Saturday, April 09, 2005

This week's adventures... PSP love and WiFi

Well, Friday slipped passed and I didn't write a blurb. But, got some "hands on" time with a PSP, and man do I want one. Although, it isn't the games that are pushing it over, it's the Wipeout Pure web browsing hack (google it). The PSP has built in 802.11b wifi capabilities out of the box, and as you may or may not know there are a lot of wireless access points (WAP) out there especially if your in a city of some size. Now most of these are secured/encrypted, but some are not. :)

I picked up Wipeout early this week (yet I don't own a PSP?!) and was really excited thinking about portable internet. The PSP will scan for WAP's when setting up a new infrastructure connection, and show you there name, encryption, and signal strength of the ones found. What your looking for is ones where whomever controls the WAP forgot (?) to set the security features. I thought I would see if any of my neighbors were "leaking" wireless signals, but unfortunately they were not. If/when I get a PSP I will have to buy a wireless router for the house. Since I still had the PSP this afternoon I decided to check around work, but it's a business area so all of the WAP's I found were encrypted although some had interesting names (Exit Wi-Fi = Wal-Mart?) . For example in the parking lot I picked up 5-8 WAP's depending on where I was standing. Another interesting place to check is an apartment complex, I drove through one, and found 20+ easily with I'd say only 1/2 with encryption turned on.

OK now for my PSA, if you hook up a wireless router take the time to change the name, and turn encryption on! Do you want anyone to come along and use your internet bandwidth, or gain access to your network? Okay some people don't do this, and you would be surprised how many units are still named default. Anyway enough of that. To make this extremely long story short(er) I surfed the web through one of the PSP portals, and damn it was cool! It's not without some problems (big pictures won't load, most pages aren't designed for the screen size, and the PSP's text entry method is kinda tedious.) but overall its really neat.

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