The More Things Change…

Remember the CRT era? When ‘adjusting the aerial’ sometimes meant balancing on one leg with a coathanger in hand, performing accidental interpretive dance to get rid of the snowstorm on screen?

Well, here we are in 2025, and much has changed… although we’re still waving things around like idiots (laptops or Wi-Fi antennas), chasing elusive bars instead of faint UHF signals.

With most Wi-Fi monitoring apps out there either too slow to update or requiring endless clicking to get live signal info, I just wanted to open a terminal, type wifistr, and get immediate, constant feedback. So I made a console app…

It works by finding the first connected WLAN adapter and outputting the signal strength every second. I originally used Python for this task, but the script kept breaking with random Python updates and Microsoft’s occasional changes to the netsh output format. An exe which utilises the Windows API shouldn’t have this problem.

Visit the repo, vet the code and compile it yourself, or download the exe, stick it in your Windows path, and call it when needed.

Open your mind!

The description claims that this ghost hunting app works on the same principle as traditional detection equipment—employing your smartphone’s sensors to measure electromagnetic fields, sounds and vibrations. Remarkably, it does so without requiring the Android API’s permissions which would allow it to do so.

So how on earth does it measure these things without access to the sensors and the mic? Duh. Through the supernatural, obviously.

I think it might even be using the DerekAcorah API because when it revealed the first words of a nearby ghost (“snake” and “oil” if you’re curious), I collapsed onto the floor and started muttering “kreed, kreeeeeed, kreed kafer, KREED KAFER!” like an elderly scouse nut job.

Nearby spirits are quite sarcastic too. One of them said “one”, “born”, “every” and then “m”, but shut its ghostly gob when I pointed out that I obtained Ghost Radar Legacy as part of Amazon’s free app of the day promotion.