Vehicle For Dissertation - Tech Edition

A resource for technology information I find interesting... And maybe you will too.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

How Boeing's Connexion service works...

Connexion, developed by Boeing, delivers broadband internet to aircraft in-flight. While I'm not a frequent flyer I do like aircraft and the technology is interesting. THG has the big explanation...

Flying the Unwired Skies : Tom's Networking

Wednesday, March 30, 2005


Saferfox Xpanded 2.3.1 - Firefox Theme

My Favorite Firefox Theme

Just thought I'd put up a link to my favorite Firefox theme. At least I think I like it the best of any I've tried so far... The memory usage seems to be on level with the default theme as well. At the moment I've got 4 pages open in one window and 2 in another with the memory usage at 38,552 KB. It's about 20,000 KB with only one page open. But back to the theme...

It's called Saferfox Xpanded 2.3.1. There is a very small screen shot (maybe I'll have to put up my own) on the Mozilla Update :: Themes page but the best way to see if you like it is to install it and give it a try. Here's the link:

Saferfox Xpanded 2.3.1

Thursday, March 24, 2005

FireTune: Mozilla Firefox Performance Tuning

If you've seen it you've probably used the max connections tweak found in the about:config window of Firefox. With a few settings changes you could speed up page loads quite a bit. If you haven't seen the tweak you can look here. But look below if you want the easy way...

FireTune is a small program that tweaks these (and perhaps others I'm not aware of) settings to increase browsing speed by opening more "pipelines" to the web server your are contacting. A friend sent me a link to it and I thought I'd give it a try. Its easy to use and works pretty well. Pages at Airliners.net (a favorite image-intensive site) loaded rapidly and I haven't seen any ill effects.

FireTune

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Hacking Google Desktop Search

It appears that using Google Desktop search and some knowledge a person can search the hard disks of other computers on the network if they are not firewall "protected". Here's a link for the details at RealTechNews:

Google Search Hack @ RealTechNews

Friday, March 18, 2005

Video Forensics Article @ THG

Here's an interesting link to an article at Tom's Hardware Guide about video forensics. It explains some of the techniques used by investigators to derive information from the less-than-ideal images provided by some of the eyes that are always spying on you as you supposedly go about your own business...There are a lot of them out on the street, basically wherever you go. Kind of creepy if you think about it much...

Video Forensics: Catching the Crooks on Camera

Monday, March 14, 2005

NewsForge article: Make your Windows apps open source

It's interesting finding out about all the applications you use that you may not have needed to buy. There are just so many open source programs available that perform as well or better than their closed-source alternatives. Here's an article on from NewsForge noting several I hadn't heard of before such as 7-Zip (file compression and archiving) and wxMusik (a music player).

NewsForge Article: Make your Windows apps open source

Thursday, March 10, 2005

How to build a BlueSniper rifle


Check out this article where Tom's Networking and John Hering from Flexilis explain how to build a BlueSniper rifle... If you're not familiar with BlueSniper you might want to check these links also to see the capabilities of the wireless rifle...BlueSniper @ RSA 2005, BlueSniper @ Defcon 12.

The "how to" article specs the parts used along with their cost and has some photos to illustrate the fabrication. Even more info related to BlueSniper and the guys who developed it can be found here: More info on BlueSniper.