Bitshift

Back in 2003, I cobbled together a portable active wireless network scanner, using a Toshiba Libretto 50ct (see also this page) whose guts I'd swapped out with those of a 70ct (I won the motherboard from eBay), an ancient DeLorme TripMate GPS unit, a nice Cisco wireless card with dual external antennas, and a cheesy hack to wire the GPS unit to use power from the Libretto's PS/2 port on its dock.

I used it along with Kismet and the included gpsmap code to fully map all the wireless networks while driving from San Jose to Las Vegas back in 2003.

Those of you unfamiliar with the LIbretto may not realize it, but it was one of the first truly powerful pocket-sized computers. It's got a 120MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, and this one has a 40GB hard drive in it, yet it's the size of a paperback book. I don't mean to malign technical marvels like the HP100lx or the Nokia 770 (indeed, I own both), but the former is woefully inadequate to such a task, and the latter... well, I just haven't gotten around to trying something like this with it yet.

I'm planning on putting a new OS on it and wiping the current config (an old RedHat install), but I'll take some photos and throw them up in the Projects section, along with documentation on the setup before I tear everything down.