Everything old is new again:
Warchalking
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Warchalking
#22This isn’t something anyone used, it was a meme. See, in 2005 John Hodgeman (PC in the old Mac vs. PC Apple ads) published “The Areas of My Expertise” [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Areas_of_My_Expertise#Th... ], including a description of hobo signs and 700 hobo names. Hodgeman was on The Daily Show and the hobo thing took off for a few minutes. I went to one of Hodgeman’s signings during that book tour. Jona…
I did a little 'war-driving", mostly just to feel part of the scene. At that point I'd never met anyone, knowingly, who used Linux. I was running Slackware, installed on 7 or 8 diskettes, on a Pentium-S ThinkPad. I only found the APs, never cracked them.
I have once seen warchalk showing an open wifi point (in a city in the UK).
This would be pre-2005 fwiw.
Re: Warchalking
#23I was adjacent to the folks who came up with this (I think it was almost entirely Matt Jones' work creating that PDF). The symbols were intended to be useful, and there was a flurry of subsequent usage (including official labels at cafes, etc). It didn't have a huge amount of organic growth, but it was a form that journalists could write about, and it made more concretely explicable the somewhat trickier but more prevalent concept of wardriving.
It may have been an artifact of the time, but it remains to me surprising how quickly and easily a timely and well-packaged idea can catch people's attention and propagate, even now. (Note that warchalking preceded John Hodgeman's book, but he too was playing off the background curiousity of hobo signs. There's no necessary origin point for combinations like this. You're just mixing and matching what's in the air.)
Our same rough circle of people are why you talk of Betteridge's law, life-hacking, or even know about that Steve Balmer "Developers! Developers!" video. If it didn't come through that route, those concepts or presentations would almost emerged from some other corner of the online world. There was no ulterior motive, no intent to get rich or famous, just people playing as they do with what's interesting in the world around them, and the ideas they spark.
Re: Warchalking
#24This seems like an unusually thinly hyperlinked Wikipedia article, no? Who is Matt Jones, for example?
Re: Warchalking
#25This isn’t something anyone used, it was a meme. See, in 2005 John Hodgeman (PC in the old Mac vs. PC Apple ads) published “The Areas of My Expertise” [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Areas_of_My_Expertise#Th... ], including a description of hobo signs and 700 hobo names. Hodgeman was on The Daily Show and the hobo thing took off for a few minutes. I went to one of Hodgeman’s signings during that book tour. Jona…
Judging by his podcast “Judge John Hodgman”, I’d say he’s an extremely clever individual. His shoot from the hip material is so clever sometimes it makes me wonder if it’s entirely scripted.
Re: Warchalking
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are couple of local terminal emulators in the App Store. I'm sure if you could source the binary you could run one of the linux tools. You could probably even build it from source if that's your jam.
didn't know about this, installing a-shell now. thanks!
iSH is pretty neat too. It’s an Alpine container, you can apk add whatever you want.
Re: Warchalking
#27What should one chalk for a Meshtastic node?
Re: Warchalking
#28This seems like an unusually thinly hyperlinked Wikipedia article, no? Who is Matt Jones, for example?
Re: Warchalking
#29This isn’t something anyone used, it was a meme. See, in 2005 John Hodgeman (PC in the old Mac vs. PC Apple ads) published “The Areas of My Expertise” [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Areas_of_My_Expertise#Th... ], including a description of hobo signs and 700 hobo names. Hodgeman was on The Daily Show and the hobo thing took off for a few minutes. I went to one of Hodgeman’s signings during that book tour. Jona…
This reminded me of the morning my wife and I decided to semantically classify all of Hodgeman’s 700 Hoboes. https://dmd.3e.org/2006-07-22-the-semantics-of-hoboes/
Re: Warchalking
#30I was adjacent to the folks who came up with this (I think it was almost entirely Matt Jones' work creating that PDF). The symbols were intended to be useful, and there was a flurry of subsequent usage (including official labels at cafes, etc). It didn't have a huge amount of organic growth, but it was a form that journalists could write about, and it made more concretely explicable the somewhat trickier but more pre…
I remember reading about warchalking at the time. I thought it was the coolest idea. I had a Titanium MacBook and knew the difficulty for finding WiFi. You could find open routers at that time. I lived in the suburbs, but I imagined it would be cool to try in the city. I was socializing in the Burning Man community then, and my friends and I were drawn to hacking ideas like this.