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!

It turned out my last weekend was more expensive than I thought! When I dressed up in my favorite Pall Mall-shirt yesterday morning, I noticed a burn hole the size of a fingernail on the right front… Someone in the overcrowded pub must have bumped into me or maybe it was self-inflicted.

Now I have to look for yet another fave t-shirt, but it looks like I already found it: the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt at ThinkGeek!
The shirt has a built-in WiFi-scanner with glowing bars on the front that dynamically change as the surrounding WiFi-signal strength fluctuates. Way cool!

Only drawback seems to be the easy washing: you’ll have to peel of the decal every time it needs a clean-up…

Ever wondered about the Indonesian bank holidays? The 2007 Formula Nippon Championship Schedule? All can be found MarkThisDate. MarkThisDate offers  iCalendar files that can be included in your own calendar software. I’ve seen more sites that offer these files, yet MarkThisDate seems to be most complete. Close to every country in the world is represented with usually at least the bank holidays.

You can add your own files, which might mean that you will find buggy or incomplete feeds, yet the amount of downloads that is shown and the ability to write reviews regarding the feed in question should give you an impression about how trustworthy the source is.

Probably the best thing is the direct links to integrate these feeds into your favorite calendar software, be it 30Boxes, Google Calendar, Netvibes, Outlook, Zimbra, My! Yahoo etc.

A new blog (the combined power of two geeks b10m and BOK) and a new network in town.
Last Wednesday, October 3rd, Draadloos Groningen (aka Wireless Groningen) went life. The first major city in the Netherlands with a project like this. So they say, I thought the city of Leiden was leading…

The inner city of my hometown has now complete wireless networking coverage. Complete, well no, only in the area of what is known as Grote Markt en Vismarkt. And no, no access for all, only accessible to a group of privileged people, like students from the university and local companies.

Nevertheless I did some wardriving while walking along the Vismarkt with my Palm T|X-PDA and a tiny app called NetChaser. I picked up a total of six broadcasting access-points named “Draadloos Groningen”, on channels 1, 6 and 13. The MAC-addresses that showed up all started with “00:06:5A”, which means they started out with a mesh of Strix Systems-equipment.
I didn’t try to login to the network, nor did I spot the actual APs locations, but one of these days I will give that a try. Then I can tell what encryption is being used too: I forgot to look into that on the Palm, so whether it’s WEP, WPA or WPA2, I can’t tell…