Lee.org

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.

update 11-9-11: consider using DeltaCopy instead of my home-brewed method below. I haven’t used it yet, but it looks nice!

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!

I haven’t tried it yet but others say it works. Windows is playing a little catch-up here… Unix had symbolic links in 1973 and it’s not a clever hack… it just works. Junction Link Magic

Hard links too with NTFS Hardlink Shellextention.

What I did to get data off a laptop before a reinstall of Windows:

Boot PHLAK
‘cat /etc/fstab’ (to find the hard drive)
‘mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1’ (to mount hda1)
open a terminal (the hard drive couldn’t be read by the gftp started via right-click on desktop | Apps | Net | gftp. Probably b/c that started gftp with an unprivilaged user)
‘gftp’
cd the local side to ‘/mnt’
log in to 192.168.1.3, user: local
select ../hda1 on the left side and click the transfer button. Woosh…