Stephen's World

Another year unto the breach

Stephen Kapp — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:13:09 +0000

Another year passes…

Defcon Day One

Stephen Kapp — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:21:50 +0000

Defcon 16, day one couple of okay talks got the high tech badge. More on the badge later.

New Jabber

Stephen Kapp — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:12:03 +0000

Well many moons ago I setup a jabber server so I could link all my IM accounts into one place. Way back then I tried Wildfire by Jive Software after a while I dumped it in favor of ejabberd as Java for running Wildfire on Linux was crippling the box.

After messing with the poorly maintained transports for use with ejabberd for too long, both the MSN and AIM transports where dead projects pretty much I decided to try Openfire, which is basically Wildfire just open sourced.

Transport support is far better with Openfire and since I dumped it first time it seems to have had a fair bit of work on it to make it more stable and such like.

After implementing Openfire I have decided to open the server for public registrations. Details of how to register can be found on the VDot site.

Trains

Stephen Kapp — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:44:47 +0000

Some thing I am growing to hate about mobile broadband is how crap it is on a train. I know why is it like this, but when a train boasts it has enhanced coverage like Virgin trains do and you find 90% of the time you have no signal or barely get GPRS you Gota wonder what it would be like without enhancement.

iPhone Apps

Stephen Kapp — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:07:44 +0000

Well first post from the new Wordpress iPhone blogging app. Seems pretty slick.

There are a few more cool apps hitting the Apple appstore, the one that surprised me was the truphone VoIP app. All can be found with a quick search.

iPhone 3G Battery Life

Stephen Kapp — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:51:23 +0000

Something I noticed very quickly was how badly the battery can be hit by simple things on the iPhone 3G. Apple have a page of features that drain battery life, now problem is quite a few mean disabling features that you want to use like push email and wifi.

I did notice however that there are a couple that really make a huge difference, the first of these is using the GPS. You can turn it off by going to Settings > General and then turning it off as follows:

Then

Doing that when you don’t need the GPS will in effect double your battery life. Especially as the GPS will of very little use to you when your inside.

The other thing I’ve noticed that makes a big difference is tweaking the brightness settings, turning the general brightness down and turning off the auto brightness will help a lot. The screen on the iPhone 3G is a lot brighter than that off the old iPhone, side by side with the same settings it is pretty obvious.

Hmmm..

Stephen Kapp — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:51:08 +0000

Well I’m seriously considering ending my now 15 year relationship as a Vodafone customer.. Switching to O2 and getting another iphone 3G in August when my current Vodafone contract expires.

Looking at the Vodafone site I cannot find a price plan that can provide the level of data and minutes to match a iphone ones.

Dwain Chambers

Stephen Kapp — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:04:59 +0000

This kind of sportsman scum such take their punishment for using drugs, and stop whining and using legal arguments to get out of their rightful punishment. He admitted to using drugs which gave him an performance improvement, he is banned from the Olympics and to be perfectly honest he should stop dragging the sport through the shit and take the punishment metered out to him and live with the fact he cheated, he is being punished.

He uses the excuse that he served his ban 2 year ban, hell the whole punishment is still ongoing as far as anyone sane is concerned, his punishment includes the lifetime ban from the Olympics, he should just live with the fact he should never be allowed to compete. He is using legal argument to waste money and time of the sports governing body, personally if I was them I’d be making him take 20 drugs tests daily and disrupting him as much as possible. After all who is to say he is clean, he is probably using the latest drugs again like he did before that where not detectable… After all once a drug cheat always a drug cheat.

If I had may way he would have got a Lifetime ban from ALL SPORT, someone who cheats like that doesn’t deserve to allowed in sport. Hell he used banned drugs he should have spent some time in a prison.

Oopsie

Stephen Kapp — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:53:36 +0000

Small oopsie today… Opened something I shouldn’t on the wrong machine, accidently opened while dropping into a bait VMWare session….. Ended up spending a good 40 mins cleaning up… It be a 0Day too so no virus scanner happens to find it..

Oh well, it has been sent off to the AV companies now…

More iPhone 3G

Stephen Kapp — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:49:48 +0000

Well after a day with it some more impressions.

App Store, there are a lot of things there that do the same thing and lots of useless apps.

There are some free apps, the best has got to be Apple Remote, which basically allows you to use your iPhone to control ‘paired’ iTunes installs, very handy.

AIM Chat, well the iphone needed a chat client shame with this it doesn’t have support for Jabber or anything remotely useful, I know no one that actually uses AIM or ICQ anymore for IM. Everyone is either Jabber (gtalk or straight jabber) or MSN.

There a a few games there which I’m seriously considering buying at least solitaire and maybe one or two others. There is talk of a wordpress blogging tool which will be nice…

Battery life well I’ve been trying to exercise this a bit, 3g is turned on and with push email going all day it has taken a hammering. The battery is half full and it came say 90% charged…

Some quirks, any restored mail account settings needed the passwords all reset so they would work properly. I’ve had that problem with the original 1st Gen iPhone before too.

I’m waiting on pwnage tool to be updated for the 2.0 firmware before I update my 1st iPhone to 2.0 as I’m using a vodafone sim in that.