wEEEdriving? Anyway, with Mac OS X on the Asus, Kismac was next. While I waited for the Dell mini pci-e card to arrive, I dug out the old D-Link DWL-G122 USB stick and the GlobalSat USB GPS and hooked it all up.

After remembering where all the relevant drivers were, Kismac worked fine, found my two SSIDs at home, and the GPS was getting a signal and put me roughly in the right place. I say roughly as the dot to show where you are covers about 70% of the UK on the default map!

The Asus is so light weight, and OS X gets roughly 2.5 hrs on the battery (this will drop with it powering USB devices, but certainly long enough to go for a cycle or walk with the EEE in a backpack. Gets a bit warm, but nothing too alarming. We’ll see how it fares on holiday in Spain!

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!

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.