The Black and White Plague

Seems like every time I step outside at the moment, I get dive bombed. The first couple of times I hit the deck, gasped out a few cuss words and scuttled towards the nearest shelter like a Frenchman, wiping cow turd off my clothes as I ran.

It’s magpie season, you see…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Magpie#Swooping

Thankfully after a couple of weeks of this, I’m wise to this little bastard’s agenda, and now that I know all of his best hideouts I can usually spot him coming from a mile off (rather than learning of his presence when he’s a foot from the back of my head).

I’ve started filming his assaults – playing chicken with a magpie is about as much adrenaline as I can get out here at the moment. Excuse the swearing and dodgy camera work – it’s hard to be composed when you’ve got a black and white hate missile aimed directly at your face.

For your amusement:

The Mazda Experience

Different strokes for different folks?

I was looking at a site called Fresh99 last night, and came across an ad banner that caught my eye.

One of these girls is not like the others,
One of these girls just doesn’t belong…

Clever advertising? Or just doing the best you can with what you can afford?

The reference to Frankston makes me think that this is all a bit too coincidental…

n.b. I’m not in Moorabbin

A nice set of cans

Two cantennas / waveguide antennas / whatever you want to call them – the red one’s the one I’m using now (the other one belongs to a friend). ASUS WL-330b was a good idea, because it connects to the PC via CAT-5 (although it was stripped off in favour of a female SMA plug shortly after this photo was taken). I used to point this out of my bedroom window on the 19th floor in the middle of the city.

26 access points using Cain (in Windows):
I got 50 one night using Kismet, including some very interesting ones, but obviously that’s a fishing story until I find the screenshot

Sexing up the ol’ Thinkpad 240

Just wrote about my heroic struggle against logistics and probability to install an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 Mini PCI card in my old Thinkpad 240, and then lost the lot. I’d be pissed off but this seems to happen to me all the time. Truth be told it was pretty easy, but it’s late and I can’t be fucked writing it all again.

So be content with pictures for the moment. I doubt anyone still uses these notebooks anyway (I use mine to write). If you do, and if you’d really like any advice or a guide on how to install a MiniPCI wireless card into the Thinkpad 240, let me know and I’ll write up the details. Might save you a few of the hassles I had!

Looks sexy, and is very practical if you want to fool around with exotic antennas or free up the one precious USB port: