Furthest Shores

Virtual Peeping Tomery For Tomorrow's Skynet

2012-02-06T04:20:00.017-07:00

The BBC News Article about the Trendnet camera security flaw, and presumably the blog it references engaged my curiosity enough for me to play with it a bit. Of course, having a large list of IPs to go through by hand is a bit lame. This blog has a nice method of aggregating, but is a bit heavier than what I wanted, which was just to see a single thumbnail for each exploitable camera. In the

Making WMP Keep Its Hooks Off My Disc

2012-02-01T04:20:00.010-07:00

Windows 7, x64: For some reason with my settings, Windows Media Player insists on handling a double click on the DVD drive. The behavior I want, is to be able to manually manipulate files under VIDEO_TS. What I definitely don't want is WMP taking its sweet time loading and trying to play the DVD. (And I don't want to have to remember to right-click each time and go to Open... especially since

Generating PDF Bookmarks Automatically When Combining PDFs

2012-01-30T23:58:00.020-07:00

A quick script to generate a proper bookmark file for jpdfbookmarks from a list of PDFs. I find myself needing this enough, the "evince on one monitor, vim on the other" method became tedious. autobookmark.sh: #!/bin/sh p=1; for f in *.pdf do fn=`printf "$f" | sed 's/\.pdf$//i'` printf "%02d - %s/%d,FitPage\n" $p "$fn" $p p=$(($p+`pdfinfo "$f" | awk '/Pages/ {print $2}'`)) done So,

ZFS On Linux - Notes to Self / (aka forget mdadm, this is easier!)

2011-05-15T04:20:00.079-06:00

Set up repositories: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dajhorn/zfs/ubuntu natty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/dajhorn/zfs/ubuntu natty main apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 1EE8660B Fix "Samba sharing is not supported.": apt-get install nfs-kernel-server Create pool: # zpool create chasm raidz /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd # zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC

VIM: Press ENTER or type command to continue

2011-03-07T04:20:00.015-07:00

After searching much longer than reasonable for such a stupid thing, my solution for dealing with the less than ideal vim behavior of prompting me like a slobbering dog to press enter or type a command to continue is: :ab maker make<CR> The <CR> should be typed exactly like that. Now I can use :maker to make, and while the shell out window is less than ideal, it flicks by quickly enough as to

Speculations About Staples' Coupons.

2011-02-11T02:22:00.021-07:00

This past Black Friday, Staples had a Western Digital Elements 2TB External Hard Drive for $134.99... with $65 off, making it $69.99, with free shipping. To sweeten the deal, there was a 50 pack of DVD-R for $7.99; granted, Kodak, but it's good enough to keep coffee stains off one's desk. Add 'em together, and that's $77.98. Apply a $25 off $75 coupon, and that makes the complete order $52.98.

In Defense Of Mr. Rogers

2010-11-11T02:36:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article on cracked.com, entitled The 7 Most Random Celebrity Duos Who Hung Out Before Fame which mentions a relationship between George Romero and Fred Rogers, and that Mr. Rogers actually sat through a Dead movie. Impressed with this, I was inspired to learn more about him, as, like many in my generation, I grew up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. One link or another led

Snagging Youtube Videos With RSS

2010-09-30T23:39:00.086-06:00

For awhile now, I've been using the very excellent youtube-dl.py script to do a batch download of Youtube videos, every couple of weeks. (Must keep up with spill.com and TheOnion releases, after all.) It became somewhat tedious, clicking through my subscriptions to cut and paste the new videos into a text file to get; especially when copying the URL directly on the subscriptions page yielded

ReadyNAS 600 RAID Recovery with Ubuntu

2010-04-03T03:22:00.016-06:00

Assumptions: (you have the following) Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS 600, Sparc based, kernel: 2.6.17.14ReadyNAS A Linux system running Ubuntu (would work with live image: Lucid Lynx used for this.) with 4x SATA ports. Trying to recover data off the disks from a ReadyNAS 600 on Ubuntu is not as straightforward as the existing guides might lead one to believe, especially getting ext2fuse to

Microsoft programmers need to be shot first.

2010-03-24T02:13:00.005-06:00

I finally get the inside joke: Vista is Microsoft's foray into Clockwork Orange type movie-making; except, instead of being entertaining, it simply leaves one with only the homicidal rage. This sentence shows considerable restraint, and has replaced 20 pages consisting entirely of obscenities. I've already decided to limit my exposure to Vista/W7 as much as is possible, and am copying off all

Vista/Windows 7 - Can't Stop Itself From Being Fresh

2010-03-02T00:08:00.001-07:00

Here's the scenario: I've got two folders open, one with sorted folders, and the other one containing over 500 files that need to go into the sorted folders. Many of the files need minor correcting: say, a file is named SOMEJUNK-And_The_Rest. It needs to be just And_The_Rest. So, I hit F2, slash off SOMEJUNK and... my file disappears! It's gone up to the 'A' section of the file list, while my

Paranoia and Filtility

2010-02-28T01:03:00.004-07:00

While trying to figure the reason Vista sometimes can't seem to read optical media, I came across this rather amusing nugget regarding mini-filters, aka file system filters: "A file system filter driver intercepts requests targeted at a file system or another file system filter driver. By intercepting the request before it reaches its intended target, the filter driver can extend or replace

Vista x64 SP1 Doesn't Refresh CD/DVD Drive View (Volume / Directory)

2010-02-21T21:19:00.008-07:00

Ah, the frustration of a Microsoft operating system. This one's got me stumped. A brief description of the issue: After ejecting a disc, and putting a new one in, the old directory shows up, and not the one from the newly loaded disc. This is in Explorer, in a command prompt, and also in FreeCommander. A procmon watch of Freecommander shows it's calling CreateFile on the drive and getting

For All Your Glowing Rod Of Light Needs...

2010-02-04T11:12:00.005-07:00

If you're in the UK, you're no doubt familiar with the experience of being told that "this video is not available in your country" on streaming websites such as Hulu. This is particularly problematic if you're looking for anime shows, versus more shared genres. Good news, then: AnimeOnUK.tv is back! The webmaster has had the cobwebs dusted off and is bringing the site firmly into the Internet

Vista x64 All Tasks aka "God Mode"

2010-02-03T00:48:00.003-07:00

The recent hype over Windows' "God Mode" likely hasn't done much to put to rest the contention the whole operating system is little more than a rather cheesy game. http://brandonlive.com/2010/01/04/the-so-called-god-mode/ (of ambiguous officialness by a Microsoft employee) goes into a little bit of detail; but the main point of interest is the general amount of hawing from Microsoft, and the

Attempting to Fight Ignorance With Some Dull Light

2009-07-09T05:55:00.012-06:00

I've started a blogspot blog to engage in that age old tradition of bashing some twit that Really Needs It™ Here, for reference, is the link which has irritated me and tickled my rant-bone: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers-questions.html#turnoff I stumbled there searching for a wattage issue with Seagate drives, and I poked around. Exasperated by the drivel there, I find myself..

K7S5A Back From The Dead

2007-05-01T09:21:00.011-06:00

My little ECS K7S5A has been a rock solid little board all these years. It's getting to be a bit long in the caps, at almost 6 years old, but it's been good to me. Until, of course, for reasons apparent to many of you reading this, I needed to edit the DMI info. One toasted board, served on a nice bed of silicon. For other folks who manage to get to this point (and there are some, since I