A simple enough hack but ingenious. Take one part Wifi Detecting shirt from Thinkgeek, subtract fabric with scissors. Add in your car and shake and bake till it looks awesome. I’m not sure announcing your intent to go wardriving is the best practice considering the overall attitude towards borrowing another person’s poorly secured internet connection.

But don’t tell that to MACGEEK. All thats left is to have a ipod doc on the license plate, and the need to replace the car every year to something with less buttons. All snark aside; I’m a sucker for crazy license plates so this hit a couple buttons here.

SlipperyBrick.com

Tags: geeky, Mac, security, shirt, Wifi

I’m sure if you are even passingly interested in technology news you are probably aware that we are once again on the cusp of a big Apple event. This happens every year to some degree. Since the world went gaga for the iPod some time back this means tons of media coverage. Even the morning news shows now tart up a 4 day old story as Tech Bytes and feed it to the masses.

The iPod, the iPhone, iMac, iaM tired of it. Even the i fixture in front of the word speaks less of original thinking and more of branding, and its fast becoming hackneyed

I like a machine that does what it is supposed to do, hopefully with as much transparency as possible and then goes about its business. I have never been one to give in to devotion or cultish following of any tech products. At their core they are purchases to be made, or not. Ecosystems to support, as someone in tech support, and liars. All products lie to you either through omission, or through outright deception. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: apple, Bill Gates, devoted, fanboy, functionalism, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, open source, PC, Steve Jobs, Windows, your rights

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Shortened Holiday Broadcast, Vacation for your tired earlobes

With the vacation in full swing and the majority of the family visiting done by now we are slowly getting back online. For the past few days my interactions in a virtual sense were supplanted by the sharing of good old fashioned face to face Christmas cheer. As it is our custom every year we made the rounds and are now a spent people. The boy was overall very well behaved and Santa was very good to him.

On tonights show you’ll hear about a few of the more awesome stories to leak through. We have a couple Holiday story holdovers to mention and we’ll let you get back to your family.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas. We got quite a few geek worthy gifts and stories to share. But we also have some rather fun news to share. If you don’t happened to follow any other the other social media avenues that the CaffiNation Walks it may be new to you so listen in.

CaffiNation Live on Wednesday Nights at 11pm Eastern

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer

visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts Enjoy the show!

• Back Channel: All the Cruft, non of the Chaff now with more fluff
• Where else can you find me? www.paulrjmuller.com

Geek Cruft

• TPN Weekly. How to be family tech support
• If it looks like a Roomba but isn’t
• Ceiling mounted robot fires ping ping balls
• Boldly swimming where no man swum before
• tree changes color with your tweets
• What happens to trees after the holiday?

Food and Caffeinated Bits:

• Mountain Dew Tree (For Norbert, but only if they use Code Red)
• 1000 Beert Bottles and a good load of Christmas Cheer Later
• 5-Piece Bar Tool Set. In a bottle*
• My Mac, My Coffee, Wonder if it uses DRM? It Sorta does
• Star Wars wine stoppers

Care to contribute?

Feel free to send in any recipes, reviews or like minded articles and I’ll gladly post it with a link back to your site!

Thanks and Stay Caffeinated People!

*Affiliate Links

Stay in Touch: Phone 215-240-1319 | Twitter @caffination | Facebook Fan Page
Subscribe via | RSS |  iTunes | Zune

Tags: beer bottle tree, code red, Coffee, Mac, mountain dew, recycled trees, robot, roomba, tweet

Just an FYI to people who listen to my show. I often post news from a site called mopo.ca, but today when i visited the site looking for the funny content I was accosted by a warning screen telling me i have a virus and the website is dangerous… OK, didn’t even look close to being real. i hit the escape button.

Then a fake virus scan ran and this lovely error message popped up in the window. The malware was trying to get me to install their “special” Antivirus, but the OS seemed a bit off. I’m working on a Mac right now… the Windows XP menu looks a bit out of place.

Sad thing is its very easy to have a website do a browser check to not only see what type of browser you are viewing the website with, Internet Explorer, opera Firefox ect, but also what OS th browser is running on. So if the scammers ever really got their act together they could theoritcally do a good job, but apparently they are slopy, so hold off visting that site until further notice and as always don’t install anything a website trys to force you to. To exit out of a program trying to hijack your machine on a PC, hti CTL- Alt -Delted and close the offending program, on a Mac hold down Option, Apple and Esc to force quit.

Tags: antivirus, fail, Mac, mistake, os x, PC, Scam, scamware, whoops, windows xp, xp

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Today’s Show: Lego, Olympics, Sandwiches, Virus, tiny things with big impacts.

• PodCamp Philly is Coming
• Back Channel Links Tumblr Blog Grinds
• The Everything Feed: Friendfeed
• The RSS Feed for this Podcast

—-

Sponsored by GoToMeeting, Try it Free for 30 days
visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts

Also Try GoDaddy Code Blu84 for 10% off your order

—-

What am I reading? I usually don’t tip my hat, but i have to Slide:ology was sent to me By the fine folks at O’Reilly. Review to come, but listen to hear impressions thus far. in a word Fantastic…  there i go tipping my hat again…

Big Change can come in little packages, but for some reason today we have a ton of small things making big impacts in the worlds of Tech and Caffeine Culture. There are stories from a wide array of blogs sources and viewpoints as always I invite you to join the discussion after the fact and comment, lead suggestions or contact me. Thanks for listening!

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: dew, emily, Geoff Manning, knightwise, Lego, Mac, Olympics, pepsi, Starbucks, turtles

The program that i recommend to any podcaster for recording, no matter how experienced they are is Audacity. Its free and rarely ever fails. However as with anything free there is some trade off, the trade off here is in the niceities of features, specifically the lack of a built in recovery tool. However despite any problems i have ever had with the tool the benefits of being a full featured audio editor have never been overshadowed by the occasional crashes. I have crafted this article to hopefully help you along recovering from a crash.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Audacity recovery, audacity recovery help, audacity troubleshooting, chipmunk effect, instructions, Intel Mac, Mac, PPC, PPC Mac

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On Today’s Show: Upgrades, Hacking, Wind Up Cars, Caffeine and Superheroes

This show sponsored by GoToMeeting, Try it Free for 45 days
Visit http://www.gotomeeting.com/podcast for more details

Podsafe Music & Announcements

• Maria Daines: House of the Rising Sun
  • Folklore House of the rising sun

• Wordpress 2.5 is now out, So when will I upgrade? Problem with free software
• The weekend begs of Spring, Trout Season Opened, Baseball Opening Day is tomorrow

Real News Bytes

• Lower than Low, Message board for epileptics attacked
• Day 1: Nothing. The error is obviously Human
• Day 2 Hacking the Gibson… Macbook Air Falls in under two minutes
• Day 3: Windows Vista SP1 laptop fall on final day. After some installs
• Ubuntu Stand alone at the end
• Comcast Degrading Signal? So thats why Lost has looked bad lately

Tech Cruft

• Drive a small car? Need a boost?
• Concept Art, PC on a Pallet. Needs a little tweaking
• Photoshop goes online, and free. But not without issues
• After the last show we talked about small and useful, this fits the bill in spades

Caffeine & Food

• Safe Driving, Caffeine tip
• Twitter is my new source for awesome links
• Snapple’s New “Water”, Give me beer
• Starbucks buys Clover, mass data collection
• This is stupid. But I like the scale

Want to Contact Me?

• Phone Me: 215-240-1319 :: Email Me @ CaffiNation@gmail.com
• Skype Me thecaffination :: Full Contact Details

Thanks and Stay Caffeinated People!

Tags: caffeine, Coffee, hacking, Mac, Podcast, Superheroes, tech news, ubuntu, Upgrades, Wind Up Cars, Windows, Wordpress