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

since more or less today Skype is not allowed anymore on the UCSB campus network. The reasons are: 1) providing bandwidth to people not involved with UCSB (Skype's P2P behavior) and 2) security of campus computers running Skype.

I guess this counts for the whole UC system so Skype is loosing a huge amount of users here. Also I know about other big companies which also have baned Skype from the networks. So is Skype dieing soon?

so I just uploaded a packaged version for the 770 of NMAP. Its a really cool thing to have on the 770. Especially since I now (Dec. 2005) own a cool Bluetooth keyboard (Stowaway Think Outside) which I got as a birthday present from my girl friend. It, together with an xterm console, really makes your 770 more usable. I started installing all the necessary shell utilities and now its just a cooler device. Also the keyboard applet is far from perfect right now. I have problems getting enter/return working sometimes. Also the power save mode kicks in too often.

I just found this list of 50 geek/computer movies (in German) on digg.de. IMHO this list is not too good. It contains stuff like The Firm or You've got Mail but misses good stuff like Dark Star. Anyway my own list is here, also this is rather a review site then a complete list.

Any other good lists or review sites?

click to get full size

here is a much nicer screenshot of xkbdbthid I took it using mst. Which is a nice networked screenshot tool. Also it tells you to only bind to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) you can access it from any computer on the network.

so now, after playing with my T3, I found that I also need to update BTClass and here it is... btclass.zip

so here is a new version of BlueSpam that works in 2006 and beyond. This time I really removed the time-bomb so it will never timeout again.

Updating this was a real pain this time. Since I don't do PalmOS stuff anymore (I prefer running Linux on my PDAs these days) I didn't have the SDK installed anymore (after buying a new laptop last year). Also just installing the complier is not enough you know. You need to download the PalmOS SDK from palmsource, find out that you need to get this one special header file not included in the main SDK. This one header file is only available from PalmONE's pluggedin developer portal. You're all ready pissed because you just wanted to re-compile this tiny application and now you have to download and install all the crap. Also pluggedin decided to revoke my developer account which I had for about 8 years (yes I'm doing PalmOS stuff since late 1997). So I created a new account... blablabla. Download the latest version of BlueSpam here.

I love my users!

...is my latest Bluetooth tool. It's a soft-HID device as I call it. This is a Bluetooth HID Keyboard software implementation. It turns your Linux box, PDA or tablet into a Bluetooth HID Keyboard. This is the same thing some of the newer cellphones have, now we have it for Linux!

This is the very first release, so expect it to be buggy. For example it doesn't support MacOSX by now (because I don't have a Mac) since MacOSX requires a other sub protocol (blablabla).

Check the xkbdbthid site and my Nokia770 page for downloads and instructions.

This is actually just my first HID tool, some more stuff is coming up but I just don't have any time now so I first release this cool thing for you.

Feedback is more then welcome as always!

mh57 just pointed me to a Spiegel Online article about Bluetooth advertising or BlueSpam as I like to call it. Its about a German company which uses Bluetooth to beef up their billboards in Berlin. Apparently they just push images, videos, text ads and coupons to any Bluetooth device in range. This is annoying but you can of course just ignore/reject the transmission or turn of visibility. The actual security/privacy problem is that people maybe get used to accept connections from certain senders e.g. BlueSpam (of course you wouldn't name your system BlueSpam). So what keeps me from standing next to one of the billboards naming my laptop BlueSpam and instead of sending a coupon I send hello.jpg. And since some phones still don't show what the Bluetooth connection is for I just pull their phonebook etc., the user will just see Allow connection from BlueSpam? Sure I want that coupon.

This is not a good idea!

Btw. the company doing this stuff is: Wall AG

I don't know if I complained about this in my blog before but today I will!

Once again my HP iPAQ h6315 PocketPC PDA-phone crashed when I received a call. It just froze when I try to pickup the call. This is about the 100th time this happened. Its in no way consistent and happens randomly. My guess is low memory due to memory holes in other PocketPC applications - but who knows.

Anyway I really need a new phone - one that doesn't crash all the time. I would use my Nokia 7650 but since it doesn't support the US GSM bands I can't.

I just needed to say this! *ARG*

Happy New Year, here is IpHome 0.2! Actually this was just a test tool but so many people downloaded it and I got some emails with feature request - so I decided to put in more features. Now you can cycle through all interfaces which are up and have a IP address assigned. Just tap the plugin display panel to switch to the next interface.

Download it from my 770 section.