New year: new toys and 2 wifi advices

So the transition to the new year went smoothly and without glitches.
And it wasn't as bad as I thought :)

I have been playing with my long-awaited SDIO wifi card and my Palm PDA. Oh boy! It's a mixed surprise (as in "it was to be expected" and "surely people know better") to find out how many open wireless networks are out there!

The funniest part is that most DSL modems being deployed by the biggest provider in the area come with wireless capabilities turned OFF by default. Someone had to turn them on and allow them to broadcast their SSID without encryption, yes?

Well, given the proper stimulus, people might learn over time. But in the meantime, all I have to do is to grab my fully-recharged PDA and scan around. There are two tiny bits of information I would like to share though:

- Grab a list of freely accesible and geographically-close DNS servers. For some reason, the default DNS address received via DHCP does not work.

- Do you make extensive reference to the Wikipedia (like yours truly does)?
Create a bookmark with the following address. It will greatly simplify your search effort:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/

I'm still compiling a list of free wifi applications, but among them I want to include a VNC viewer, a SSH tunneler and an IM client. The biggest challenge will be to fit them all in the 32 Mb of my PDA. Ack, why couldn't the designers of the device include 2 SD expansion slots?

In other news, the second part of the new Battlestar Galactica's series season 2 has begun. One must make sure the -other- addicts get their fix soon too ;)