The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘Geekery’ Category.
I switched to using Google Password Manager today, changing the most 100 out of 600 passwords to be random strings of characters. I also use Authy, a great Mult-factor authentication tool, on the most important sites. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe I’ll upgrade to Lastpass or similar soon.
I recently converted the OrbSWARM Blog and Mediawiki to static websites. Here is how I did it.
Download the entire wiki, minus the “Special” pages and “Help” pages
wget -k -p -r -R ‘*Special*’ -R ‘*Help*’ -E http://wiki.orbswarm.com/
-k –convert links – edit each page so the links on it link to the new static site instead of a website
-p –page-requisites – fetch all the support files too, like .css and javascript
-r –recursive – download the whole site, not just one file
-R –reject – don’t download pages with these names in them
-E –adjust-extension – make all files end in “.html”
Download the entire WordPress blog
wget -k -p -r -E http://blog.orbswarm.com/
Then just upload all those files to a web server!
There are so many ways to control sound on Windows 10 that I sometimes forget them. Here is a list for my own reference:
Clicking on the speaker icon in the far lower right system tray
And then click on the carrot that pops up. This changes the default audio output. Great for choosing between your bluetooth earbuds vs bluetooth earbud AG mode vs computer speakers
Right-clicking on the speaker icon in the far lower right system tray
There’s a bunch of options and submenus here!
Start | Control Panel | Sound
In this area, each device (ie Bluetooth earbud, speaker) will have different Enhancements here. My MPOW earbuds have Bass Boost, Loudness Equalization (a compressor, hurray!), Headphone Virtualization (a nice stereo expander).
You can also enable or disable devices here
Start | Control Panel | Device Manager | Audio inputs and outputs
You can update or disable drivers here
Start | Control Panel | Device Manager | Bluetooth
More with the updating and disabling drivers
Start | Control Panel | Realtek HD Audio Manager
Here’s a good article about audio settings and equalization
You can google “Dynamic Range Compression Win 10”
You might enjoy the Video Speed Controller Chrome extension.
Get it here.
I use it when I’m trying to find the good part of a video: tap “Jump 10 seconds forward” or “jump 10 seconds back” a few times! Or when Hulu forces me to watch ads, I fast forward through them at 16x speed. And of course, when I’m watching a boring video, I’ll turn up the speed so I can “watch faster”. I’ll turn it to 1.2x speed when I’m trying to watch a slow drama that needs to kick it up, or 2.5x speed for poorly cut Youtube videos!
These settings work very well for me:
Also, since no one should ever fully trust a free extension to not snoop on you, I set it to only run when I click on the icon, like below:
Rclone 
is the right software to copy multi-terabyte file repositories from one place to another! It’s also very capable at rearranging files in lots of other different ways. Check it out. It’s something of a sister program to rsync on unix.
I had to fiddle with rclone a bit. Here is the command I ended up using:
c:\aaa\rclone\rclone sync –modify-window=2s -v –exclude=”System Volume Information/**” d:/ f:/[my new repository]
It was so simple (after a two weeks of fiddling and yelling at my computer). Just run that command, wait 3 days (yipe, I’ve got some bandwidth/scale problems) and profit!
(If you copy-paste that text, make sure you don’t use smartquotes, use regular quotes)
Let’s look at that command one argument at a time:
c:\aaa\rclone\rclone
rclone isn’t installed, perse, on a windows computer. You just unzip it and go! That means it doesn’t set PATH variables (unless you do it yourself. So I open up a Windows Powershell with Admin rights, specify the folder to run in (c:\aaa\rclone in my example) and go!
sync
It’s so magically simple. Sync is better than copying because it will delete extra files on the target side.
–modify-window=2s
The FAT file system doesn’t accurately capture file modification times. So every time you run rclone, it’ll compare file modification times and get it wrong. If you turn on very verbose mode with “-vv” you’ll see errors like “Modification times differ by 1.490000000s”, and it’ll copy files over and over and over :-(. This “modify-window” setting says “if the files were modified within 2 seconds of each other, don’t sweat the difference.
-v
“-v” is “verbose” mode, “-vv” is very verbose mode, for when you want to figure out why your rclone session is failing. You can eliminate it when you are sure of your sessions.
–exclude=”System Volume Information/**”
I’m copying from the root (d:\) If I don’t specify this, rclone will try (and fail) to grab files from the system volume information folder.
d:/ f:/[my new repository]
Note that I’m using slashes instead of Window’s backslashes. It might not be essential but rclone (and I) prefers slashes.
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What doesn’t work:
Windows File Explorer drag-and-drop copy doesn’t have enough checking, the ability to recover a failed copy, or the ability to “sync”.
Teracopy can copy but not sync. It recovers a bit better from failed copies but not well enough for my 2TB file moves. I think it created system instability, crashing a few times at inopportune times.
Robocopy not enough checking, mediocre recovery from failed copies, not enough feedback.
Windows File History might actually be useful as a local backup tool. I played with it a bit and seemed to work well on a local network. Though it kept nagging me when a computer wasn’t connected (yes, I know, I turned the other computer off an hour ago). Though I’ll likely stick with rclone and Backblaze instead of learning 2 tools.
Minio on a server with some fancy buy-once Amazon AWS compatible backup software for the client like Arqbackup was a good idea until I found that Minio needed to be manually updated every couple weeks or it would refuse to start up.
keywords: backup
I wrote this on my mom’s Facebook account today:
Hi, this is Marlene’s son, Lee Sonko, writing on Marlene’s account. Someone broke into Marlene’s account a few weeks ago. If you got a friend request from “me”, please report that account as fraudulent and unfriend them!
They were amazingly sneaky. The only notice we got that something nefarious was happening was an email that Marlene’s password had changed. I’ve seen this before and the thieves plan was to let the account sit for 30 days with the new password and then lock Marlene out of her own account. A good friend of mine got completely locked out of her account forever with this scam!
Here’s what to do to make sure this doesn’t happen to you: Set up two-factor authentication for all your important apps. Just install the Authy app on your phone and then follow these instructions https://authy.com/guides/facebook/ Now you’ll need your phone when logging in with a new device. It’s not a bother and it will save you!
Also, don’t ignore odd emails from Facebook, like if they say your password has changed.
Here’s another message I was using
This is Marlene’s son, Lee writing from her account.
Recently you got a friend request ostensibly from Marlene but it isn’t her! It is someone pretending to be her! Could you please do a few things:
First, please report and unfriend that new, Bad Marlene . Go to this page: https://www.facebook.com/marlene.sonko.9 , and in the upper right corner just below “Friends and “Messege” click the “…” and click “Find support or report”. Please report this account!
Second, please make sure that all of your accounts have 2 factor authentication using an authentication app like Authy.com or Google Authenticator to secure your account! Here’s a pretty good video showing how to do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcKnAjTTXYg
My mom’s account got hacked even though we had just set up SMS-based 2-factor-authentication! It was a bother to set up the authentication app but it was WAY more of a bother to recover Marlene’s account from the bad people. Seriously.
Third, if you ever get an email from Facebook saying your password has changed, or you get locked out of Facebook for an unknown reason, don’t ignore the problem! You’ve got 30 days to undo problems or be locked out of your account FOREVER.
Sorry for such a long message. Best regards – Lee Sonko for my mom, Marlene.
PS Feel free to call my mom or me (I’m at xxx-xxx-xxxx) and verify all of this!
Here are some more details. I didn’t share all of this with all her friends on Facebook but it’s worth mentioning!
The thieves did a very elegant switch-a-roo! My mom only uses Facebook on her iphone. She reported that app had starting looking “weird”. We figured out that her login had been switched to a new, fake account! I didn’t have her phone in my hands but it was apparent that the thieves were able to log her in to the new, fake account that looked similar (maybe using the old login credentials, where they switched her legitimate account to using new credentials that we never had access to)
On this fake account, she could see her friends but not interact with them. Maybe what they did was something like this:
Blargh.
For the adventurous among you.
Start nslookup. Set the server to hastur.rlyeh.net
then
> set querytype=txt
> set domain=adventure
and then:
> 1
Press enter and follow the interactive adventure!
Ok, I think I finally fixed it.
Since 2017, I’ve been having outgoing email spam problems. At one point, I’m sorry to say, malicious actors were sending 50,000 emails per day from @lee.org. I’ve been wrestling with the tools that stop stuff like that from happening. How did I finally fix it? Until last month, my email was hosted at Dreamhost.com and it forwarded to my free Gmail account. Now, it goes straight to a ($6/month) Google Workspace account.
I’ve only moved email over, not all the other google services but so far the move is successful.
Pluses:
Minuses:
Some tools to test the spamminess of your domain:
After having a come-to-Jesus discussion with Dreamhost tech support (I said, “Pretty please help me fix this or I’m leaving.” They said, “It is unfixable Google Workspace might magically fix it”) I moved my gmail account to a paid Google Workspace account. The hope is that for $6/month, they’ll fix my intractable spam problem (whenever I send email to a new person from @Lee.org, it falls into their spam folder for unknown reasons). It’s kinda exciting seeing all my gmail email being migrated to my new account. All 62,000 emails going back to 2011! And I might just fold in my Outlook email going back to 2002 and my RFDMail and Eudora going back to 199-something!
I’m still trying to make it so my emails from lee.org don’t fall into people’s spam folders. When I send email to new people it often goes to spam. I’ve checked headers carefully and it shouldn’t but gmail receivers see a notice “emails from lee.org have been spam in the past”. Ugh.
Dreamhost tech support suggested that I move my mail to Google Workspace. They have a 1 month free trial and it’s just $6/month/user. Maybe if it’s hosted locally, they will show more love for the domain. And there’s a bunch of tools available with the suite. Maybe I can go back to Dreamhost after a few months.
The data migration tool would only let me pull in the last year of gmail from my old gmail account. Bah! So I turned on the import feature in gmail and did it that way instead Go to admin.google.com | Apps | Google Workspace | Gmail | Setup | User Email Uploads. Set to “on” Then go into the new gmail account and go to Settings | Accounts and Import. Do the import!
Here are the tools I’m using to analyze email:
Google Admin for Workspace