Lee.org

Here’s 2 good ways to keep spam at bay:

Route your email through Google Mail
1- forward all your mail to a Gmail account that you set up
2- Tell Gmail to forward all your mail to a private email address of yours

Or
I pay $1.95/month for the Cloudmark Desktop service (http://www.cloudmark.com/) and it works very well. I think it costs $4/month for new subscribers or you can use my referal code to get it cheaper (http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=hze4hl). It’s only for MS Outlook or Outlook Express.

Good luck.

Voltage Loss Tables: Calculate how many volts are eaten up over a given distance

voltage loss = amps * wire resistance * distance in feet * 2 wires (1 wire in each direction!)

Sources http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html http://www.paigewire.com/volt_loss_formulas.htm

Continue reading ‘Voltage Loss Table’ »

If you have TestTrack Pro 4 from Seapine Software, you might find the following useful. Change the email notifications as such and the emails will be in a much more readable format.
Continue reading ‘TestTrack Pro 4’ »

VNC SingleClick is a program that lets a person run a small (166k) program in order to let another user see their computer screen and/or control their computer. It’s way useful.

Here are notes I took on how to set it up (these instructions were ripped from a doc I wrote for another purpose. Sorry if it’s slightly unintelligible)

Continue reading ‘VNC SingleClick’ »

"SebastianBassi" from Rentacoder.com and Bioinformatica.info just finished pulling some 400 old posts from my pre-Wordpress journal into Wordpress. I’ve now got 803 posts in WP. :-) It involved him doing a lot of manual file renaming, slight modification of HTML by hand and moving files around. It would have been a big bother for me. He did it for less than $200. I still had to do like 2 hours of review work and pointing out things he missed. But I'd recommend him. 

So is there actually a good news reader out there? I tried switching from Firefox Sage to something snazzier and I’ve been scorned twice now.

RSS Bandit is very pretty and has really nice management but you can’t tell how many comments are in a post using the UI. (this seems related to shoddy support/implementation of <slash :comments>).

RSSReader… I forget why I dumped RSSReader.

I’m swiching back to Sage. It’s silly though. I pull up a feed and then middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click all the entries to open them up. That seems ineffient or something but it works.

Here is how to set your RSS news reader to read Protected (Friends-Only) posts.
I mention this because I had some trouble getting this to work with the available instructions out there.

This is tested on RSS Bandit.

Create a new feed entry with a URL like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace “YourFriend’sUsername” with… I’ll let you guess)
Go to the Authentication tab and type in your Livejournal username and password.
Done :-) You can now use that feed entry to read your friend’s posts.

I read in several places that you should do this:

http://Username:Password@www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest

(replace Username, Password and YourFriend’sUsername)
I haven’t found this to work.

I submitted a T-Shirt idea to J!nx today. I’m just logging it here so archive.org picks it up if the idea ever sees the light of day. The abbreviation for the idea is: ISTOTI.

When you are at a public access terminal, it’s very possible that a keylogger is sniffing your keyboard. But sometimes it’s just so convenient that you have to use one of these machines anyway. To try and beat it, do the following:

1 Open notepad
2 Type part of your password in the password window
3 Using the mouse, go to the notepad window
4 Type some nonsense characters
5 Using the mouse, return to the password window

Repeat steps 2-5 a few times.

Make sure that the password window doesn’t show your password on the screen because bad people might have put a program on your computer that takes screenshots every few seconds.

(tip from Security Now Podcast, Episode 17)

If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.

I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!

You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!

Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)

I was up and running in < 5 minutes.

---

I took down the original post I made about Synergy a week ago because I wasn’t ready to recommend it; there were some crashing problems. I found out that the crashing issue was quickly fixed (1.2.5 was no good) and I had just come in at a bad time. I had written to the author when I saw the poor performance and he got right back to me, pointing out that he had very recently posted a fix.

I fixed that terribly annoying bug that IE users were seeing when trying to leave comments on my site. It was that the comment text-box would extend all the way to the right, underneath the right column such that you couldn’t see what you typed… terribly annoying.

Fixed.

So now everybody comment like moon-struck werewolves.

I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….

There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.

Cool beans.

You know that my blog must be getting popular… I got 118 comment spams last week. Thank goodness for Spam Karma and Bad Behavior. Not a single spam got through. I don’t know how much e-mail spam I get these days, Spamassassin takes care of most of it while Cloudmark Desktop takes care of about 10 a day. I had one false-negative last week, but that’s about it.

…and yes Holly, I totally realize that this is another product review in a long string… Nya on you! ;-)

update 10-9-05: BITE MY TONGUE! It seems a very odd coincidence that just a few hours after I wrote this, I got my first next-generation comment spam.

It was a comment from one Ryan M. Parr. He’s got an email address, a web site filled with all sorts of semi-authentic sounding crap and he even writes semi-coherently. The spam was deposited in a very low key manner. He didn’t even mention the name of the product! Instead, he google-bombed on a keyword, “Eye[nocommentspam]Q”. That takes you to a website called in[nocommentspam]fmind.com where they are selling (of all things) a speed reading course.

I thought the spam mail sounded stupid too; so I downloaded it off bearshare; unfortunately now that I checked it out, it turned out to be in an Asian character set and unable to extract from .rar format. If you want a program along this line, a good program is Eye[nocommentspam]Q.

Fuckers.

update 10-11-05: 71 comment spams received in the past 3 days. 0 made it to the site. I just sent $25 to Dr Dave and Michael Hampton, authors of Spam Karma and Bad Behavior.

I’ve been using FTP Voyager and SmartFTP for a long time. Today I was having some trouble getting them working on a new Windows MCE machine. Michie suggested I use Internet Explorer. “But IE FTP sucks.” “No it doesn’t.” She is right. Somewhere in the last couple years IE (6.0) upgraded their built-in FTP client. It has full drag & drop capabilities and it’s pretty and everything.

Here is how to set up an SSHD service on your Windows XP Cygwin machine. This comes from a great guide from Pigtail.net on how to turn an old PC into a Linux Router… aptly named the Linux Router Project (LRP)

Local version of how to install SSHD. And how to install SSH

And yes, this works.

I want to back up my Windows XP computer to another Windows XP computer using Rsync and SSH. Since Rsync only runs under *nix, I’m running it under Cygwin.

There are a couple hurdles to doing this. The one I got stuck on was getting SSH to work without a password.

It’s so freaking simple to do. You just have to know which instructions do not help accomplish your goal.

Continue reading ‘Using Cygwin, Rsync, SSH and the internet to backup my XP computer’ »

I bought an HP Laserjet 1020 a few days ago. It sat outside my room gathering dust for a few days; I was worried. I’ve had an HP Laserjet 6MP for the last 8 years and it has performed flawlessly. Would this new printer be any good or has HP lost it. “They don’t build ‘em like they used to.” This new printer looks like a toy compared to the 6MP. Heck, that’s the main reason I didn’t bring it. The 6MP weighs in at roughly 25 lbs; this new printer is barely 5, consuming 1/2 the desk space. How could it possibly print 3 times as fast at twice the resolution, printing envelopes and full size images with it’s wimpy 2 MB of RAM?

Well, it does.

The first thing that got my attention was how well planned out the setting up procedure was. From the pretty language-free notes to the amazing ease at which the toner slips into it.

• Driver software: excellent. It clearly walked me through printing double-sided… and it didn’t speak! Those speaking printers still freak me out.
• Speed: remarkable. The first text page comes out in 8 seconds, then 6 seconds per page. Full page photos come out just about as fast.
• Print quality: excellent. Not as good as a photo, or as a color photo but terribly sharp black and white. Better paper might help this.
• Envelopes: Fine. Since it doesn’t have an alternate paper path port, I worried that my envelopes would be all crinkled. It comes out only a tiny bit crinkled and the paper fully recovers after a few minutes. (better than my 6MP!)
• Footprint: tiny! When you’re not using it, you can fold up the front door and it takes up about 8″x15″x8″. Otherwise, it’s 15″x15″x8″, smaller than some inkjets.
• Aesthetic: Nice. Smooth, slightly curvy lines, respectable two-tone traditional beige and dark beige.
• Cost: A bit more than some other printers. I paid $179. Some other stores had a $30 rebate but I was lazy. Some other low-end laser printers are as cheap as $89 but buying the HP name seems to still be worth something. :-)
• Toner life and replacement cost: I think I remember reading that I’ll get 2,000 pages out of the $80 print cartridge. Probably more if I refill it.

Certain readers of my blog have expressed how they haven’t read my blog until now because wasn’t syndicated on Livejournal. I just wanted to show these people how I read their blogs, be they on Livejournal, Blogspot, Wordpress, or a custom system like The BBC or New York Times.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

1. Get Firefox. It is good. It is free. It makes your web surfing experience faster, it’s less prone to viruses than Internet Explorer and it has a few terrific features like tabbed browsing that will make your internet experience even better.

2. Get the Sage RSS reader extention for Firefox.

3. Open the Sage sidebar. There are many ways… one is to hit Alt-S while in Firefox. I prefer to use Tools | View | Customize to drag the Sage icon onto the toolbar; Then I can just click on the icon next to my Firefox Refresh button.

4. Go to your favorite blog.

5. Click on the little magnifying lens icon in the Sage sidebar. It will find the RSS feed for the blog automatically. Choose a feed with your mouse and click “Add Feed”.

6. Do steps 4 and 5 for all your favorite blogs. Some of mine are BoingBoing, TJIC, the Technical Video Rental.com blog, BBC News, Gizmodo, CNN, Craigslist Bikes for Sale in SF, My sister’s blog on Livejournal. All of these sites have RSS feeds. My list is a lot longer but it’s on my desktop computer, which is still being shipped to me. (it should be here today… goodie!)

7. Whenever you’re wondering if any of the blogs in your list have been updated, click on the little Refresh icon. It will automatically check all of the blogs in a couple seconds and indicate to you all of the new content.

There are RSS feeds for a tremendously wide array of websites. RSS is an internet standard. It’s good that way. Use it. You’ll like it.

Neo: I know what you’re trying to do.
Morpheus: I’m trying to free your mind, Neo…but I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.

My main music tools are Winamp, CDex and FLAC. I would use Vorbis Ogg since it has significantly better sound quality per megabyte used (192kbps is indistinguishable from the real thing. In MP3, 256kbps is almost as good)

Support tools I use for music:

flac112a.exe – The FLAC tools so that CDex can convert files to FLAC. Note settings in CDex:

• Encoder: External Encoder
• Encoder path: C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe
• Parameter String: -8 -o %2 -T “artist=%a” -T “title=%t” -T “album=%b” -T “date=%y” -T “tracknumber=%tn/%tt” -T “genre=%g” -”
• bitrate: doesn’t matter
• file extention: flac
• Make sure that in the generic tab, “ID3 tag version” is set to “none”

FLAC plugin for Winamp – FLAC_plugin_with_library_support for Winamp.exe by Michael Facquet. It lets Winamp read FLAC files. Library support means that tags are read correctly :-) Winamp Reference.

out_lame – A Winamp output plug-in to create MP3 files directly from Winamp. IE: if it can play through Winamp, it can be converted into an MP3, which is great for building CDs for my car’s new mp3 player. Reference.

SqrSoft ACF Disk Writer – It will write ANYTHING that can be played through Winamp to the disk, including streams that usually can’t be. Winamp Reference. Homepage.

Dumb AI still makes me mad.

Welcome to Earthlink LiveChat. Your chat session will begin shortly.

Not at home and you want to read your email? With EarthLink Web Mail you can check your email from any computer with an internet connection!

‘Sherman N.’ says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?
me: Hi, I have a mindspring dialup account. I’m trying to access my mail from another computer but my username and password don’t seem to work. Could it be that I’m not allowed to access POP mail via the internet?
Sherman N.: I understand that you wish to know your password. I can help by providing the password after veryfying your account.
Sherman N.: I see that you have provided xxx as account verification information, Is this your Internet login password?. If yes, can I have your permission to view the password in our database. You will receive an email regarding password view.ace=”arial” size=”2″>
me: No, I don’t need to know my password. I have my password. Please turn off that crummy artificial intelligence system and re-read my request.
Sherman N.: To best assist you, you need to speak with a Technical Support Representative. Please stand by while I transfer you.
Please wait while I transfer the chat to the best suited site operator.
‘Joshua G’ says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?
[There was a 15 second pause here that really got me bothered. I thought that I was going to have to repeat what I said to a MACHINE to a human. I was about to copy and paste my previous correspondence when.....]
Joshua G: =”black”>=”OperatorText”>Hello, I see you’ve already been chatting. Please give me a moment so I can read the previous chat and pick up where you left off.
me: Let me take this opportunity to say that "Sherman N" is a crappy AI.

…

Eliza… Eliza…. My heart’s on fire…… for Eliza!