Today I bring you a world first… possibly… Whilst travelling on the London to Newcastle train on my way up to Durham today I opened up my PowerBook and was immediately greeted with a connection to the ‘train’ Wireless Access Point (WAP). Cool I thought, net access on a train! Unfortunately my glee was short lived when it turned out you had to pay £2.95 for just 30 mins of access! I decided to pass on this but that didn’t stop me having a snoop around, the process of which I will call ‘WarTraining’ in homage to ‘WarDriving‘!!
First I fired up iStumbler (an excellent WiFi scanner) and was shown a list of over 16 WAP’s - it appears they’ve installed a couple in each carriage for complete coverage. It even showed a couple of peoples personal laptops that should know better (yes, that’s you Mr. Stevenson!). I then ran a quick Nmap scan of the complete IP space to which I connected. This showed nothing of interest unfortunately and confirmed that the setup is pretty secure. Once connected the only thing you could access without paying was the GNER website which provided and explanation of how the system worked:
Basically it uses a combination of satellite and cellular phone links to provide a pretty-much uninterrupted service - what happens when you go through a tunnel I don’t know! One cool little feature on the web page was a map that showed the exact position of the train, presumably via some sort of GPS device so you always know where you are (in case you forgot perhaps?!).
The whole thing is a neat idea but at the cost they’re currently providing it at currently I can’t see it catching on with anyone other than well-off businessmen.
When I switched over to Bluetooth scanning the security situation was much worse. I picked up a number of unprotected phones from which I could have stolen their files and address book or even used it to dial any number if I had made the connection. My advice if you’ve got a Bluetooth enabled phone is to turn it off!
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If you’ve ever had to do a quick bit of audio editing then you’ll know that a lot of the software out there for doing so either isn’t very good or is very expensive. I recently wanted to make a recording of a radio audio stream but couldn’t do so directly (i.e. the player didn’t let you). After searching around a bit I rediscovered an excellent open source audio editor called Audacity. I last used Audacity a few years ago when it wasn’t very stable or feature complete but all thats changed now and it’s become a mature bit of software.
Audacity allows you to record sounds (from a variety of sources), play sounds, import and export files in a variety of popular formats, and more. It’s cross platform compatible meaning it runs just as well on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Its intuitive interface allows you to edit your sounds using familiar Cut, Copy and Paste functions as well as mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a host of other features which I haven’t worked out yet!
To make the recording I wanted I simply had to connect the line-out of my sound card to my line-in and then set Audacity to record that channel. I was then able to tidy up the ends of the track, normalize the volume levels and export it as an MP3 - simple! I know its a bit of hack but it did the job nicely. This all makes me wonder why companies are so intent on developing DRM (Digital Rights Management) into everything. At the end of the day if you can play something you can copy it so there’s little point to going out your way to protect it.
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If you’re a regular visitor then you will have noticed that the new site design has gone live and the server move was successful. The basic design is based on Kubrick by Michael Heilemann which I’ve modified to suite what I want - I think it looks pretty good myself but I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks!
One thing worth mentioning is that if your using an older web browser the site will probably look a bit messed up (especially in Internet Explorer). I would strongly suggest that everyone upgrade to Mozilla Firefox which is simply the best browser you can get at the moment bar none. In a nutshell it’s faster, more secure, standards compliant and best of all its free! If your a suffering IE addict then there’s a good guide here for how to switch to FF.
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I’m not a huge fan of most so called ‘Modern Art’ (see Tate Modern etc) but occasionally something will catch my eye. I came across the work of Eric Feng via a link to his website and was instantly taken in by the intricate technicality (a word I’ve been waiting a long time to use!) of his work which uses fairly simple geometric forms to build up complex surrealistic creations.
fevolution II. Red-crowned crane
How the artist has managed to maintain such a high level of detail whist maintaining such intricate simplicity is beyond me but in any case I think it’s pretty cool!
fevolution I. Run
You can take a look at the online exhibition here. Make sure you read the ‘artist statement’ section which is slight strange to put it mildly…
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