fractalbrothers, you dig?

FTP vulnerability - has your site been broken into?

2009-07-13T12:26:00.002-05:00

FTP, to say the least, is a very insecure protocol. Usernames and passwords are sent in plain text and can be sniffed anywhere between the route from your computer to the host's server where your files are stored. Outgoing traffic from your computer can also be sniffed by malware that is installed on your computer. Since passwords are sent in plain text, malware authors don't even need to bother looking for the configuration file on your computer containing account credentials. They can simply sniff outgoing traffic.
The solution? (or at least, a better solution so as to thwart malware authors and other wrong-doers trying to sniff FTP passwords) use SFTP (secure FTP)! You can enable SFTP by enabling SSH on your hosting, which usually requires authorization. However the benefit will be well worth it if you have had a website hacked for seemingly no reason. Your FTP password being stolen is a likely candidate.
More on this at the original article on using SFTP to administer a website at slashdot.
For a SFTP client, I suggest fireFTP. They recently added SFTP capability.

WHY DID BILLY MAYS HAVE TO DIE!?!?!??

2009-06-30T22:30:00.002-05:00

Dead at age 50 on June 28, 2009, Billy Mays was arguably the best pitchman in the entire world. That's pretty much what there is to say about Billy Mays, the guy who pitched products such as OxiClean, Mighty Putty, and the quick chop, before the slap chop came around and kicked the crap out of the quick chop.
Despite Billy Mays' obnoxiously high pitched and loud voice, he will be missed because Billy Mays was really cool - almost as cool as Chuck Norris.

Michael Jackson dead at age 50 - end of an era

2009-06-25T18:10:00.002-05:00

Pop star Michael Jackson died in his Holmby Hills home at age 50. Most people don't really give a crap, but the "Thriller" album rocked, so Michael Jackson will be remembered for at least another 30 years or so when he'll be retired from discussion in pop culture and preserved in Wikipedia for all eternity.

It costs $4,715.75 to get a license plate in Shanghai, China

2009-05-11T16:27:00.003-05:00

Since traffic is so bad in Shanghai, vehicle license plates are auctioned off and are very hard to get, especially for middle and lower class individuals. The price of a license plate in many instances is higher than the cost of a small used car (!). In March 2008, the average price was 32,169 RMB (Chinese Yuan) or about $4,715.75. At one point, in December 2007, the average price of a license plate in Shanghai was 56,042 RMB or about $8,213! Insane.

Original article: ShangCar.com

Great deal on business cards, deal ends midnight May 17th

2009-05-11T11:50:00.003-05:00

30% off business cards (1000) quantity at overnightprints.com. Use coupon code 30BCSALE.

I use overnightprints.com every time I make business cards because, well, they are so darn cheap especially considering the outstanding quality. These guys don't mess around, and the cards will be the highest quality (and thick!!) If you don't believe me, just request a sample and you'll see what I mean.

GM getting desperate: sending spam email?

2009-04-24T01:06:00.002-05:00

I think in these uncertain economic times, GM is getting desperate and buying DVDs full of email addresses which were obtained by unscrupulous means. Of course I'm just guessing here, because I just got this email from "the professionals at GMC":

I have no idea how they got my email address. Someone sold it to them, and I'd like to know who, but unfortunately, I didn't add a label to my email address while signing up for whichever service sold my email address (like emailaddy+label@gmail.com) so I don't know who did it. Pretty annoying though.
Is GM really so desperate that they have to resort to sending out unsolicited emails to guys who aren't even remotely interested in buying a piece of crap, poorly built American vehicle? I think it's a possibility considering they are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Dude eats world's biggest cheeto over the optimus maximus keyboard

2009-04-23T15:18:00.002-05:00

Absolutely priceless. Although I have doubts that he actually ate the whole thing (because of the cut scenes), if he did, then mad respect to him. Here is the video.

World's Largest Cheeto and the Optimus Maximus from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

The particularly disgusting thing is that he ate this cheeto over the world's most expensive keyboard, the Optimus Maximus, which has individual displays for each key on the keyboard and costs about $1600 for the one with every key customizable (there is one with just 10 function keys with OLED displays for about $800) It's hard to tell which one he used in the video but either way, he got it all funky with cheeto.

Frito-Lay already sells the cheetos GIANT, but it's not quite that big. Perhaps they will start selling them that big, under a different name. Like Cheetos Ginormous. We can only hope.

Original Gizmodo post.

New google captcha?

2009-04-20T19:56:00.002-05:00

Google is trying a new captcha sytem in which the user has to rotate the image so that it is oriented upright.

In case you didn't know, a captcha is any sort of system that is intended to keep bots (computers) from automatically signing up for things. The need for captcha systems increases as smarty-pants people like Chinese and Russians figure out ways to get through captchas like grungy looking letters and numbers.

The captcha seems pretty nice, as it would not require any text entry, and only requires one stroke of the mouse to complete. Criticism includes some people complaining about the fact that blind people won't be able to use the captcha. (lol).

I just had to say this - one particulary retarded commenter at the original article here said that the Federal government should ban private companies from using this type of captcha because it will limit the usability for the seeing-impaired. Where do these people come from..? Seriously?

nVidia SATA RAID drivers for nForce 550/570/590 motherboards

2009-04-19T17:41:00.003-05:00

I have the Foxconn C51XEM2AA, but you may have anther nVidia 590 motherboard that you need RAID drivers for. These drivers are intended to put on a floppy disk or a thumb drive if your motherboard supports it. Here is the link to the download:

nVidia SATA RAID 32 bit

These drivers are for:

Operating Systems: Windows 2003, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000

Supports following driver models: NVIDIA nForce 590/570/550 Serial ATA Controller
NVIDIA MCP61 Serial ATA Controller
NVIDIA nForce(tm) RAID Class Device
NVIDIA nForce(tm) RAID Class Controller

nForce 590:
Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H
eVGA nforce 590 SLI
Asus CROSSHAIR nForce 590 SLI (ASUS CROSSHAIR Republic of Gamers Series)
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (AiLifestyle series)
MSI K9N Diamond
ASUS Main Station Series M2N32 WS Professional
ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X
ABIT AN9 32X
DFI LANPARTY UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G
ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium (AiLifestlye series)
XFX nForce 590 SLI
nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition
Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S4

nForce 570:
MSI K9N SLI-F V2
Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4
ASUS M2N-LR
ASUS M2N-E AiLifestyle Series
Foxconn N570SM2AA-8EKRS2H
ABIT KN9 SLI
ABIT KN9 Ultra
ASUS P5NSLI AI Lifestyle Series
DFI Infinity nF570-M2/G
MSI K9N SLI Platinum
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AiLifestyle Series
MSI K9N Platinum
MSI K9N SLI Platinum
MSI P7N Diamond
ASUS P5NT WS AiLifestyle Series
ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus AiLifestyle Series
MSI Biostar TFORCE 570 SLI
nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition
ECS Elitegroup nForce 570 SLIT-A

nForce 550:
MSI K9N Neo-F
MSI Biostar TFORCE 550
DFI Infinity nF550-M2/G
Abit KN9S
Gigabyte GA-M55S-S3
Biostar TForce 550
Microstar K9NNEOF

Hilarious sign in a closing Circuit City

2009-03-19T14:41:00.003-05:00

It is good to see that some employees of Circuity City are keeping their senses of humor despite their employer closing its doors permanently.

It will be interesting to see if any of the employees retain their senses of humor when GM fails and closes its doors as well.

Asus Lamborghini VX5 with 1 terabyte SSD, 4GB RAM, core 2 quad

2009-03-04T14:58:00.003-06:00

The Asus Lamborghini VX5 will undoubtedly be the baddest laptop on the market. With a 1 Terabyte SSD (solid state drive) from pureSilicon, an intel core 2 quad processor, and 4GB of RAM. The SSD drive pushes an impressive 300 MB/second burst speed, as well as sustained read/write of 240 and 215 MB/Second, respectively. The laptop also features a blu-ray optical drive, as well as an HDMI output. The laptop also has an impressive "full HD" resolution of 1920 by 1080 and an nVidia GeForce GT 130M graphics card with 1GB of GDDR3.

Smoothwall error "Unable to run command" fix

2009-02-05T15:48:00.002-06:00

If you are running Smoothwall express 3.0, and you are having problems with the port forwarding section not working, and getting the "Unable to run command" error, we found a solution to some of your needs:

If you are adding comments to any of the port forwarding rules, delete them, and restart smoothwall. This allowed port forwarding to work again and got rid of the "Unable to run command" error.

Hope this helps you. If you were not adding comments to port forwarding rules, it could be an issue with Snort, the intrusion detection system that comes with Smoothwall (or another issue). See "Unable to run command" thread on the smoothwall forums.

What a failing ATI Radeon HD 4870 looks like

2009-02-02T21:18:00.005-06:00

This is the Asus EAH4870 Black Knight edition Radeon HD 4870. The card has bad ram and this is what it is doing in TF2:

The crappy framerate (especially for what this card can do - i.e. tear TF2 a new one) is attributed to this being on windows 7 beta, with not so great drivers for the Radeon HD 4870 yet.

Rodney Stanger news blooper

2009-01-31T16:45:00.003-06:00

Friggin' hilarious! Rodney Stanger, a 61 year old suspect in the Molly Bish case, is apparently a hamster.

The sadness of the actual story makes this a little less funny. I wish the thumbnail was a political figure or celebrity instead of Rodney Stanger, an incarcerated suspected murderer and probable loser.

Looking for someone? 5 best people search engines

2009-01-26T18:26:00.002-06:00

Are you looking for someone from school, or stalking someone? If so, according to lifehacker, the five best people search engines are:

Pipl - Great people search engine because of its deep crawling abilities (goes into databases and indexes that are not normally searched by other people search engines)
Google - great because of its indexing of ever increasing online profiles.
Facebook - with 150 million users, you have a pretty good chance of finding someone you know.
Spock - polls information from multiple sources and supports email notifications if your search changes.
123people - also digs deep to find people's blogs and online profiles.

Original article: Five best people-search engines @ LifeHacker.

SEO experiment - BraggTags

2009-01-25T14:37:00.004-06:00

Apple iMac, XM radio sales strongest at Best Buy in Midland, Texas

2009-01-23T13:47:00.007-06:00

While the economy deteriorates in most every city in the country, the economy in Midland, Texas seems to be doing just fine. My indicator to back this claim? Apple iMac and XM radio sales at Best Buy - two (arguably) overpriced luxuries.

According to an Apple sales rep at Best Buy we talked to today, the Best Buy store in Midland, Texas is outselling every other Best Buy in the country (how he knew the store's XM radio sales figures I don't know). The iMacs were out of stock while I was there, and the rep said they were selling over 80 units per week.

I'm sure the fact that Midland is an oil and gas town has something to do with it, and the fact that it once had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country (during the oil boom of the 70's). I'm sure plenty of that money is still floating around.
Also, Midland ranked #1 in the country for "best cities for business" in 2008 according to inc.com.

Firefox 3 crashes all the time

2009-01-23T13:14:00.010-06:00

Why Firefox crashes all the time? I am not sure. The past couple versions have been very problematic on my system, and that could be for a number of reasons. A firefox extension or plugin could be causing the crashes, but I know it is within Firefox because the crash reporter comes up after the crash. I am going to begin disabling my plugins and extensions until I get rid of these pesky Firefox crashes.

I am running Firefox version 3.0.5 currently. The crashes seem to happen randomly, and they do not happen when Firefox is starting up, and it doesn't seem to be related to loading any particular website.

The page that Mozilla refers one to when they are experiencing random crashes is here: Firefox crashes when loading certain pages
However, since the crashes do not seem to be linked to any certain website, I am referring to this page as well: Firefox crashes

The plan of action to try and fix the firefox crashes will be:

Uninstall Firefox and install a clean latest version (tried, unsuccessful)
Try Firefox in safe mode to see if the problem is a plugin or extension.
I don't have any themes installed, so I don't have to worry about that.
Find updates for all my extensions and plugins.
Disable extensions that don't have available updates.
If #5 doesn't fix the problem, start disabling working extensions and plugins.

Lego digital cameras and Lego mp3 players

2009-01-20T04:08:00.002-06:00

The danish toy maker Lego is planning on unveiling a brand new line of products, Lego digital cameras and Lego mp3 players. The entrance into the "gadgets for kids" market follows in the footsteps of the robotics kits they also sell currently. The new gadgets are going to be produced in order to bring Legos to life in "an all-new way for its fans". Lego digital cameras and Lego mp3 players are the next logical step in that direction.

Kids won't be the only ones buying the Lego digital cameras and mp3 players, because of the cult following Lego has among geeky individuals (like myself). Take google founders for example - their first storage array case was built out of Legos.

The new product line will be available later this year and will cost between £14 and £40 ($19.98 and $57.08, respectively). Keep an eye out for Lego digital cameras and Lego mp3 players in brick and mortar and online retailers later this year.

Complying with adsense - privacy policy

2009-01-16T04:39:00.002-06:00

According to Adsense's new terms and conditions, each site that serves adsense ads must have a privacy policy. So I created one. Hopefully, my sagging earnings will recover once it gets indexed.

If you are blogging on blogger like I am, basically you have 2 choices for a privacy policy.

Make a Privacy Policy as a blog post and link to the blog post on the footer of your blog (this is what I did) The advantage is that it is very easy to do, but the cons are that people will be finding the privacy policy when they don't really want to.
Make a separate page, that you link to on the footer of your blog. The drawback to this is that the privacy policy doesn't have your blog's look and feel to it.

Privacy Policy

2009-01-16T04:32:00.002-06:00

What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you subscribe to our newsletter (RSS feed).

When registering for our feed, as appropriate, you will be asked to enter your email address. You may, however, visit our site anonymously.

Like most websites, we use cookies and/or web beacons to enhance your experience, gather general visitor information, and track visits to our website. Please refer to the 'do we use cookies?' section below for information about cookies and how we use them.

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

* To send periodic emails
The email address you provide to subscribe to our RSS feed will only be used to send you updates of the content of our website.

Note: If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, we include unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of each email.

Unsubscribing from our RSS feed can also be done through the feedburner website (www.feedburner.com).

In addition, Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the Internet.

You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Third party links

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our website. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

California Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

Because we value your privacy we have taken the necessary precautions to be in compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act. We therefore will not distribute your personal information to outside parties without your consent.

Your Consent

By using our site, you consent to our privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page, and/or update the Privacy Policy modification date below.

This policy was last modified on March 14, 2009.

Contacting Us

If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy you may contact us using the information below.

http://blog.losercoalition.net

nuklear_at_gmail_dot_com

Evga 730a motherboard owners: better overclocking is on the way

2009-01-15T17:36:00.003-06:00

For those of you that own the evga 730a motherboard, and are frustrated at its stubbornness to overclocking, there is hope for you. We have confirmed (over the phone with tech support) that evga is working on an updated BIOS that is overclocking friendly. Be patient and check the evga support website for updates frequently.

I'm not sure where to look for this BIOS update though, since evga has removed the driver download page for the 730a. I'll update this post when I find out how to download the BIOS update.

Note: this is great news for those trying to run 1066 MHz DDR2. It is nearly impossible to run DDR2 at 1066 on the 730a motherboard presently.

Edit: the new BIOS update from EVGA is out, and it does in fact allow for better overclocking on the 730a motherboard.

The BIOS update can be found here: http://www.evga.com/support/drivers/
Click on "Mainboards", then "BIOS updates", then select "E113 - EVGA 730a".

YouTube muting videos with copyrighted music

2009-01-14T20:12:00.002-06:00

YouTube has recently begun muting videos with copyrighted music, according to Mashable.com. Not that I care that much, since most of the videos featuring copyrighted music in the background are silly anime videos that are synchronized to the latest Nickelback (or Linkin Park) ditty.

Actually, I do care, because as soon as a service like YouTube starts doing stuff like this, its popularity and soon after quality starts to diminish. Users don't like their videos being messed with, and you can hear most of what they are putting into their videos on the radio for free anyway, so what is the big deal? They are not making any money off the videos. Now copyrighted video, that is another issue because it is most of the time paid content elsewhere.

iSteam application insanely popular, earns its developers big bucks

2009-01-14T03:36:00.003-06:00

Isteam is the #1 free iphone application in 22 markets and among the top 10 paid application in over 40 markets, is earning its developers (which happen to all be 22 years old) a slick revenue of $100,000 dollars a month. Not bad, not bad. The application is pretty sweet though, if somewhat useless (certainly not the only one of its kind in that arena), because you can erase the steam with your finger, change the direction of the droplets, shake it or blow into the microphone to clear the steam, etc. Pretty fun it sounds like.

Defraggler - free defragment tool! (windows defrag alternative)

2009-01-04T00:39:00.004-06:00

From the makers of CCleaner (highly recommended file/registry cleanup tool) comes Defraggler, a free defragment tool for Windows. Here are some of the features of defraggler:

The ability to defrag individual files rather than the entire drive
Small footprint: single EXE less than 1MB!
Works under Windows Vista
Lists all fragmented files on the drive and allows you to select one or all of the files you wish to defragment
Best of all, it's FREE!

Go grab Defraggler now. It makes a nice addition to one's tech toolkit.