...stuff I do and things I like...

I bought a MSI Wind netbook a while ago and I really like the size and how small it is. The one thing I really hated was the bad RealTek Wifi card. It often lost the connection to the access point and almost never worked after resuming from suspend (to RAM). All this on Ubuntu 8.04.1. Last weekend I finally got my Mini-PCI-E Atheros Wifi card I bought on eBay for 20 Euros. The card works great, no lost signal, suspend/resume works great. My MSI Wind now really rocks. As soon as I get the 6 cell battery it should rock even more :-)

I recently acquired an 3G iPhone just to check it out and write some software. I must say I'm already totally addicted to it. I'm sorry to say that but the N810 is no real competition. Stuff that really get me excited: really mobile email, very fast GPS (and maps), excellent connectivity (WLAN + 3G). The N810 has all these features too but just not in the same quality. Maybe I would be less impressed if the N810 had GSM/UMTS connectivity. The I only have to carry one device and have connectivity in most places factor just kicks ass.

Some points where the N810 still is slightly ahead: web browsing (big screen, flash), the hardware keyboard (nothing beats this on a shell), and of course the open source platform.

I'm sure that I will continue using my N810 for specific tasks once in awhile.


Befreiphone

I just setup pptpd for my iPhone. Since I don't really trust all the application developers to think about my passwords and my privacy.

I know PPTP is not the best VPN solution but it works and was easy to setup.

@Joe du auch wolle?

Der Befreiphone Wettbewerb ist lustig, also mach ich mal mit.

For the non-german readers: this is a SEO contest where you can win a iPhone if you get ranked 1st for a search on Befreiphone on Google.

I did a talk about my Home InfoPanel project at the MRMCD111b last weekend. In the slides I try to cover the idea, the build process, some obstacles and show many pretty pictures.

The slides are available here (40 MB)

...black 16Gigs if you need to know. I got the phone on Sunday afternoon and went on a business trip right afterward - so I had some time to play with it. First app. I installed was Twitterific (yes I'm a Twitter addict). I mostly played with Twitterific, the maps app, safari and mail. All in all a good first experience.

Since I have other things to do now I'll wait a little before I start messing with it (jailbreak etc...).

Btw. I got my iPhone 3G from Vodafone Italia. My good friend Sergio imported it for me. THANKS again! Right now I'm using it with my Fonic (a O2 reseller) prepaid card. Prepaid is nice since it will help me not to ruin myself in a week :-)

Alex recently got a Mifare (RFID) ID spoofing device. Last weekend at the MRMCD111b we got to play with it. I'm looking forward to try it against some real targets.

so looks like I'm going to BlackHat Japan in October to talk about my latest project SymbianOS Exploitation. I'm really looking forward to it since I never been to Japan and BlackHat before.

BlackHat Japan speakers page

The OpenBTS project's aim is to build a open Base Transceiver Station (BTS) that is a mobile/cell phone base station. The project uses a software defined radio specifically the well known USRP. The project seems to be going well since they already had a field trial at Burning Man this year.

This project should be really interesting. Also using this will be rather impossible because of license issues with the wireless spectrum that is used for mobile phone.

Link: openbts.sourceforge.net