P16: Practical Progress

Hackathon pics, Installing Kismet on Nokia N810

Ack, I can't believe it's nearly a week since the Google App Engine hack-a-thon and I still haven't written about it. The event itself was fun, informative, and most importantly yielded a t-shirt and an App Engine account. :)

Picasa: photos from GoogleAppEngineHackathon

I'm vaguely visible in the front row in this photo. (behind the red laptop)

More about the hack-a-thon in another post. But I really need to get better at just blurting out what's on my mind, so to avoid week-long lulls on this blog such as you just experienced. :)

Installing Kismet on Nokia N810

• Kismet - A Wi-Fi "network auditing" tool, aka passive sniffer
• Nokia N810 - a Linux-based "internet tablet". Pocket-sized, has Wi-Fi and GPS

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I've always wanted to put these two great tastes together. Last night I finally figured out how, courtesy of Internet Tablet Talk forums:

• Activate RedPillMode in Application Manager, this allows you to see system libraries
• install libraries: ncurses-base and tcpdump
• install "becomeroot" from gronmayer.com/it so "sudo gainroot" works on the local xterm
• Install tz1's .deb build of kismet
• in an xterm, do:
  • sudo gainroot
  • mkdir /media/mmc11/kismet
  • kismet

And it worked! Thanks tz1!

New toy: Flip Video Ultra camcorder

I acquired a cool new toy yesterday -- courtesy of my lovely girlfriend Susan, and Warner Brothers, which gave it to her at the end of a business presentation (gotta love the ad business!).

Pure Digital "Flip Video Ultra"

It's a tiny handheld camcorder that records to internal solid-state memory, and has a USB plug on the side that pops out. Plug it into your computer and you'll find software (Windows and Mac) on the camera, ready to use.

The quality is really not so bad. Here is a quick clip of my dog, which I shot at 11PM last night, edited slightly, and uploaded to Flix55.com:

Gads, I sound so silly talking to my dog! :-)

Some quick tech notes:

• The provided OS X software runs directly off the camera -- nothing to install
• It's a PowerPC app, but it ran fine on my MacBook Pro (Rosetta emulation)
• An MPEG4 codec from 3ivx.com is provided. I was able to play the videos without it, but I installed anyway
• For sharing, the app will recode your video in a "Flip Videos for Uploading" format -- Quicktime .MOV (codecs: QDesign Music 2, Sorenson Video 3)
• This "upload" version is a lot smaller, but the audio transcodes poorly on websites that use ON2 Flix Engine to generate Flash video (FLV) -- like Flix55.com

ps: Yes, I set up the video transcoding backend at Flix55.