Stumbling is fun

I took the laptop and said cantenna today and drove around the neighbourhood some. At first I had my card set wrong (still Peer to Peer with WEP), so I did not find anything. As soon as I switched it to Default, NetStumbler just kept going “boing” .

In the few minutes I had before the battery went flat, I found 11 access points. 4 of them had WEP enabled. A lot say “Linksys” or “Default”, a few have names like “Housing” (hmm, Dept. of?) and “WORKGROUP”.

Fun stuff, this driving around with an antenna. Can’t do it seriously without a car adapter, though; the WiFi + Antenna just takes too much juice out of the battery.

In other matters, I managed to mislay the beeper I wear on my belt. Don’t ask me how I did that. I think I am non too organized today.

Wireless goodness

Yay. I am up and running on wireless in my house.

Correction: The Belkin USB is not an AP. It is just a network adapter.

Not a big deal, I just set up a peer-to-peer wireless then, and bridged the Belkin USB and my Ethernet on the XP desktop, so that the wireless laptop is part of the same network. I didn’t have much luck with using XP’s built-in wireless config utility, though, it kept showing me only greyed-out controls for some reason. I ended up reinstalling the Belkin software with its own configuration util, which is an option during installation: Use XP’s built-in or pretend not to be wireless (as far as XP is concerned anyway) and use Belkin’s utility to configure the wireless aspects.

I did manage to load Orinoco firmware and drivers and utils for my Dell TrueMobile 1150 PCMCIA card. I did that because Dell does not update their OEMed firmware/drivers, so it was either “run on outdated stuff” or “putz around with Orinoco stuff until it works”.

Detailed and lengthy instructions .

Solaris

Movie mini-review: Solaris

Just saw Solaris. Stanislav Lem move-adaptation goodness. Nummy! I feel much Kubricked, though it was Steven Soderbergh who directed it.

The movie’s mood is slow. The music is dreamlike, for the most part, the planet Solaris is a feast for the eyes. The story in short is … strange happenings aboard a station orbiting Solaris, security force that should investigate goes missing, shrink is sent in to figure out what’s going on.

I half-expected the whole thing to drift into Sphere-esque mayhem, but it does not. Tension is high aboard the station, but all the killing lies in the past. No one attacks anyone with a kitchen knife. Good.

The frequent flash-backs into the life of Chris Kelvin (he said shrink, played by Clooney … who ain’t half-bad) are shown in a kind of warm sepia-tone that I actually liked, a little corny though it may have been.

I don’t want to tell much of the story, as much of the enjoyment comes from the thorough mind-fuck this movie attempts to give you. Some spiritual questions are raised as well, but not really answered.

It gets a “go see!” and “I gotta buy this on DVD” from me.