Rob the Geek

Category: Geek Stuff

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1: Digital Citizenship – Cyber-Safety

    Digital Citizenship – Cybersafety Stream led by: Martin Cocker (NetSafe) – NetHui Digital Citizenship Forum Martin started off the session by outlining there things are in New Zealand, as well as providing a context for the terminology which would follow. In this regard, Digital Citizens were defined as those using technologies to have: Greater productivity (via use […]

  • NetHui 2011 – Day 1

    You could tell that you’d arrived at the NetHui because every seat anywhere remotely near a power source was occupied by someone hunched over an electronic device, either furiously tapping away at a keyboard or swiping at a screen. Skip to: Opening Address: Vikram Kumar / Rod Drury Presentation of InternetNZ Lifetime Achievement Award World […]

  • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) + WiFi working on EEE

    When Ubuntu 11.04 released, things went backwards for the EEE. If the wireless adapter was enabled, Natty would hang soon after login – it turns out this was due to a kernel issue similar to that experienced in its predecessor. But, as per many things in the open software world, the community has come up […]

  • Skype Beta 2.2.0.25 for Linux – Webcam WORKING!

    Ugh – finally, after much backward and forward (even to the point I dragged out a Windows laptop) I’ve tracked down the issue which was stopping my embedded webcams (which otherwise works in all other applications) from working with the latest beta of Skype for Linux. The solution is this (thanks Ubuntu Forums): for 32-bit […]

  • Visualising Public Data – Auckland Transport

    Chris McDowall is a very, very clever person. In addition to all the other cool stuff he’s done in the NZ data space, he has just released this post on taking the Maxx public transport data feed of movements over a day, and plotting it out on a map. It’s hypnotic and astounding in the […]

  • Notes from Barcamp Auckland 2010

    Barcamp Auckland is an annual gathering of developers, designers, start-ups and social-media types. It’s a full day event held in an ‘unconference’ like style, where the attendee (see my attendee & interested folks list on Twitter) set the schedule – and people turn up to discuss topics which interest them. The following are the session […]

  • Profiling my Power

    To celebrate the introduction of the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS*) in New Zealand today (1 July 2010), I thought I’d publish the following article on what I’m doing in terms of residential Power Monitoring. Read on for: The Back Story The Unboxing Installing the Device Configuring the Software Results The Back Story A few years […]

  • These *are* the Droids you’re looking for…

    Hat tip to @VodaphoneNZ for re-igniting my interest in having another crack at the following post which I originally wrote for an internal publication for my employer. I’ve changed some of the phraseology,but the basic content – apart from the opening paragraph – remains pretty similar. Once again, these are my personal opinions and are […]

  • Tabnabbing – An Even More Evil Phishing Attack

    Wow – I’ve just finished reading a recent blog post by Aza Raskin (creative lead for Firefox) and he presents an interesting new phishing attack vector for us to be(a)ware of, that of ‘Tabnabbing’. For many of us, phishing attempts, (that is – attempts by ‘evil’ sites or emails to pretend they are from legitimate […]

  • A PC for the Kids: Introduction

    With my wife adopting a new notebook we’ve found ourselves with an additional, usable machine which we’ve earmarked for our boys use. The unit in question is a rather dated IBM Thinkpad R51 which ran fine with Windows XP, but given that our boys are now of an age where they are being more inquisitive, […]