n3wjack's blog

google reader replacement for geeks

n3wjack — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:54:26 +0000

Google Reader is quitting on us and there doesn’t seem to be an alternative if you don’t want something that tries to make your feeds look all fancy and shiny eye-candy-ish like Feedly or most of the alternatives I saw.

The things I loved in Google Reader are:

1. Accessible from anywhere (which means web-based basically), so desktop based RSS readers didn’t cut it.
2. I can use it from my Android phone, either with an app or straight from the website.
3. I can skim feeds quickly and star or tag articles I want to read later.
4. The read-later articles need to be imported into Instapaper, using something like IFTT.

I started looking at some open source solutions because I didn’t want to end up getting shut down again. In the least the services needed to allow me to import & export feeds easily in case it does bail out.

I noticed a few open source applications running on PHP that are interesting but only one of them is still actively developed and has a decent user base. So Tiny Tiny RSS is what I ended up testing out.
It’s pretty close to Google Reader (which makes sense because it’s an RSS aggregator and reader after all) but it isn’t pretending to become it, or implement every GR features. It’s sailing its own course, but since it’s pretty damn close I thought I’d give it a shot.

So here comes the geeky bit:

Since this is a web app and not a web service, you have to host it yourself.
So this means getting the code, uploading it to your server, setting up the database and configuring it.

If that didn’t scare you off, all of this is nicely explained in this lifehacker post and on the TT-RSS installation notes. So you’re pretty safe there. Recently the software was updated to enable it to run on a shared hosting server, so you can basically run it anywhere from now on.
If I wouldn’t have my own hosting I’d try to get it running on a NearlyFreeSpeech site to try it out for cheaps. You can set up a PHP site quick and cheap over there if you have the know-how.

There’s and Android application on the market you can try for 7 days for free to connect to your instance of Tiny Tiny RSS (after you open up the API settings in the configuration) and it works great. It costs only a few bucks so I figured I was willing to pay that to the author of this fine piece of work that’s available to the world for free after all.

It also supports starring and tagging posts, and it allows you to expose your starred items as an RSS feed so you can pull that into IFTT for syncing with Instapaper.

There you have it. All requirements are met with free software (except the Android app bit) and a bit of geeky work on your part to get things set up and running. So far things are running great and I didn’t run into any issues yet.
You can set this up for multiple users, so if you have friends that are also orphaned by Google Reader you can share your instance with them.

Photo by stylianosm, cc-licensed.

securely wiping your hard drive without dban

n3wjack — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:19:58 +0000

Well if DBAN doesn’t cut it for some reason there’s always a more native Linux way to do this.

Step one is getting a Linux live CD, DVD or USB stick and boot from that. I used the Debian Live CD myself, which boots into character mode so you don’t end up with XServer not getting your video settings right.

Once you’re in a shell, you can use the shred command to wipe your HD’s data by overwriting it a number of times with random data. I found that out by reading a post by a lad named Jason on the topic which was a nice help. I only had to add the “sudo” call in front of the command to actually allow it to get write access to the disk on Debian.

First figure out what partition/drive you want to wipe by running:

cat /proc/partitions

Then, in my case, I had to run this to wipe sda:

sudo shred -fvz -n 6 /dev/sda

The -fvz basically means, [f]orce write permissions, [v]erbose output so you can see the wiping progress and write [z]ero’s on the last run to hide the wiping. -n 6 tells it to do 6 runs of random data writing.

Using DBAN is still the easier way to get this done, but if that’s causing you trouble you can use this as a backup wiping measure.

Photo by Hugo Chinaglia, cc-licensed.

hardcore overload II

n3wjack — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:20:38 +0000

Time for another hardcore overload. We’ll start with the awesome Outside Agency again (can’t fail there) with the Twisted Darkside podcast mix #112 they did for the Impact 11th b-day warehouse party (direct link & mirror). It’s a shorty, but it’s damn good. If you’re dying for more hardcore podcasts, well, that Twisted Darkside page is full of ‘em, so I’m sure you’ll find something there.

In case you don’t, there’s always this one: a mix by no other than UK legend The DJ Producer for the PRSPCT XL 17 party. I don’t think I need to waste any more words on this. Lot’s of Hellfish & Producer in this one of course, so enjoy.

Now something I’m sure you haven’t heard of before. A Berlin based producer who’s been going at it for 10 years started a dark sounding electronic music project under the name RML_. You can download his first EP for free which has some cool, dark & hard techno at a bit of a slower pace so you can chill down from the previous mayhem posted here.

Photo by Rosa Menkman, cc-licensed.

using a web client in powershell

n3wjack — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:39:14 +0000

PowerShell truly is powerful.
A few lines of script is all you need to perform an HTTP request in a PowerShell script. If the native commands don’t cut it, it’s pretty easy to reach out and harness the power of the .NET framework instead like in the sample below.
As a .NET developer this allows you to write some pretty kick-ass scripts without having to compile a line of code.

I like it.

# Add the necessary .NET assembly
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Net.Http

# Create the HttpClient object
$client = New-Object -TypeName System.Net.Http.Httpclient

# Get the web content.
$task = $client.GetStringAsync("http://n3wjack.net")

# Wait for the async call to finish
$task.wait();

# Use the result
if ($task.IsCompleted) {
  # Do your thing here.
  echo $task.Result
} else {
  echo "Sorry, something went wrong: " + $task.Exception.Message
}

donating bandwidth to open source

n3wjack — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 11:41:22 +0000

If you’re like me and you have a big fat internet pipe entering your home then you probably have a lot of unused upload bandwidth at the end of the month. In fact, if you have one of those flat-rate unlimited bandwidth kind of packages which you lucky foreigners seem to have in abundance, then you have (in theory) a lot of unused bandwidth… always.

So how about using some of those gigs for a good cause? How about seeding some awesome and freely available open source software and content so others can get faster access to it. That wat you save the lads hosting those big ISOs from their servers some bucks by taking the load off their upload stream.

The solution is simple, boot up your favorite torrent client (uTorrent for example) get a few torrented downloads for the open source causes you feel like contributing to and seed away!

Good stuff to give bandwidth to are:

The Ubuntu Linux operating system. Seed the iso’s of the latest version.
Other free OS’s such as Debian, Suse, FreeBSD or whatever flavour you fancy.
Google’s Project Gutenberg, sharing a DVD worth of free and open ebooks. It feels good to share a library of content from your machine, trust me. Also great to browse through yourself btw.
The free content (cc-licensed mostly) from clear-bits. Pick some stuff you want to check out yourself, music, video’s, games, anything and just remember to keep that torrent up for seeding. You won’t have a lot of downloads on these usually as they are only fetched sporadically, but keeping the seed up is like giving the other a thumbs up if you like his stuff.
Recently archive.org also put up a lot of its content in torrent form.

Be sure to check back on those OS releases now and then so you don’t end up seeding a dusty old version, but other than that, your torrent client is giving back without you having to do any effort. How sweet is that?

Photo by Massimo Margagnoni, cc-licensed.

3 awesome free breakcore.nl releases

n3wjack — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:29:18 +0000

Shame on me!
I’ve been sitting on some sweet breakcore but didn’t find the time to share the awesome with you. So here it is, in a triple dose (sort of) to make it all dandy again.

The Dutch breakcore.nl site has brought out various breakcore releases at regular intervals, like their Themeless album series featuring lots of new breakcore talent. The range of breakcore variation on this albums is so that you’ll always find something you like in those high quality tracks.

Dowload Themeless 5 and check it out for yourself.

A second release on breakcore.nl worth checking out is the free EP called Midnight Notes released by WSicko, who’s runs the forum & label if I’m not mistaken.
The album has 5 high energy tracks which combine classical music with gabber and jungle beats. You know, that stuff that’s pretty common in breakcore. Good stuff, somewhere in the range of The Teknoist if you ask me, so download it or listen to it on bandcamp.

The third one is another goody coming from z999 and is called Distorted By Design. Breakcory jungle breaks mixed up with melodic classical bits and pieces with a nice distortion sauce on top. Best served loud.

Photo by craigCloutier, cc-licensed.

some free wallpapers for desktop and phone

n3wjack — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 10:20:08 +0000

My web stats tell me that you lot like to find some new and shiny wallpapers for your desktops and phones now and then. Since I’ve been tagging my flickr photos for a while now with wallpaper tags, I thought it would be nice if I’d just link them up here so you can take a peek and use them if you like.
All wallpapers are cc-licensed as usual so you’re free to use them, chop and manipulate them. To download an image, click the Actions menu on top, then pick “View All Sizes”.

Here’s some of the desktop wallpapers:

And here are some more wallpapers specifically made for your smartphone (which means they are in portrait mode basically):

Enjoy!

usb 3 external hd + wireless mouse gives nasty frustrating interference

n3wjack — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:59:00 +0000

This been bugging me for a few days now so I’m glad I found a fix and thought I’d publish that to the world-wide web.
Recently my old external HD started making these really annoying clicking sounds after I accidentally dropped it on its head. Oops. A check-disk showed the clicking noises where indeed indicating a problem (check-disk never manages to finish its check, it gets stuck somewhere in the middle…) so it was time to shop for a new and shiny drive, of course USB 3 compatible because it’s like the latest and greatest in Universal Bus Technologies these days.

After I connected the new and shiny Seagate drive to the lappy however, my wireless mouse (I don’t like wires) started acting jumpy. My suspicion that indeed the drive was the culprit only increases as the behaviour stopped when I disconnected the drive.

OK, guilty party found, but now what? Apparently the USB 3 cable and/or drive is giving off enough interference to mess with the wireless radio signal for the mouse and keyboard (I don’t like wires). I read a few online posts on similar problems but nothing that really gave a clear solution except “try using a different USB port” for the wireless connector.

Great but I can’t, since on the Dell laptop all the USB ports are pretty close to one another (tip for Dell perhaps?). Then from a Logitech thread came the tip to perhaps try using a USB extension cable. Well bloody Hell I still have one of those things around I never use! Turns out that little cable of only a good 20 cm long is enough to keep the wireless receiver far enough away from the jamming source to function properly again.
Awesome.

Weird thing is that when I move it close to the USB 3 port used for the HD again, it doesn’t seem to suffer from interference anymore. I have no idea why that is.

Photo by Rosa Menkman, cc-licensed.

how to use code analysis in visual studio and not go crazy

n3wjack — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:54:14 +0000

Code Analysis in Visual Studio is great to have your .NET code checked automatically against the .NET framework design guidelines, coding standards and good practices. By activating CA, you’ll pick up some of these practices along the way and as a result you’ll be writing better code, aided by this automated tool.

The downside is that sometimes CA can make your go stark raving mad when you are in the process of sketching or refactoring some code. When you want to quickly draft some code or try something out to see if that hack you have in mind would work, CA gets in the way as it keeps bitching about naming conventions, literal string values and what not.

So how do you make CA shut the F* up in a case like that?
Well it’s quite simple, you just have to add this line as the first in your cs file:

//

You have now fooled CA into thinking the file is auto-generated by some tool and it will effectively STFU.
Awesome.

Don’t forget to remove that line again afterwards of course.

things I learned from hacking my own wifi access point

n3wjack — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:34:58 +0000

I read this article recently on how this guy hacked his neighbours WIFI access point relatively easy. After that I wondered how easy it would be to crack my own WIFI network because my password wasn’t all that complex. In fact, it even has some dictionary words in it. So I got me a copy of BackTrack 5, got up to speed on hacking tools like airdump-ng, aircrack-ng, John the Ripper (love that name) and started cracking.

Here’s what I learned:

Getting enough data from a WPA encrypted WIFI access point to start hacking on far away from the crime scene takes only a few minutes if you know what you’re doing.
To get access to your WIFI network interface you need to run BackTrack on the bare metal. Running it as a virtualized guest OS in VMWare doesn’t expose your WIFI interface as WIFI. Booting the OS from a USB disk did the trick for me.
Don’t save files in /tmp/ on Ubuntu if you plan to reboot. They will get wiped when you reboot. *facepalm*
John The Ripper and aircrack-ng exist for Windows as well. Hacking away with the native versions seriously increases your hack attempts per second (800 vs 2700 on my machine) instead of running them on a virtual box. I know this is obvious because you’re running on the native OS, but I just assumed those tools where Linux only at first. Silly me.
John the ripper has its brute force limit set to 8 characters at compile time. That means that it’s a bit harder to get hacked if you have a 9 character password because you have to recompile or use the external modes. I ended up using the external modes.
Brute forcing a WPA packet for a 9 character password takes ages. Literally! It ran for hours and it didn’t even get close to finishing. At 2700 attempts per second with a 9 character password combining numbers, upper- & lower-case characters it would take about 872 years to find all possible combinations. If you use a 100 laptops like mine simultaneous (Intel i7 2Ghz) that is. Ouch.
There’s a bunch of word lists out there containing commonly used passwords. If your password is in one of those lists, chances are it will be found in no-time (2700 passwords per second remember). So it’s a good thing to make that password as random as possible.
The free lists you find online are supposed to be of lesser quality. If you’re willing to shelve out a few bucks however, you can get bigger and high quality lists. Still this proves that having a good randomized password is pretty important.

Conclusion

My WIFI password is harder to crack than I thought. Yet I’m going to change it to something more random because those dictionary words are not in the current frequently used password lists right now, but it could end up in there in the near future. For all I know it’s already in some password list I didn’t see.

Photo by g. tavmen, cc-licensed