Having my Asus A636N PDA with wireless built in was a good idea I thought to check the strength of the wireless signal around the house rather than carrying a bulky laptop.

Finding a wifi-scanner that worked on the ASUS A636N took a bit of searching, trial and error. Two that I tried working with Pocket PC 2003, not Windows Mobile 5.0 which the Asus comes with.

MiniStumbler (a cut down version of the brilliant netstumbler program) didn’t work. Neither did WiFiGraph. I didn’t get to try Retina but it looks like a good program.

Also, RW Wifi Scanner supposedly works as well, but I did not try this (Note: this app costs $3.99 whereas all the others are freeware).

I tried WiFiFoFum. It has a nice interface - either a list view or radar view which is prefect for war driving (if you are into that sort of thing). It also has the ability to use the GPS and export the co-ordinates to such formats as TomTom POI, netstumbler so they can then be used in those programs.

The download comes with Compact Framework 2.0 SP2, both which are installed via Active Sync. So if you need to uninstall them for any reason, it can be done easily.

To get this to work with my ASUS A636N, I got into the options menu (once started up), and turned the device off/on. worked without any hassles, and the only other option I would turn on is the aggressive scanning feature so you get real time signal strength updates.

At the time of writing I had not tried the GPS (or export) option.

Overall, a handy little utility to have installed on your PDA to scan wireless networks. It certainly helped me find where the blackspots were in my house.

A credit report is meant to be scrutinized. Unfortunately the populace is only concerned with more credit cards. They have gotten into the internet banking too, using their online credit card heavily. The credit cards have indeed lost their actually purpose.

Here’s a brilliant way to save all the room that a KVM switch and related cables take up.

KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) switches are used when you have (for example) 2 PCs and only 1 keyboard, Monitor and Mouse. They allow you to share the use of them by simple hitting a button on the KVM switch or by a special key combination on your PC.

You can buy them quite cheap off Ebay, but I have found a better way to do it - and for free.

In comes Synergy - Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each using it’s own display. No additional hardware is required.

All that is required to use (once configured of course), is to move the mouse off one screen and then it appears on the other. Keyboard control is then assigned to the other PC where your mouse is located.

Synergy is an open source project, and can be found here.

A cheap insurance is not a means of working towards debt management. For debt relief, get rid of such deals. Use online bank for utility payments, and avoid banks in or close to malls and supermarkets.

What’s that I hear you say? A memory card that has wireless built in? Sure does.

The Eye-Fi memory card adds wireless support to digital cameras that don’t already have it. Perfect to get rid of those pesky cable that clutter up desks.

It supports automatic wireless uploading to your computer as well as social/blogging based photo sites such as Facebook, Picasa and Gallery2.

It’s very easy to do. Just plug your card in, and configure the wireless from your computer. When Eye-Fi is within wireless range, it will automatically upload your pictures for you. The card also performs like a traditional memory card.

The price is around $99 which is a bit steep, but for the convenience factor alone, is well worth the price.

Want to set up a home surveillance system at home while having a bit of fun?

Here’s a bit of a guide of what to do - or more so what I did and how.

Originally this started as a bit of a project in my spare time, but after some teenage idiots decided to throw rocks and eggs at our place one night, it became more of a security thing as I wanted to catch those bastards!

Anyway, back to the good stuff. Not having a big budget, I decided to do a bit of reading and find how much a cheap setup would cost me.

First of all I needed a dedicated PC that I could ‘break’ and it wouldn’t be a drama. Easy - I have a few lying around here and decided to go with a IBM Net Vista PIII 850 with 256M RAM and a 40 Gig hard drive. It’s nothing flash but a good stable PC. I also needed a video capture (DVR) card and a camera. That’s where Ebay came in.

Ebay have these cheap 4 port capture (DVR) cards that you can pick up for about $10. There are a few different types, and if you pay a few more dollars you can get one that processes more frames per second (fps) at a time.

One thing I did read quite often is that with these cheap cards, if you think you can run 4 cameras at real time, then you are dreaming. One or two cameras is bit more realistic. Don’t forget this was more of a project.

The card I got was called a Pico 2000 DVR card
(Please take note of comment #1 at the end of the post),
and looks like this:

The card comes with Windows drivers, and I can tell you now that getting this card to work under Windows (XP) was a real pain (and didn’t work with the drivers supplied) . I will do a separate article about using this under Windows as it deserves its own post. I ended up using Linux for my project.

Now, the camera - again from Ebay. Search for ‘Nightvision camera’ and see how many results come up. You have a few options here as well. Whether you want a wired or wireless camera, color or B/W, and of course what physical size.

Here’s what I chose (but in a cream case). It’s a wired color camera, with 18 LEDs that does enable a bit of seeing in the dark:

To connect the camera to the DVR card, I will use coax cable and terminate RCA plugs at either end. Not too hard to do if you’re handy with a soldering iron. Note: As you can see there are two connectors for the camera. One is for the video signal, and the other is for power, which comes from a standard plug pack transformer.

Next article, I will get into the OS and software that i used.

Individuals who buy to let mortgages manage the rest often end up in debts. The term investment in unheard of to them. A home mortgage deal is common enough and something almost everyone is dealing with, but these people do everything against the free insurance quotes book.

Outlook 2007 has a RSS feed reader built in, but what about if you have Outlook 2003?

RSS popper takes care of it for you. Once installed and configured, RSS feeds will appear in your folder list - one folder for each feed under the RSS folder. It even handles RSS feeds that require a user ID/password. If you have a large number of feeds, you can alter the refresh rate of feeds to minimise net traffic to less intervals.