Blog My Wiki!

War strolling in SE13

Well I had to go for a war stroll… consume.net suggested there was a potential open access node just two streets away, so I got MacStumbler running, slung the laptop under the pram and took my youngest son for a walk. I did toy with the idea of ditching the baby and just taking the iBook for a walk, but then I couldn’t face what that would say about me, and my addiction to technology.

I walked around the neighbourhood a bit, every now and then crouching down, squinting at the screen to see if any new wireless access points had been logged, feeling like a complete idiot.

I did find a new node, a mere two minutes’ walk from my house, but annoyingly I can’t see it from home, not even from the loft. So I needed to locate it more precisely, and I needed to perfect my warstrolling technique.

The coolest way to it it, I reckon, is to set Macstumbler to speak the name of new wireless access points when it finds them, plug in a pair of walkman headphones, wedge a soft toy inside your laptop to stop it going to sleep, put it in a shoulder bag, and… go for a stroll.

Sure enough, half way down the next street, a voice said in my ear “access point Wireless…”

The correct way to get broadband

I’d been toying with the idea of getting broadband for ages – a bit pricey at �25 a month, but I thought it would change my life, I’d use the internet more and in new and exciting (maybe even lucrative) ways.

I also wanted to go down the wireless route so I could sit in the garden shed updating my weblog (“The spider has spun a new web on the Nitromors can. Stopped raining. The squirrels are active again…”)

My mate Jon thought I should buy an Airport card for my iBook, plug it in and see what came up – just Jon being funny, I thought, so I ignored him and ordered a broadband package and a wireless router that would act as an ADSL router and WiFi base station all in one – hooked the beloved bondi blue iMac up to the router by ethernet and off I went.

A few weeks later I got my Airport card – the CD-ROM wouldn’t mount on my iBook so I just powered down the computer, slotted it in and powered back on.

The compter said: “Detected new Airport card… use default settings?”

Well, in the absence of any instructions, let’s do that.

And it worked, there I was browsing the web. Had problems with my email but that’s not unusual. Couldn’t connect to the router admin page, and the signal strength was a bit low, but hey, who cares, here I am lying on the sofa, websurfing wirelessly at high speed. Easy. Perhaps too easy, for what’s to stop some warchalkers stealing my costly broadband connection?

Later that night – probably about 4am – I pieced all the clues together and realised that the reason the signal was quite low, and I couldn’t send email and couldn’t see my router’s config web page was – my iBook wasn’t connected to my router at all, it was connected to someone else’s.

I switched my wireless router off at the mains, and sure enough my internet connection remained. Moving round the house I discovered it works best upstairs at the front, meaning someone across the street from us has an ADSL line connected to a wireless router with rather less than no security – I didn’t even need sniffing software like Macstumbler, the Airport Setup Assistant found it immediately on its own – the router’s SSID is ‘default.’

So Jon was right – I could have saved myself �150 for the router and �25 a month… just plugged in an Airport card and seen What Came Up.

Still, my neighbour’s WiFi router won’t work in my kitchen. And it certainly doesn’t reach as far as my garden shed.

Emails from the afterlife

I was just sorting out my many mailboxes on my computer last night when I found a UKOnline account I must have signed up for and promptly forgotten all about.

Out of curiosity I clicked on ‘send and receive’ and promptly two emails with attachments dropped into my inbox. They were from my father. My father died nearly a year ago.

Very odd that I even gave this address to anyone, odder still that emails from my dad have been sitting on on someone’s mail server for so long, just in the off chance that one day they would be retrieved.

And I wonder… what will happen to my websites when I die?

The discussion about iPods not giving ‘true’ random play is quite interesting; it highlights the fact that when we say we want an MP3 player to play ‘randomly’ in fact we mean anything but, and I’m a little surprised that the designers at Apple didn’t suss this from the get-go.
What we really want is… not to hear the same song twice in the same listening session, not to hear more than one track off the same album in one session if possible, and probably not to hear more than two songs by the same artist. In fact true randomness means that we might hear the same song 23 times or all the tracks from an album in correct order.
There are two ways round this; my favourite is to listen to your songs in alphabetical order by song title. This creates an amazing illusion of ‘randomness’.
The other is to set it on shuffle play and just pause/lock the unit between sessions; you can’t cconnect it to the computer and have to use the charger to avoid resetting the playlist. This method doesn’t ‘feel’ as random as the alphabetical method but at least you won’t hear ‘Cheap Astronaut’ by Baby Bird several times in one sitting. It’s my iPod’s favourite song. Don’t ask me why.

Finally got my ADSL working today – after changing the firmware in my router, uploading new login scripts, losing sleep, a clever soul on the Demon technical support line deduced that I’d been using the wrong password for the last 3 days.

How embarrassing.

Moral: don’t set passwords on nightshifts for you will forget them when you wake the next day.