Hijinks Inc.

Category: News

  • AT&T pulls the plug on free Wi-Fi

    Last Wednesday AT&T started offering free Wi-Fi for iPhone users at all Starbucks locations, all you needed to do was enter your cell phone number.

    Thursday, intrepid hackers (okay, really just people of average intelligence) started talking about how you could access the free Wi-Fi just by changing your browsers user-agent to Mobile Safari and entering any old phone number, didn’t have to be a AT&T number, or even a cell number. Good times. I even parked outside a local Starbucks long enough to confirm this, it nearly ruined my street cred.

    Today, AT&T flipped the kill switch on the free Wi-Fi. Though no official statement has been made, numerous people are reporting that it is no longer accessible even on the iPhone. Nice one AT&T!

    There’s a good chance we’ll see the service back up and running soon, though likely featuring an upgraded authentication process.

  • Hard drive problems

    wdfdesktop_se_aajs.jpg

    Greetings, and thanks for reading my first post as a Hijinks Inc. author! My name is Jared, and I hope to be posting fairly regularly, but I have a busy schedule, so we’ll see.

    My rant today is about my computer, which apparently lacks the capacity to be scanned by Ad Aware or AVG without hanging. I have a 160GB SATA drive partitioned for my operating system and programs, and an additional 500GB SATA drive for storage. I figured since it always hangs while scanning the C: partition on the 160GB drive, that there was something wrong with the 160GB drive. I tested my theory by loading a fresh copy of XP Pro on an 80GB ATA drive, thus running on a completely separate hard drive on a completely separate controller, and it still hanged while scanning the C: drive. I then proceeded to un-plug the 500GB storage drive and then it scanned fine.

    What’s confusing me now is why it hangs when scanning the C: drive when it seems that the 500 storage drive is the problem. Or course, then I thought I’d figured it out, so I plugged the 160 back in, kept the 500 un-plugged and assumed it would work, but this time it hung. So now there’s either a problem with both drives, or it’s having a problem with the fact that both drives are over the magical ‘137GB’ mark.

    What’s really weird is that it’s successfully scanned with the newest 8.x version of AVG when I scan manually, but when it runs the scheduled scan, it hangs for like 20 hours.

    I’m stumped, irritated and tired, so we’ll tackle this one another day. Was that too negative? Probably, but it’s truth, and I think the truth is what we need a lot more of in this world. 🙂

  • 19 days to Skyhook

    Looks like I complained a little too soon, Skyhook actually added my AP to their database and it now shows up on Maps. Seems like 19 days is the magic number.

  • Mint.app Beta

    You can grab a copy of the beta from the Hijinks Repo. Everything required to run the application is included in the package.

    Please report any bugs in the comments.

  • US Banks Suck

    RBC Royal Bank of Canada is taking promotional offers to a whole new level, offering up a Eee PC 2G surf for opening a new account! A nice upgrade from the free coffee pot I got for opening my account.

    Of course, there are hoops to jump through…
    Checklist

    Not quite enough to get me to move to Canada, but if they start offering a 4G Eee PC, I am so there.