A lot of hotels, coffee shops, and airports are sporting pay-per-hour 802.11 service these days. In most cases, you’ll be presented with what appears to be an open hotspot and a DHCP server will give you an IP address. When you open your web browser, though, a transparent proxy will deliver you a page that […]
As much as Paul Bausch loves Flickr (so much so that he coauthored Flickr Hacks
If you switched to Vista and you tend to hack anything with a serial interface, you probably noticed that HyperTerminal has been removed from the Windows operating system. Only a minor setback: Hilgraeve, makers of HyperTerminal, offer a free (for private use) edition of their product that works just like the HyperTerminal you have come […]
Here’s an interesting thought. The flip side of “prove you aren’t a robot,” is “prove you are human.” Though it’s no easier to prove, at least it places the onus of proof on the spam bot and not your human guests. It’s subtle, but there’s a philisophical difference between requiring people to do something that […]
The ability to geocode, or translate into latitude and longitude, postal codes is a fairly useful hack to have in your programming toolbox. Quick and dirty zip geocoding allows you to do some neat things fairly efficiently and with a minimal amount of code. Though it’s U.S. centric, it allows you to add location-based functionality […]
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is one of my favorite artists, his latest – a tactical toolkit to liberate pay-per use wireless networks – Wifi Liberator is an open-source toolkit for a laptop computer that enables its user to “liberate” pay-per-use wireless networks and create a free, open node that anyone can connect to for Internet access. The […]
Did you know that your microwave is more than just a simple leftover reheater? A couple weeks ago I heard about a study which showed that nuking a grungy sponge for 2 minutes was effective at sterilizing it. This was quickly followed by reports of a number of small fires involving dry sponges. Lesson learned: […]
