Raving Rabbit

The little rural village where I live in Ireland has been blessed two years ago with the arrival of the 3G, and the national operator couldn't do anything against it this time (they're still making so much money with all the dial-up users!).Some competition finally took off, and viable wireless solution became available in this Internet black spot.So it's only in mid-2007 that...

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Remote Sentinel

This falls into my wish-list, although I'm not really planning to get one any time soon. I just like to keep an eye on it to see how it evolves price-wise (around €300 at the moment) and feature-wise: The Rovio from Wowwee is an eye-catching IP camera on wheels.I wouldn't count on this robot to watch over my house in my absence because it's likely to be the first thing any burglar...

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Screen Capture and Screen Recording

As a big part of my job is to make technical procedures as clear as possible for non technical people, a vital tool that I extensively use to achieve this is the screen capture utility, and, to a smaller extend, the screen recorder.I adopted Gadwin PrintScreen. It's a closed-source freeware, but I yet have to find a matching open-source offering together the features that I required:-...

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myPhoneExplorer

Continuing on my best-of collection of freeware (although not open-source in this particular case) outperforming their professional counterpart, here is one that, for a good part, made me come back from the Windows Mobile to the Sony Ericsson world: myPhoneExplorerI started around 2005 with a very ambitious phone manager called floAt's Mobile Agent (aka FMA), but its development...

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Foscam IP Camera (Part Two)

I have to add an update (already) on the FI8908W that I presented earlier, and this time, there's good news for Linux, Mac and Firefox users! (corresponding firmware for fi8909w-NA and fi8903/04w here)Since people at Foscam already proved very responsive, I sent them another question about the chances to see some support for non-ActiveX browsers in a future firmware.While I expected...

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Ultimate tool for the tribe's Big Chief

Back in the late 80's, a particular episode from Jim Henson's TV series Dinosaurs, was showing Robbie, the son, , challenging Earl, his father, for the alpha-male supremacy by taking the TV remote from him.This marked me as the best illustration of a true social fact: whoever holds the remote control, rules the house!To secure this fact, a sophisticated device that you only can...

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Let's make some mess...

Are you nostalgic of the time when it was possible to reboot your personal computer by gently hitting the desk with your fist (Sinclair ZX81) ? Have you been the proud owner of the first 16-bit computer out-performed by all the 8-bit competition (TI99/4A) ? Did you drill holes into your 45 min tapes to use them in the revolutionary tape streamer of the ColecoVision ADAM ?I know,...

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A small linux-based wireless storage

I must confess that I bought this item by mistake: I expected this tiny wireless storage to be the perfect companion for my DVR (Digital Video Recorder). But I neglected to ensure that it would have a USB Host type of port, and it's not the case. So it cannot act as a flash drive for the DVR, if you follow me.Still, it's a nice device: small enough, using a 6.3cm (2.5") hard drive,...

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One small rocket for man...

This USB rocket launcher seemed appropriate to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.I usually don't like to waste my precious USB ports with useless things, but I'll probably make an exception for this one... one da...

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Beware what you joke on!

I said once, as a joke (okay not very funny), that with Ryanair, passengers would end up carrying their own luggage to the airplane and would be standing rather than seating during the flight... well it is all about to happen!I must have said it too loud!Let's hope it's just another joke from the airline to generate both fear and buz...

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A cheap GPS that can be happily tweaked

Some gadgets are a true pleasure to own, in particular the once that have a high price/tweak ratio.This is the case of some cheap GPS devices out there that you can buy for less than €100 on the web. They're not too hard to unlock so they can be extended beyond their original purpose.I recently purchased one of them from DealExtreme, not the nicest Personal Navigation Device,...

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Network Notepad

I was looking for a simple way to create a nice map of my network at home. While not so big, it grew fast with the addition of various wifi-enabled devices in the last years.A colleague brought my attention to a freeware called Network Notepad.I initially overlooked it as being too basic, but it turned out to be actually exactly what I needed: not too big (about 3 MB), not too...

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