The meeting usually starts around 5:00PM at the Oak Park Mall food court in Overland Park, KS -- the north entrance between Macy's and Dillard's. Look for nerds. If you see any three of the following items at one table, you've found us.
It looks like I'm headed to IT Sec World this year. This is a convention with seminars for Health, financial and government IT workers.
The seminars appear to be a re-hash of things I'm always familiar with, but I figure I'll be using this as a network opportunity as well as a way to get my finger back on the pulse of financial services InfoSec.
Does anyone else plan on attending?
Saturday, I set up my Jornada 720 with the enGenius 200mW card, a Garmin GPS12 (olde school) and a pair of 19dBi antennae. I used Kismet running on JLime Linux. About 3:00 PM, I hit the road with my wife. Here's the setup in the car.
Only in rural Missouri... What the hell?
And if that's not strange enough, I hit a low-flying goose (yes, a big, huge Canada Goose) about 10 miles outside of town. I had to limp my car into town. I could see, but only just. And speeds higher than 50 MPH or so made the windshield cave in more. Yikes!
After we got into town, it was off to 1984. 1984 is an arcade that looks quite literally like it got put in a time machine and beamed here.
They even have a Mac Classic running all of their business software!
Darren tries his hand at BattleZone (a cheesy tank battle sim)
Darren and Sl4cker
Gauntlet!
After we got tired of the arcade, we grabbed some sandwiches, then took off to a bar for beer, gadgets, pool, and more beer. And some pool. And shots. Then more beer. And after I left, I think they had more beer too.
This is Adam, the new owner of Jordan Valley Pedicabs. He manages 5 pedicabs in the area, and who knows how many "drivers" around in Springfield. You haven't really lived until you've tried riding in the back of a three-wheeled bicycle while rather inebriated.
More carnage. My wife and I were stranded in Springfield since there were no glass repair shops open on Sunday.
We spent some time with family friends north of Springfield while we were waiting for my windshield to get fixed up. They have cows in their back yard. This is definitely Missouri.
Life's no fun unless you're geeking out and wrenching on stuff at least once a day. I helped Ray install an electronic cruise control system on his Vulcan 2000. Wiring diagrams, Fluke testers, soldering iron, and lots of shrink tubing made up most of my Sunday.
I didn't get many good pictures of the Hak5 meetup because it was too dark and I didn't have a tripod (and my camera is crappy). I think Darren and Snubs will likely have a bunch of photos up sooner or later. We'll have to see.
My Kismet/JLime/200mW/19dBi Dipole rig found about 6,500 networks this weekend. About half of those were new, never reported to WiGLE. Another weekend like this will boost me to WiGLE's top 100.
Edit: If photos aren't working, try this album link.
Sorry I haven't finished up my series on Web Filter Evasion yet. I had most of the articles pre-written except this last one and life's been kind of busy this week. I don't even know if I'll get around to Sysadmin Sunday the way this weekend looks.
Speaking of which, we could use more writers for security, electronics, or other geeky topics. You don't need to be in the KC area, but it would help. Feel free to drop us a line in the comments.
Tonight's The Friday Geek-Out at Daily Dose in Overland Park, KS. I'll probably be there around 11:00PM.
Darren published meetup details so maybe we'll see you there. If you're around KC and want to convoy or car pool, let us know in the comments. We'll probably roll out from KC around 3:00 tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon.
Pics will follow, I'm sure.
We switched locations this month to the downtown Central Library at 10th and Wyandotte. The meeting rooms are a lot nicer. Remember, the meetings are the second Wednesday of each month.
We discussed a smorgasbord of topics, most of which at least somehow related to BSD in one way or another. This included (but was not limited to):
jlime Linux on the HP Jornada 720 Handheld/PC
This and a bunch of other stuff at the KC 2600 meeting.
Tonight (Friday, April 4 2008)
Oak Park Mall Food Court (Northeast entrance)
SE Corner of 95th and Quivira in Overland Park, KS
Starts at 5:00PM. Look for geeks with laptops.
This has been a crazy week for me. Most of this is related to work and personal life. I have a few observations and it's going to sound like a rant.
Someone I do work for is testing a new SSL VPN solution. This is a VPN that just uses the web browser. I was looking forward to ditching the Windows VM which I pretty much use only for VPN. This particular VPN has been configured to require Windows. What the hell is up with that?
We had the BSD User Group meeting yesterday. Somehow, the meeting room got double-booked between us and the Commodore 64 Club. I say club because no one actually USES Commodore 64 computers for anything anymore. They just look at them and play text adventures on them. At first, I was excited to see the C64 laptop there, figuring someone may have actually installed NetBSD on it, but no. It was just a C64 laptop (there's a model name or number for it but I don't care enough to look it up). Then, I got to thinking about NetBSD. You probably could get it working on a C64. I co-worker of mine suggests that you could probably put a dead hamster in a shoe box and get it to run NetBSD. I don't think that's too much of a stretch.
The C64 club had KCBug outnumbered 3-to-1. This pains me. Had it been a PerlMongers or KC Linux UG meeting I wouldn't have been so hurt, but seriously, KC guys. This was a a disgrace. Get with the program and come to KCBug next month. Please? Thanks. Meeting details will probably get posted to the KCBug Mailing List.
The PHP user's group is tomorrow. I'll probably be there. So will Asmo.
I attended the kick-off meeting for KCBUG this evening, and had some fun. There were only four of us and we seemed fairly diverse in background and with experience using BSD. I think we all walked away learning at least something.
There wasn't much structure, but things discussed included:
Yes, that's my license plate. Just call me a fanboy. Actually, it's my 2000-2004 plate. My 2004-2008 plates are on my car right now, but they say the same thing.
With that, it should come as no surprise that I'm excited to announce KCBUG: A *BSD user group meeting here in town. Thanks to Frogman for tipping me off. Right now, it looks like KCBUG's inaugural meeting is going to be Wednesday, Jan 9 2007 at 6PM located at the Plaza Library at 48th and Main.
I'm going to try to make it to the first meeting. Hopefully we'll see you there!
Usually, KCPUG's December meeting is either non-existent or of sparse attendance. The third Saturday of December is pretty close to the holidays, and many people have other plans. As such, I hadn't prepared anything to discuss, and neither had anyone else. I was pleasantly surprised when -- despite a snow storm -- we gathered more people than I'd expected. 2 of them came all the way out from Clinton, MO. It was nice to see some new faces among the regulars.
I demonstrated my Spreadsheet browser, and we all discussed some other projects we're working on. After that, it was mostly a discussion of various server platforms, web design software, and programming languages, both viable and not. This included Microsoft IIS, Apache, DreamWeaver, Front Page, PHP, ASP.NET, LOLCode, and BrainF---. Sometimes, a meeting without a lot of structure can be a great one.
In a matter of two weeks, we've seen a plethora of new OS releases:
Following the July 2600 Meeting on July 6th, you're all invited over for a cookout at my new place. It's a little over a mile from the 2600 Meeting.
I'd prefer if those who plan on attending would comment here and say so, although I'm pretty sure that my fellow HiR writers will be there. We'll have some burgers, 'dogs, some drinks and snacks.
Bring your own WPA-compatible laptop.
After the cookout and geekout session, we might go on a little treasure-hunt, if you know what I'm saying.
