The new site is located at http://kismac.macpirate.ch/ so drop by there, and if you can program, get involved!

More traveling around, looking at suitable office space, with the laptop scanning away.

Two scans here, one around Blackburn and Preston, and one over to Burnley.

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So we’re moving offices soon, and are looking at business parks around the area, so the stumblin’ gear was set up in the car and off we went

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We went over to Manchester for a D&AD lecture evening at the PrintWorks, guest speaker in question was Hillman Curtis, and damn fine it was too… but what would a trip to Manchester be without a scan?

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My wife and son arrived home late Friday night, so I had a chance to do a scan on the way to the airport.

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There’s a neat bit of software that you can use in conjunction with your GPS unit and Google Earth to show your position in realtime while Stumblin’.

Using gps2geX, the software generates an “on the fly” KML file which is loaded in Google Earth. The co-ordinates for gps2geX are updated from the gpsdX daemon, which is also being used by KisMac, so no one app is taking sole control of the GPS unit.

The results are pretty cool. You can see your exact position on Google Earth, updated as per your settings in gps2geX, Google Earth even tilts and pans the camera around based on what direction and speed you’re moving in.

So if you’re driving around looking for wireless networks, how are you streaming images in Google Earth? Ahh, good question. I use my Sony Ericcson K800i as a bluetooth modem. I’m on T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Plus service plan, an unlimited (yeah, with the usual cavaets) internet access plan. A drive around my home town worked well, probably because I had a lot of imagery cached already, but it all seemed to work just fine.

An article on The Register proclaiming WEP is dead. A group of 3 German students have refined the methods and developed a faster method for cracking using ARP packet injections…

“So to make it a little bit easier for the reader we can say that 60 seconds are enough to collect 40,000 packets and crack the key with a 50 per cent success rate.”

Basically, this kicks down the already shoddy house that is WEP encryption, and really, if you have no need to hook up your PSP and Nintendo DS,you should be using WPA authentication on your networks at least.

The obvious question, (when packet reinjection is done) when can we see this in KisMAC?

I’ve had a loooong day.

My son was awake most of the night with a fever (therefore, me too). We’ve moved a lot of office furniture out of our studio for storage (how have I collected this much crap in 16 months?!). I’ve dropped my wife and son off at the airport to go to Spain, then went stumbling around Liverpool with a friend. He said if you’re too tired, leave it. But the chance to log some fresh ground is always too appealing.

So we drove round Liverpool city centre, well, he drove, I piloted the laptop. We did drive-bys on such buildings as Barclays Bank, Sony Europe and the town hall, all showing up nicely. After an hour or so of this, we headed back to his, and I left… with the intention of covering more ground!

A quick drive from West Derby to Crosby, the village I grew up in , then a late night cruise round my old stomping ground… fuelled by Red Bull and Tool. Another hour passes. It’s time to go home… head for the M58 and another hours drive up the motorway to Blackburn.

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