Geekblok

I’ve mentioned FireEagle on this blog before and after I’m glad to see the first useful applications come up!

Recently I’ve visited Switzerland and Germany and used FireEagle and in both places, I’ve used the awesome new website called wikinear. First, find yourself an open WiFi network and update your location. I use twibble and FireBot. The latter is a twitter bot and the twibble application makes it really easy to post your GPS coordinates to that bot.

After you’ve updated your location, go to wikinear.com and click a few times to get logged in. After that, wikinear will show you a little map (Google Maps) with some pointers of “interesting things” around you. The information is taken from Wikipedia (hence the name wikinear). This is of course very useful and fun!

Great, simple website!

At home, the only way to reach my server on the attic from the ground floor seemed to be wireless. At least that is what I used for about a year. The connection let me down quite often, most likely because of the crappy wireless card I have in it (a Sweex wireless LAN PC card 140 Nitro XM, model: LW141).

A few weeks ago my father came with a box of hardware that he did no longer use. One of the hardware things was a D-LINE CPL-85 of Dinh-Telecom. It was just a case of plugging in both devices in the power outlet and the connection between my server and the network was there.

This is of course nice, but I wanted to know a little more about the devices.

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BOK surprised me with an invitation email about a website I never noticed. The small mail suggested that I should check it out and maybe write a little about it here, due to absence of BOK this weekend.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

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