Monday, May 31, 2010

Wireless settings

Made the jump recently to add wireless to my home network (vs all-wired) due to the arrival of my iPad. Conventional wisdom (SSID) got in the way though.

All you need to set is a LONG & STRONG WPA2 (AES) password. I was telling the router not to broadcast the SSID, but that does little to stop hackers and makes the network almost unusable -- devices (iPad/iPhone) can't see the network, even if they remember the SSID/password. Once I set the SSID to broadcast, the devices automagically saw the network and joined. Just make sure you choose a unique SSID.

One potential problem I have to investigate. What is someone chooses the same name (SSID) and no password -- which one will the device choose?

Security's Top 4 Social Engineers Of All Time

Click here for the article.

On this, Quit Facebook Day, I haven't quit Facebook since there are reasons to have a presence there. However, to protect my privacy, I've removed every shred of profile information, including using a fake birthday (was already doing that). Basically, i treat it like Twitter - I'll read stuff, I'll contribute not-too-personal stuff, you can figure out who I am by my associations, but I won't provide any specific personal information (it's enough that Google is trying to get all of that stuff :-/ ).

Another interesting article here (bit.ly link) or here (direct link to Washington Post).

Sunday, May 30, 2010

What am I up to?

Things on my to-do list:
- transfer passwords being kept by Firefox to 1Password (Mac) and KeePass (PC)
- consolidate data from a dozen 100-200GB (WD & LaCie) external drives into TB drives- set up WD NAS drive
- set up TimeMachine backups for MacBook (to LaCie d2 quadra)
- upgrade MacBook to SnowLeopard
- find a decent multi-account Twitter client for iPad (use Twitterific on iPhone and Seesmic Desktop on PC, nothing on Mac)
- find a decent newsreader for iPhone & iPad (use Google Reader on PC, nothing on Mac)
- finish transferring most of my work from PC to MacBook
- wait for Henge Docks docking station to become available for my 13" MacBook
- try to load OpenBSD on my old PowerPC chip iMac (currently running OS X Tiger)
- wait for the new iPhone coming in June

Lost meets Avatar

click here for the picture (via @jlist").

Steven Fry on "What I wish I'd known when I was 18"

Take 30 minutes out of your day to listen to this (via @chockenberry). If you'd prefer to listen to it offline as an mp4 (instead of streaming it), bring me a USB stick.

Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'

Interesting article here (via @samkrishna).