chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Inssider WIFI tool
Nov 14th
I’ve heard a lot about netstumbler and the neat things it can show you about the wifi in your area, it always seemed pretty useful to me but it never worked with any of the wifi cards I have ever had so it’s useless. In comes Inssider, which does basically the same thing as netstumber but should work with most wifi cards/chips rather than a select few as it uses the wireless API in windows.
As you can see it lists the wifi access points in range with the signal strength and handy things like the time it was last seen and most importantly the channel the network is operating on. The most useful parts for me though are the graphs at the bottom, the left one shows the signal strength over time, which is useful if you want to track what may be interfering with your signal. The right graphs just shows a visual representation of where the different channels are and where the networks around you are broadcasting, this is very useful in determining which channel you should be broadcasting on to get the least interference from other networks.
All in all it’s a small and useful package and you can download it here.
Miniaturization
Aug 21st
I’ve been thinking lately, how much different technology has made our lives in the past decade. In particular the mobile phone. Mobile phones not only allow us to communicate verbally with other people they allow a whole plethora of possibilities from taking photos to querying Wikipedia.
Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook profile pic faux pas
Jul 27th
This is a compilation of the worst crimes against the facebook world. People should keep their profile pictures relevant on most of all the picture should be of you!
Memory card benchmarks
Jul 3rd
I was looking for some cheap Sony Memory Sticks for my PSP as I’m in need of a lot more space for music, video etc… However, the state of the flash memory market hasn’t changed and PRO DUO cards are still much more expensive than Micro SD cards. An 8GB PRO duo costs around £25 whereas 8GB Micro SD can range from £8-£15. So I was thrilled when I spied this:
And was salivating at the prosepct of paying £18 for 16GB of PRO DUO storage instead of £55. That’s right, you can pop in 2 Micro SD cards up to 16GB and use them both as one drive in PRO DUO devices. It seems too good to be true, but it works and apparently there are no drawbacks. The only problem was that these £8 8GB Micro SD cards were only Class 2, meaning I may have to shell out more making it less of a bargain, there was lots of information available on the “minimum” write speeds of SD cards and the “maximum” write speeds of PRO DUO cards but I couldn’t find any concrete data on how fast cards should actually be.
So as usual I went crazy and I decided to benchmark a few cards to see if I would be losing out by using 2 Micro SD cards instead of a normal PRO DUO and to see if I was going to be sitting around checking my watch while this “Class 2″ SD card loaded stuff. Read on for graphs etc. Read the rest of this entry »
Inside the Xbox II
Jun 25th
Well I managed to get my hands on a smaller Torx screwdriver, got it all to pieces and god rid of those dreaded X-Clamp mofos, now I’ve put it all back together and it’s working fine. The only problem is that the xbox seems to think that it’s getting too warm as the fans are constantly stuck on “shuttle launch” mode so although the xbox now works it’s not exactly playable… So I’ve ordered myself some thermal paste from ebay to see if that improves the heat dissipation. Although I can’t really feel too much heat in the xbox to warrant the fans being on full blast so much.
And here’s a little close up shot of those dreaded X-Clamps you’ve been hearing so much about:
Any way, here’s some more Xbox innards: Read the rest of this entry »
Inside the Xbox
Jun 24th
To fill you in on the Xbox situation the towel trick only fixed the red ring for about 5 minutes and I ordered the parts to fix it from ebay for about £3. I set about dismantling the box but apparently my Torx screwdriver set does not go small enough (need a T8). So my Xbox currently looks like this:
So until I see if I can grab one tomorrow from town it’s sat half naked on a table and I decided to take a few photos, prepare to get to know your xbox a lot more intimitley. Read the rest of this entry »
“Different” stuff in Windows 7
Jun 19th
I’ve put it off for a while but my laptop was getting extremely sluggish on wakeup and I needed a good reinstall as I’ve installed so much crap it’s unreal. So I figured it’s the perfect chance to try out the evaluation version of Windows 7 that I got some time ago but have not got round to trying. I’ve had a good play with it now so I thought I’d put up a post 
There are a lot of improvements with windows 7 but there are a few things that you will notice more than others and I’ll basically give a run-down of the things that look and feel different in Windows 7.
The first thing you will notice is the task bar, now sports a completely different more compact look and feel, it’s a kind of all in one task bar, system tray & quick launch:
From left to right, the Firefox icon is highlighted, this shows that the program is running. Second along is the Windows explorer icon, this is highlighted but also shows two other boxes behind it, this shows that there are 2 other Windows explorer windows open to make 3 in total. The Windows Media Player icon is there but is not highlighted this is merely “pinned” to the task bar and not running, running it would merely highlight it as the others are. The MSN icon also has 3 boxes indicating it has 3 (or more) windows open.
Read the rest of this entry »
JewerLust (Android)
Jun 18th
I remember a few years ago when I had my Sony Clie Palm device that the only game worth playing with the lovely touch screen was Bejeweled. I’m sure everyone reading has played it at least once (or maybe zoo keeper or many other names), maybe you liked it maybe you didn’t but for most people it’s addictive and enjoyable.
My girlfriend and I must have spend hours playing that little bugger to death and that was only the trial version, anyway I digress… There is a version of Bejeweled out for Android but the graphics are basically the same as that Palm version I played in 2003 and there’s not much new in the way of features, unlike the PC version which just keep getting better. In comes Jewerlust: Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile sized chunks
Jun 17th
I’ve been using my G1 quite a bit to browse the web lately and as you know I have an extensive image gallery which I like to use in posts on forums etc. Well now I can both directly upload to that gallery by using a handy ftp program on Android and browse the gallery in a specially designed environment. I sat up for a little while last night making a compatible and dinky gallery that reduces bandwidth and increases the amount of images I can view on the screen at once.
Before: 105Kb |
After: 32Kb
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Mobile Blog:
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As you can see in the first screenshot 2 images can barely even fit on the screen, after streamlining and making the thumbnails quite minuscule 32 images can easily fit on screen at once, I also upped the amount of images shown per page so there’s less clicking of links. I also streamlined the image page so that images fit easier and it is easier to get a link to the image to post elsewhere. Of course it still retains (and utilises) the ability for me to resize the images however I need to and to do a bunch of other image manipulation too.
I can’t leave without mentioning the last screnshot, which is of the mobile version of this blog, it’s clean, neat and fast. I used to use a more flashy version but I think it was a little cumbersome. This version just puts the posts ups there with no superfluous crap.
As usual it’s unlikely anyone will even visit the site on a mobile device except me, and as usual it’s mainly an exercise to teach myself more. But of course I will be using it all the time to continue the tradition of posting random images.
My Android Desktop
Jun 5th
A few people have expressed an interest in my android desktop and I figured it was probably best to post all the relevant info here. Knowing me it will all have changed within a week though.
In the first picture the first thing that jumps out is the weather widget, it’s the best free one I’ve found, it’s called simply Weather Widgets Free and when you tap the widget it brings up a 4 day forecast too. It had no problem finding my location either, which you can set to use GPS to get the weather.
The other thing worth noting in the first picture is the little “1″ above my message icon. This is a widget called SMS Unread Count, which shows the number of new messages waiting, it also shows dialler missed calls too.
The dock bar at the bottom is part of dxtop, the custom icons used on the home screen and the dock are from 3 different icon packs: Vista, Windows 7 & Xbox 360. dxtop allows you to change icons for anything on the desktop or in folders by long pressing.
dxtop is also responsible for the dual tabs in the second picture, the first tab is the normal application list as you can see in picture 3 it makes the list 5 items wide meaning you can see more per screen.
The second tab is a task manager tab, it shows recently used apps, running apps and apps that are running only as a service. If you take a look at the fourth screen the browser is not running but was previously used, the link text is white, dialler in red is a running program and by long pressing it we can kill the process, the weather widget is in yellow which indicates that it is only running as a service and again long pressing allows us to kill the process.
The second screenshot is merely a folder which I added to the dock, all the icons on my dock are currently folders filled with applications or shortcuts, this is built in to android. To create a folder just long press on the desktop and select new folder.
Finally, the last screenshot displays Toggle Settings which allows me to toggle things like wifi etc, I put his as a shortcut on the dock, the very last one that looks like a power button.
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