User Blogs

.."The representative was so convinced that the concept as a pilot project is now likely to be implimented in Walaza and 4 surrounding villages"..
http://voipinfo.3owl.com/wordpress/2012/04/digital-village-demonstration-walaza/
(Translated from German)

3 mesh potatoes trialed over a distance of 4.7 km. Mesh Potato field trials

Due to unexpected circumstances and with much regret, Gawler South will be removed somewhere in the next month and will not be restored.

"Wireless Battle of the Mesh" is being held from 26 March-1 April in Athens: http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV5

Part of the event is a "Warm Up" at Sarantaporo village - ~200Km north of Athens, with currently 9 wifi mesh networks in the surrounding area.
They have some nice links graphing their meshes:

Sarantaporo: http://www.sarantaporo.gr/node/98
Milea: http://www.sarantaporo.gr/node/141
Farmaki: http://www.sarantaporo.gr/node/211

This weeks Floss-Weekly podcast features "Village Telco"
http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/196
(Haven't listened to it yet)
Guests are Steve Song and Terry Gillett.
Terry was the person that bought BATMAN-ADV to the Mesh Potato project - extending MP from a voice-only solution - allowing you to do stuff like this:

A cute feature I like about the mesh potato: PC not required - setup can be done from a plain old phone.

Twine reports via Twitter, SMS, email or with a HTTP request, using rules set from a Web interface.
http://supermechanical.tumblr.com/

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2011 Annual General Meeting. An enjoyable time was had by all.

Many hands made light work of the proceedings with a great BBQ provided by Shadey, James and co. and everyone pitching in to help with the setup and tear-down of the chairs and tables. The wifi competition generated a lot of interest with (from what I can tell) a range of techniques being applied and quite varied results between the contestants. Unfortunately time was short and not everyone was able to have a go, but we will try to do something similar in the future. In the end Remy was victorious with his 802.11n configuration, and took home the lovely LG monitor kindly provided by Aspitech.

Congratulations go to the new committee of 2012. We extend our warm thanks to the previous team members who are taking a break this year. Chris (drgeforce3) has put in a tremendous amount of work over the past 5 years in both building and maintaining the network, as well as developing new prospects for network growth and helping with office duties. We hope he can continue to do this in a similar capacity into the future. Duncan has served the group well over the past few years coordinating memberships and providing useful analytics from historical membership data. And of course our retiring Secretary Shadey will be missed but we hope to see more of him at the usual places such as the ASLAN kitchen and vending all the latest wireless equipment at the monthly meetings.

Hope you all have a safe and relaxing Christmas. Remember there is no December meeting, but we look forward to catching up in January at the usual time and place to kick off the new year!

ABC Radio National program Future Tense played a program this morning on providing communications for the underprivileged with Adelaide's Paul Gardner-Stephen and David Rowe.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2011/3353120.htm

Guess the trees across the road that sit between my antenna and Skye have grown - my connectivity is not getting better :-(
Site stumbled just now, but only Skye shows up (well Air-Stream AP's that is).

Kismet does not work with my USB wifi dongle, so I used the following bit of bash script:


while true
do
#reset
iwlist wlan1 scanning >> scan_2_nov_2011_1
sleep 1
tail -n 50 scan_2_nov_2011_1
ls -lh scan_2_nov_2011_1
#reset
done

Then

cat scan_2_nov_2011_1 | grep ESSID | awk '{print($1)}' | awk '! a[$0]++'

to pull out unique ESSIDs... which gave

ESSID:"BigPondDA93E3"
ESSID:"BigPond9A29F9"
ESSID:"wireless"
ESSID:"aitel-adeltwr-norwood"
ESSID:"BigPond1C28"
ESSID:"betsuin_home"
ESSID:"WLAN"
ESSID:"IndianSpiceCentre"