So, in the interest of those of us who are poor college students and cannot afford good interwebs, or those of us who just moved into a new apartment and can’t get that internet up in time….
Here are the moderately idiot proof ways of cracking the WEP encrypted network of your neighbors, whom you should bake cookies for and give to them for their kind supplying of internets.
SpoonWep in BackTrack3. Boot into Backtrack 3, KDE Menu>Backtrack>Radio Network>Analysis>80211>cracking>SpoonWep
You need the channel and the BSSID which you can get from BackTrack>Radio Network Analysis>80211>Analyser>Kismet
What this pretty much means…DON’T USE WEP to encrypt your wifi! It keeps no one out, and its pretty much a useless and empty gesture.
Cheers and remember those cookies!
If you live with several people or in close proximity, such as dorms, apartments, etc, you generally will encounter at some point in time the problem of someone being loud when your trying to go to sleep. It could be intentional, but most of the time, its completely unintentional and could probably be easily fixed by popping out and asking nicely. However, if its not, or if you just don’t feel like it, Sweet Dreams can gradually lower your system volume based on a schedule.
What does this mean?
Your trying to go to sleep, set Sweet Dreams to decrease the volume on your computer over the course of 30 minutes, stopping at the final volume of 5%, and tell it to shutdown afterwards. Well…that’s exactly what it will do.
It does it quite gradually, and I really did fall asleep without even noticing that it had gotten so quiet. Very useful if you have some music you can fall asleep to, but don’t feel like having to turn it off or listening to it all night.
Check it out: Sweet Dreams
GifTag is a universal wishlist. Pick stuff you want, add them to your list, share em with friends/family, and voila, they all have access to a wishlist that can contain items from any webpage.
It’s a pretty nifty app which could get very useful for those parties where you get lots of gifts. *Hint Hint.
Check it out: GifTag
Did I mention it was free?
Once you start building up a library of music artists, actors or directors that you keep track off, its very easy to miss a release or event from them. Crap, I missed it! is a way to keep track of book authors, tv shows, albums, concerts, movies, sports, pretty much everything.
Register, add your interests and tracking, and it will notify you of anything.
It’s really quite useful. Check it out: Crap I missed it
Track this is a web-based package tracking application.
It can pretty much everything from FedEx and the usual to CEVA and Canada Post.
Register and it can send you updates through the website, email, SMS, RSS, Twitter, or Facebook. Pretty much, you can stalk your package.
It’s pretty nifty, especially when you get a few packages and its hard to keep track. I used this recently for a set of 4 different boxes, and it was pretty nifty.
Check it out: TrackThis
Heres some good backup software, each with its own strengths.
Hinx Backup Easy, is a small utility that lets you do local backups or FTP backuping, with schedules. Theres the option for incremental backups, and thats about it. Simple, and small 🙂 Hinx Backup Easy
DocShield has a different niche. What happens if you’re working on a giant paper, and it just goes horribly wrong? DocShield scans marked folders for changed files and saves archived versions. Its like code versioning, but for allpurpose files. This also lets you backup your versions on an ftp server. DocShield
Finally…on a slightly different note, File Alert Monitor, does what any sane human being would be able to pull out of the program name. It works on networked drives too 🙂 Check it out: File Alert Monitor
An interesting dilemma. Really…I mean, the first thing I thought of when I read the title was, huh?
I mean, firstly, perpetual motion…suuuuure. For 10 seconds? that makes it semi-believable, until you realize thats a direct contradiction 😛
But hey, its NIST. I mean, the scientists there think of new ways on how to make our definition of 1 second become even more exact. And I mean…MORE exact.
So, instead, they made perpetual motion, using bose einstein condensate. So, a long time ago I wrote up a little thing about what BSC actually is…well, too bad for you guys, I don’t feel like resurrecting the forums which have now become BOT TERRITORY. And therefore, let it suffice that it was made using BSC. The reason why it’s perpetual motion is because there is a total lack of friction. It’s at the lowest energy state, meaning there really CAN’T be energy loss.
Now, we gotta admit, right now, this is a totally useless thing. To maintain this toroid of BSC is energy consuming and essentially a power hole. However, since the liquid is moving indefinitely, this opens up the possibility of energy storage that is 100% conserved. There wouldn’t be a loss due to thermodynamics, unless you disrupt the BSC system. Who knows? This could become very useful later on.
Cheers!
Thanks Mark for finding the article, and thanks NIST scientsts 😛
In a slightly random departure of our normally scheduled/planned tech news…we broach upon…food.
I understand that El Bulli has been out there for years, but this is the first time I personally have heard of this restaurant. Of course, it would help that I am not in habit of regularly checking world-renowned restaurants…but…
El Bulli is a restaurant in Catalonia, Spain. Its a very small restaurant. It only serves 8000 people a season. With a small catch. More than 800,000 want to be served. What’s special about this place? Well…its run by Ferran Adria, who is perhaps the best chef out there, and probably a genius. Food genius 🙂
What they do is innovate on food. Instead of making, say, extremely good pork chops, or any particularly good “normal” food, they and i quote “deconstruct” popular dishes and remake them.
Each season, they create a new course list and last years menu included, snow balls that were stuffed with strawberries, tangerine/carrot whipped fluff, and other interesting things that I just really can’t describe.
For this….check out the video: El Bulli on Youtube
Also…despite the overwhelming popularity of the restaurant, Adria continues to run at a loss, for the 8th year in a row, with cost per diner at exactly 250 euros. Hey…if you can get a spot…250 euros isnt that bad for a 30 course dinner that spans 4 hours 😉
