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!

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…