While I waited for my lift to work, I mucked around with the Sat decoder that my mate had dropped off while he was there on Friday.

I was trying to make sure it had the correct signal source details, when I had to go.

I managed to forget my ipod, bugger, since it's going to take me hours to get home.

When I went out to lunch, I went into a cheap shop, and bought some crappy cheap earbuds for a dollar, so I could listen to music on my laptop on the way home.

I also bought another linux magazine, to read on the way home.

At least the trains were back running this week, so I didn't have to get 2 trains and a bus home, only 2 trains, but they cancelled the first train, so it ended up taking me 3 1/2 hours to get home.

Anyway, while coming back towards home from Newcastle, I used kismet to look for WLANs.

I saw 92 different APs, some of them had no protection on them, so if I hadn't been flying past them at 80km/hr or more, I might have been able to attach to them.

I'll probably put the dump file from kismet up at some point.

Here's a list of the essids I saw, in the order I saw them between Newcastle, and Niagara Park, where I shut my laptop down:

broadmeadow
WNA-Newcastle
WNA-Mater-05
merewether
default
merewether
NETGEAR
belkin54g
RadioNet
MBCNTLWLAP
Kick Aarse
vimes
NLSNET
IDL-Kotara
Hanson
Vally
RNB-WPA
NETGEAR
default
Buchanan
Eagleton Home Network (49424455)
wireless
IDL-Munibung
IDL-Munibung
IDL-Munibung
wireless
IDL-Vincent
IDL-Vincent
Reach
ws1
Cardiff3
linksys
default
DLINK
default
ACNHWINET1
NWE_OFFICE
hpsetup
default
NETGEAR
NETGEAR
17Wamsley
NETGEAR
Ominous
Drew
NETGEAR
NETGEAR
earthquacke
NETGEAR
NETGEAR
lock
wsc telemetry
belkin54g
conexant
CCPSO
impact
default
AccPt
WRIGHT FAMILY
cci.net.au_mardi
default
tuggerah_new
default
default
WORKGROUP
Tuggerah Dental
linksys
ore
belkin54g
NETGEAR
marg
Tecknow

There were also 20 with no name set on them. I realise there are a few duplicates above, but they are not the same APs, because they were running on different channels, with different MAC addresses.

I got home, and a little while later, I got a call from a mate, he'd bought himself a tivo off eBay about a week ago, and it had arrived.

I decided to get back to sorting out the sat stuff.

I took out the card interface from one of the old sat units, a UEC 720, which is most of a card programmer, and put it back together. I could never get that box to work with a card programmer for some reason.

I removed the basic card interface from the spare UEC910, and I soldered it into the UEC720 that my mate had given me.

I rigged that up, and connected the card interface to the card server, and found that after a bit of fiddling with it, I managed to get it use the card server.

This was groovy, because it could handle searching the channels, but the 910s don't, and get stuck saying "waiting for NIT acquisition" until you cancel the scan.

It also had the channels in the right place, unlike the 910s, that need all the aurora channels there, even though I can't get them, because I only have access to a horizontal polarised signal feed.

After getting that going, I decided to do a bit more soldering, and I replaced the potentiometers on the interlock controllers I've got that need fixing.

This worked, as I suspected, it was the pots causing the problems, so I'd fixed 2 of them. I have a 3rd one, but I don't have a pot to install on it.