Finshake

Looking for a Label Printer?

2009-11-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

Recently I needed a label printer for a project I was involved with, and after looking around a bit decided on buying the Brother QL-570 Label Printer. Having not used it before, but having used successful Brother products in the past, I decided that this one was it. This is a great printer. It prints fast, it cuts automatically at the end of the print. The label paper is readily available at any office supply store, and the software is dead easy to use. I plugged it into...

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Shootings at Fort Hood

2009-11-06T17:13:00.000-05:00

For those of you that have not heard, yesterday, apparently, a psychiatrist decided to take it upon himself to start offing soldiers, and wound up with 12 dead. I would like to send my condolences out to the families of the victims of this senselessness. We have enough people trying to kill our soldiers abroad, why must we have our own do the same here at home? I don't know how the guy managed to get 12 people, of course, I wasn't there, and I am just armchair quarterbacking, but 12?...

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Dojocon

2009-11-06T17:10:00.000-05:00

Drove down to Dojocon at Capitol College in Maryland today. Did the old, "Man the Sourcefire Booth" bit. Except this time, it was for VRT, instead of at a big Orange Sourcefire booth full of literature about product, the questions this time were about Snort and VRT rules. Quite a bit different from normal, great though. Dojocon did quite well (It's still going on), 150-200 people there, I would guess, (I'm not good at people estimation), lots of good presentations and lots of...

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Hey Jude

2009-11-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

Don't know where this originally came from, I saw it on KungFu Grippe. Please leave comments below.

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Lots going on, thus lack of posts

2009-11-03T17:50:00.000-05:00

So... lately I haven't been posting a lot, been doing a lot of things for work, plus I just got back from a vacation to Disney World, I got my Mustang back, and am traveling for work. Just for those of you that read the blog and will be there, I'll be at DojoCon on Friday, November 6th with the VRT. Stop by and say hello if you'll be there. Please leave comments below.

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Apple Tablet (To be called Slate?)

2009-10-26T12:46:00.000-05:00

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past year, you probably have not heard the rumor that Apple is supposedly making a "Tablet" Computing device. The first really, kind of, official note about that came out today by way of a speech given by the New York Times. Bill Keller speaks to the digital group at The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo. It happens at 8:30 in the speech. Please leave comments below.

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Google Chrome for the Mac released

2009-10-26T08:55:00.000-05:00

Kinda. Google released a "developer preview" of Google Chrome for the Mac finally. Actually, you've been able to get a hold of it for awhile, but the copy that you could get, from Google, was essentially the developer developer preview. It worked, but only in some areas. I was using that for a long while, and I was quite happy with it. But Friday of last week, Google finally put out a version of the browser that is a bit more.. "working". You can grab it here....

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Some New Apple stuff

2009-10-21T07:56:00.000-05:00

Like every other retailer getting ready for the Holiday season this year, Apple, on the back of the biggest Quarter in Apple history, which saw their stock jump almost 10 dollars in one day, announced a few new products into the pipeline yesterday. Let me just share a couple thoughts on these and then we'll move on to more interesting things. 1. New iMac's with 21.5" and 27" displays. While I don't have an iMac, my parents do, and I think it's a great platform. All that...

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Fix for the Mustang

2009-10-14T07:22:00.000-05:00

For anyone who was wondering, the Mustang was fixed by putting a new starter and cables on it. The starter bench-tested good, (meaning it spun when power was applied) but wasn't strong enough to turn the flywheel. When you put it on the bench next to a brand new starter, the new starter turned about twice as fast. While the car was up at that shop, I had them put a new header on it, dual exhaust with dual flowmaster mufflers. I would have done it myself, except that I don't...

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McAfeee Avert Labs Blog: W32/Xpaj Botnet Growing Rapidly

2009-10-13T08:16:00.001-05:00

Read the below on Google Reader, figured it was easy enough to write some SNORT(r) rules for: alert tcp $HOME_NET any -> $EXTERNAL_NET $HTTP_PORTS (msg:"VIRUS W32/Xpaj Botnet infection"; flow:to_server,established; uricontent:"up.php"; content:"a=g2"; rev:1; sid:1000000;) alert tcp $HOME_NET any -> $EXTERNAL_NET $HTTP_PORTS (msg:"VIRUS W32/Xpaj Botnet Infection"; flow:to_server,established; uricontent:"stamm/"; content:"stamm.dat"; depth:0; within:9; rev:1; sid:1000001;) alert tcp...

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Tungle Makes Cross-Calendar Scheduling Simple

2009-10-13T07:25:00.002-05:00

This is a great idea. Tungle Makes Cross-Calendar Scheduling Simple [Calendars] via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 9/30/09 If you're looking for a web-based application for scheduling meetings, you'll find no shortage. Want that application to sync to common calendar applications like Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCal? Prior to Tungle you were out of luck. Tungle combines the best features of a variety of calendar syncing and meeting scheduling tools and rolls them all into one. With...

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Well, it's broken down for now (the Mustang that is)

2009-10-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I went up the Hershey AACA car show in Hershey, PA. In my Mustang... ......and got to Lancaster, PA. Car died at a Gas station and wouldn't restart. Tried to jump it, one click, nothing. Had it towed to Pep Boys (hey, it's Lancaster) and wound up troubleshooting most of the car myself. They eventually just gave me their multimeter and equipment and I started diagnosing. After they tested the battery, there were three guys standing there looking at the engine...

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Scary

2009-10-12T13:31:00.002-05:00

This is from xkcd.com of course, but how true is this? Sent to you by Joel via Google Reader: via xkcd.com on 10/8/09 Things you can do from here:Subscribe to xkcd.com using Google ReaderGet started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

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Painting the floor in the Garage

2009-10-08T11:37:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking for awhile about doing this, but I just had too much stuff in the Garage at the time. Well, after a huge cleanout over a couple weeks, I decided to go ahead and paint the Garage floor. It's not a huge pain as people make it out to be, it's just time consuming. The first thing you have to do is head to Lowe's. They makes kits for this kind of thing. What the kit consists of (at least mine did) is a bottle of "Acid" wash, a can of paint, a can of epoxy...

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Spam Increase lately?

2009-10-07T07:54:00.002-05:00

As I posted on the Internet Storm Center this morning: Thanks to a reader (Thanks Bob), who wrote in this morning asking if we have seen an increase in spam lately, I can personally confirm that yes, I have seen more spam in my inbox lately. Bob sent us a couple interesting graphics, the first being a graph of how much of a spam increase there has been recently: Secondly another graph he sent in was an interesting correlation. It was how many viruses have been blocked by ClamD. As I...

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Why I haven't been talking about Email

2009-10-06T07:55:00.000-05:00

I received an email recently asking me why I haven't blogged (really at all) about email recently. This person enjoys my tips, and actually, the most read articles on my blog are about Email. However, I think it's because I have it figured out now. I use Gmail on the web. No local client. (This is probably the biggest saver! Deleting my local mail from my computer saved me about 6 Gigs of space.) I use keyboard shortcuts and the "To" and "Cc" indicators (The little...

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There IS good left in the world!

2009-09-22T09:38:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was in Washington DC walking from Union Station over near the Smithsonian. Apparently along the way I dropped my "return home" train ticket. A kind gentleman from the Washington Times found it, Googled my name, found my blog, and emailed me to return it. Thanks Steven. It's people like you in the world that still give me hope in humanity as a whole. How do you work on Capitol Hill? :) Just kidding, in any case. Thank you.

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I bought something new...

2009-09-09T10:28:00.006-05:00

Usually you read my blog for my long diatribes on Microsoft or something else that annoys me. OR Email, OR Apple, OR security Today, bit different. This past weekend, I was driving down the street and I passed this guys house, now, this guy is one of those people that buys a car, fixes it up, and resells it for a modest profit, he does it mostly for fun, and really, not that INTENSE fixing car up kinda stuff, just get it running, or maybe just to sell it, as is, for a meager profit. So this...

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New Minimization technique in Snow Leopard

2009-09-01T11:40:00.003-05:00

Something I didn't know was there, but again, it's one of those hidden new gems buried inside of Snow Leopard. (This post is for my OS X users out there. Obviously.) You know when you minimize an application to the Dock, the Dock places the minimized application over on the right hand side of the dock, next to your stacks and the trash? Well, you don't have to do that anymore. This button:"Minimize windows into application icon" is found in the System Preferences under "Dock". After you...

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Microsoft IIS 5/6 FTP 0Day

2009-09-01T10:13:00.002-05:00

In my job, I see a lot of Snort rules being thrown around for this that, and the other thing. The thing I try to emphasize is not to make rules for rules sake. Don't write rules just because you can. Write rules because you have to. So recently an exploit for Microsoft IIS's FTP daemon was released on Milw0rm. (Go find it yourself if you must.) Almost immediately I saw a ton of people trying to make rules for it. Turns out, rules didn't need to be made. The Ftp_telnet preprocessor was...

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Snow Leopard, so far..

2009-08-29T13:22:00.002-05:00

Been running Snow Leopard since yesterday. As Apple promised, on the surface, you can't really tell that anything is different. When you click on the dock, you notice the popup is different. You notice the stacks are different when you click on them. You notice the 20Gb (Yes, GB!) of space on the Harddrive that you get back. (20 on my machine at least.) But the thing that I noticed so far is the speed. Especially in Safari when it comes to javascript. Loading things like Gmail come up...

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Snow Leopard is coming..

2009-08-25T21:49:00.004-05:00

In case you've been living under a rock for the past couple days, as plastered all over Twitter and every computer related gadget site, Snow Leopard, the next release of OSX is coming out on Friday. This release is mostly enhancements to the Leopard operating system, not really any new "features" per say (even though there are a ton), but mostly bug fixes. However, today, there has been some news circulated around about an anti-malware solution within Snow Leopard. There have been screenshots...

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Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Three)

2009-08-20T09:01:00.003-05:00

The CalendarThe essential part of any productivity system is the calendar. Managing your time for your projects is probably one of the most vital portions to getting anything done. Without disruptions, without the cruft of the day, you can focus on your problem. The essential problem with any environment is poorly set expectations. If you think you are going to be able to have your coworkers and boss read your mind, you are grossly mistaken. They don't know that you may be behind on a...

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Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Two)

2009-08-18T16:23:00.005-05:00

Managing To-DosAs I promised a follow up post to my previous blog post here. I stated, I try to manage things through Todo lists. When I read an email that I need to take action on, I make a ToDo out of it. Simple to complex, I make a ToDo out of it. Not just emails either. If I am in a meeting and I hear an "action item" for me, I knock that out. If I get a shopping list from my wife, I put that in my Todo list as well. There are several tools that I have evaluated and used over the...

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