Wireless Networking
This program is easy way to find out what wireless networks are around your house, it has the name of the network, channel it is using, signal strength, and if WEP is enabled.
It was made for "War Driving" if you saw the movie Wargames, the lead character practiced what he called WarDialing, which was calling every phone number possible looking for a modem, war driving is driving around the town to find wireless hot spots, and will even use GPS to make a map!
To do the GPS part, all you need is a cheap gps, the cable and a usb-serial adapter, and the drivers to make the adapter work.
Every time your computer finds a Wireless Access Point, it will log in the GPS location, for future mapping.
Here is an example of what I found driving down my street:
About every 4th house had a wireless network!
A good use for this program is to find out what channels are in use around you, and to avoid them so your network will be faster.
Not that it there are only 3 channels that don't overlap: 1, 6, and 11.
Most alarming in my driving and this article is that 95% of all networks don't have encryption turned on. This could be because they
want anyone who drives by to be able to use they internet, they couldn't get it to work with encryption, or they just don't know
that anyone driving by can use their network. If you have any sensitive information on your computers, please turn encryption on and
your file sharing off!
If you found my page looking for KizMac, note that it's spelled Kismac by most people but pronounced Kizmac.
KisMac is a more sophisticated program that will let you not only see what's around your house, but how much data is transferred and the MAC address ID's. As you can see from the screenshot below, will even let you break the encryption on a network.
Note that even though it looks very easy to break the encryption, you have to monitor a wireless network for a long time while it's active to get enough packets to do the job. And with so many networks without encryption, why would anyone bother to break yours?
The paranoid computer user shouldn't use wireless networking at all, but if you must, at least turn on WEP and change the keys every so often in case someone has broken them.
if you go to wifimaps.com you can type in the name of the town and it will give you a map of hot spots around your town, here is a map of Austin:
Corpus Christi just doesn't have that many people who care to upload any data :-)
There are all sorts of antennas you can put on your wifi box.
If your looking for cheap, head on over to freeantennas where you can download templates to print out on your printer
with instructions on how to cut them out and glue them together; add a little aluminum foil :Presto! 1 virtually free antenna.
If you don't want to work that hard, or need a real antenna:
Some Keywords in looking for an antenna is 2.4 GHz, 802.11, or Wireless LAN
This website had a really big 24 dBi antenna for around $50. Note that the bigger the dBi, the father it will go, but usually also has a narrower beam to point with.
A good antenna like this one will go 1-2 miles pretty easy, and if you had an antenna on each side, it will go a whopping 20 miles!
There are 2 requirements though, it is line of sight only, and aiming is pretty tricky that far away.
One other benefit is that it will beam the signal through the roof of your house pretty well so that you don't have to mount is outside.
Your Biggest problem will be finding the right connector. This Web Site has a list of devices and the connectors they use, but most I have run across use either SMA RP or TNC RP. The RP stands for Reverse Polarity, and as to why they use such bastard connections, is that they did not want you to hook up your own antennas.
Ethereal is the hackers tool for wired networks, this will let you see all the computers on the local network.
Mac download page (small warning, even I couldn't get it to work!) It will also let you look at individual packets going across the network.
I found a great website call Homestarrunner.com
My favorite page is an example of a website that doesn't work
Also funny are Strongbad's emails, a good one is about cool websites
And if you ever played Kings Quest, you might enjoy Peasant's quest!
They even have a working adventure made with flash. If you have trouble winning there are two walkthroughs.
If you have read anything lately, you might have seen something about the movie industry being afraid of bit torrent.
Bit torrent is sort of like kazaa or emule, in that it lets you share a file over the internet, but it was designed to only share one file!
If you have a file that will be released that will have a huge number of downloaders, you can use bit torrent to send it to as many
people as possible, as fast as possible. So while there are people that used it to send out a copy of The Matrix, two weeks before
you could watch it in the theater, there are many legal reasons to use it.
There is someone making new Star Trek episodes There is no way they could afford enough bandwidth to send the episode to everyone that wanted it on the release day, so they made a torrent to distribute the file. For everyone that downloads the file and leaves the window open, they help share the file so that other people can download it from them.
The trailer to the last episode is quite good! you need VLC Player or DIVX to watch the trailer.
Unfortunately the easy to download episodes are encoded with WMV and even VLC won't play them, so you will have to download the DVD images. Mac's can play DVD's right from your hard drive!
To get the DVD images this mirror or this other mirror has them. Otherwise find someone that has a PC and you can download the WMV files.
If you use FireFox (which you should at least try) you can add a whole bunch of extensions under the tools menu and extensions.
Then you click on Get More Extensions
Click on News, scroll down to weatherfox, then click on install now.
Glad the election is over?
This site has some cool maps on who won what county. You can find out where you need to move to make the most
difference in the next election! :-)