Skip to content →

Category: web

iTouch warwalking

Published January 10, 2008 by lieven

Four years ago I had a brief fling with wardriving. It went only as far as getting Ethereal to crack the security of our house-network. I simply couldn’t picture myself walking around the neighborhood with my laptop under my arm… However, jogging around with an iPod will attract far less attention.

Starting an iTouch in a network-rich environment you will be asked which network you want to connect to (see for example this wardriving video). However, if you need more information on the networks, there is a port of the OSX-tool iStumbler for the iPhone/iTouch : Stumbler (available also from the Install.app under Network). This morning I flipped open my iTouch in a generic street near the University and was surrounded by 12 wireless networks, 6 of them wide open…

One may then ask : what about less innocent wardriving tools such as Kismet or Ethereal itself? The problem with porting those seems to be that no-one knows whether the iTouch wireless driver can be put into ‘promiscuous mode’ (see for example this thread).

Once you have collected open networks at your favourite places or have passwords to closed networks, it would be nice if the iTouch would auto-detect these and connect to them without you having to remember the particular name or having to type in username/password combinations. Surprisingly, this is possible thanks to the people at devicescape.com. Create a free login, then get Devicescape Connect (available under Network) run it and write down the pincode you are given and follow the instructions to complete the installation. You can then edit your Wi-Fi list of desired hotspot or personal networks, together with all login-data. There is a nice TidBit article describing devicescape in full detail.

Leave a Comment

working archive plugin, please!

Published January 8, 2008 by lieven

Over the last two weeks Ive ported all old neverendingbooks-post from the last 4 years to a nearly readable format. Some tiny problems remain : a few TeX-heavy old posts are still in $…$ format rather than LaTeXrender-compatible (but Ill fix this soon), a few links may turn out to be dead (still have to check out those), TheLibrary-project links do not exist at the moment (have to decide whether to revive the project or to start a similar idea afresh), some other techie-things such as FoaF-stuff will be updated/expanded soon, et. etc. (and still have to port some 20 odd posts).

Anyway, the good news being that we went from about 40 posts since last july to over 310 posts, all open to the internal Search engine. Having all this stuff online is only useful if one can browse through it easily, so I wanted to install a proper up-to-date archive-plugin…

The current theme Redoable has build-in support for the Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18 plugin which would be ideal if I could get it installed… Im not the total newbie in installing WordPress-plugins and Ive read all the documentation and the support-forum and chmodded whathever I felt like chmodding, but still no success… If you know how to kick it into caching the necessary files, please drop a comment!

The next alternative Ive tried was the AWSOM Archive Version 1.2.3 plugin which gave me a pull-down menu just under the title-bar but not much seems to happen when using bloody Safari (Flock was OK though). Maybe Ill give it another go…

UPDATE (jan. 9th) : The AWSOM Archive seems to be working fine with the Redoable theme when custom installed in the footer. So, there is now a pulldown-menu at the bottom of the page.

**UPDATE (jan. 12th) : Ive installed the new version 1.3 of AWSOM Archive and it works from the default position **

At a loss I opted in the end for the simplest (though not the most aesthetic) plugin : Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. This provides a year-month scheme at the top followed by a reverse ordered list of all months and titles of posts and is available as the arXiv neverendingbooks link available also from the sidebar (up, second link). I hope it will help you not to get too lost on this site…

Suggestions for a working-from-the-box WordPress Archive plugin, anyone???

Leave a Comment

overloaded iTouch

Published January 5, 2008 by lieven

A jailbroken iTouch can do many wonderful tricks : by sarting up an AFDd server one can use it in Disk mode, exactly as an iPodClassic, one can use it as a WebServer by installing Apache and PHP and run a Wiki, one can install OpenSSH and secure shell to the rest of the world, one can even turn the iTouch into a music streamer via the FireFly server, one can …

And all of this on a gadget with only 116Mb RAM and one processor running at 412MHz… is asking for overload problems both on memory and battery. A couple of days ago I wanted to start up the iTouch and was greeted by a bright flickering screen and thought I’d finally bricked it…

Fortunately, there’s a simple lesson to be learned : with every new feature you install, learn how to switch if off and monitor your iTouch using the SysInfo.app (under Utilities) which allows to view basic system info (screenshot below) as well as all active processes.

Here a few tricks to turn on/off the major consumers :

  1. To turn off the Apache-sever, ssh into the iTouch and give a apachectl stop command (you can always restart it with apachectl start.

  2. To control OpenSSH, install the Services.app (under Utilities) which allows to toggle Wifi, Edge, SSH and Bluetooth on or off (screenshot below).

  3. To control APFd, use its control pannel to toggle the Broadcast active feature only when you need your iTouch in Disk mode (it will then appear under Shared in your Finder window, at least under Leopard. For more on this see Mount and use your iPod touch as a Thumb Drive.

  4. To control FireFly, use the UIctl.app (under Multimedia) and scroll down (after staring for about 15 seconds to a white screen) to org.fireflymediaserver.mt-daapd, tap it and start or stop the server.

Another major consumer is the MobileRSS.app (under Productivity). Maybe I should restrict my subscriptions to the hottest blogs only…

Leave a Comment