thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wireless

I like most poor apartment dwellers have been know to leech off a neighbors unprotected wifi network. The case usually being that I'm waiting for my own service to set up. It's amazing how many open networks you find just crusing slowly through the apartment complex with your laptop. A course should be taught on basic wifi security. My first network I set up two years back I was very strict and locked everything down tight, mac restriction, wep, non-broadcasted ssid and had no problems. It wasn't until this year, when I had to remove some of my settings to get my xbox live working that I actually had unsolicited visitors. Well admittedly pissed off at first, after I relaxed I thought it might be fun to play around with the neighbors. I mean they are using MY network doesn't that give me the right to all the data they are sending across? So I decided to explore options of trapping or redirecting their output requests. Unfortunately I found my router had no real capabilites (outside rewriting the firmware) of giving me access to outbound requests. A little more investigation and I found that hubs unlike the switches built into most modern routers will actually transmit signals to all hosts. Sounds like a possibly? Now that I'm in NJ and just got my cable internet set up, I'm looking for some guinea pigs. As soon as I get my old school hub and set up my ad hoc stalker network I"ll be sure to write more.

apple alarm

In an ongoing effort to automate my lifestyle and further geekify my existence, I am designing a custom alarm clock using Applescript and my iBook. I was very surprised to learn how easy it was to invoke other applications via Applescript. Currently my alarm is set to begin playing an iTunes playlist 10 minutes before I have to wake up. The volume starts very soft and builds until my wake up time. At wake up time, new music follows along with a voice automated greeting informing me of the current time and the current weather (this part is still in the works).The next stage is even louder music coupled with loud time announcements every five minutes. The getweather bit is basically a screen scrape of weather.com using curl...

curl -s http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/$1 | grep '&temp' |
sed s/.*36hr\&temp=/'The current temperature is '/g |
sed s/\&uv.*\&cond/' degrees. The current condition is '/g |
sed s/\&templ1.*/' '/g |
sed s/=clear_mostly/'mostly clear.'/g |
sed s/=cloud_partly/'partly cloudy.'/g |
sed s/=cloud_mostly/'mostly cloudy.'/g

This should work at least until they changed their page structure. As far as I know weather.com does not have free web services. BUUT if they did, I could use Applescript's built in Soap request functionality! Anyway this will be fine for now. I'm also looking into creating scripts to log into web mail and retrieve my messages, and eventually tie that to some voice response system so I could call in on my cell and get my email. Thats a little far off for now, but will keep me busy. Besides I can't automate too much, I spend most of my day sitting around being lazy anyway.