Tag: WIFI

Does your laptop sport a full-width keyboard but you wish it had a numeric keypad? For those who crunch a lot of numbers, Sure, you can pick up a USB keypad pretty cheaply, but why lug around one more piece of plastic and PCB if you don't have to? If you're already toting an iPhone or iPod touch, Balmuda Designs' free NumberKey app is up to the task. Install the server on your notebook or ...

In exchange for just one search on Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, Microsoft will grant you free WiFi access on hotspots nationwide (but mostly in airports and hotels). Apparently the offer began in September but perhaps they've been steadily unrolling it across the country as they only just announced it officially yesterday. It's an interesting approach to marketing, and no doubt not ...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on an emerging trend of coffee shops covering up outlets, banning laptops, or pushing out people who sit for too long. Although the article suggests this might be a bigger phenomenon in New York than, say, San Francisco, the conclusion seems to be based entirely on anecdotal evidence. Sources include a couple of coffee shop owners in NYC and a laptop user who ...

NetStumbler and inSSIDer are cool wireless utilities, but Ekahau Heat Mapper takes things one step further. When you launch HeatMapper, you'll have the opportunity to select a map image - say, one you put together using Autodesk Dragonfly. Wander around your location and click on the map every time you pause to take a reading, and HeatMapper rolls the collected data into a slick, interactive ...

Wifi mesh networks certainly aren't a new idea. Heck, it's a trick even the inexpensive OLPC XO Laptop can pull off. Utilizing a project Microsoft Research began working on in 2002, Windows 7 will allow us to connect to multiple wireless access points or act as a repeater using a single wireless adapter. Does your current wireless adapter support VWifi? Probably not right now. Manufacturers will ...

I had tried NetStumbler before on my Vista laptop and not met with much success. So when I read on MetaGeek's web site that their inSSIDer was designed to do the same job with native Vista APIs, I was intrigued. If you're a road warrior, this is a great utility to keep at the ready. inSSIDer's scanner makes it a snap to identify available access points, quickly displaying available SSIDs and ...

Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military. Xirrus Wifi Monitor is available as a Yahoo Widget (for Mac, too) and a Vista Sidebar Gadget. It sits at the side of your screen scanning at your specified interval and updating its tiny radar screen with new hits. In our testing, it did a very good job at plotting the physical location of ...

The Mac users at Download Squad love the built-in Airport cards in our Macbooks, but sometimes we wish the software were a little bit ... smarter. The menu-bar interface for Airport doesn't really give a lot of information about the available networks, and sometimes it automatically joins one you know you don't want to use. If you want to disconnect from a network without connection to another ...

There are few job titles as misleading as that of the "Penetration Tester." Sure, saying professional computer hacker would be more direct, but have you ever noticed how hackers seem to have a dirty mind? Why else would they want to go phreaking through backdoors? Anyway, in order for hackers to umm...maximize their penetration; they need the right tools for the job. BackTrack is a bootable Linux ...

Over the past few days there has been increasing furor over a claim made by some "electro-sensitive" folks in Santa Fe that wifi in public buildings violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because these people are electro-sensitive (and this sensitivity can be to all sorts of electromagnetic fields, in things like cell phones, or microwaves, or, we'd imagine, things like transformer stations ...

WeFi is a free utility for Mac or PC laptop users who want an easy to use WiFi connection manager/hotspot finder that also lets you know if your friends are connected to hotspots near you. If you're working at a coffee shop down the street from your friend, WeFi will tell you so that you can seek your friends out or run the other way, depending on how much money you owe them. We first covered ...

A lot of highly-caffeinated people were made very happy yesterday, when Starbucks announced it would be partnering with AT&T to provide free WiFi. About 7,000 locations nationwide will carry the new service. Now we can finally take our laptops into Starbucks without feeling like we're stepping through a time portal to the 90's. There's a slight catch to the free WiFi deal: you get two hours ...

Truphone, the UK-outfit that puts bread on the table by allowing cell-phones to make VoIP calls while saving cell service subscribers access charges, has just announced a partnership with WiFi network provider Quiconnect. This means that Truphone users will be able to hop onto WiFi hotspots all around the world, as long as those hotspots participate in Quiconnect's network. While there still ...

A recent trip to a coffee house had us thinking--why isn't WiFi everywhere yet? Well, at loss for the answer to that one (though opinions explaining WiFi's utter lack of ubiquity differ widely), we decided to ask another one--how can the wireless road warrior equip himself for navigating the mostly-uncharted seas of WiFi? The first tool for your wireless toolbelt is NetStumbler, a Windows app for ...

McDonald's, effervescing with beefy, trans-fat-free goodness in every bite, has just given British iPhone users one more reason to mack a double-cheese: free WiFi. The move is designed to take a chomp out of rival chains which offer WiFi for a fee throughout the kingdom and is timed to coincide with the UK release of Apple's tremendously successful iPhone, a move somewhat contradictory to Apple's ...