Violet Blue and Boing Boing Debacle

Filed Under Geek, Internet, News, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Websites | 3 Comments

For those that don’t know, Violet Blue is a well-known sex educator and Boing Boing is one of the most(?) popular blogs on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Violet Blue’s posts getting pulled from BoingBoing, there’s more than enough press out there about it. Even the LA Times picked up the story. I don’t want to get into a long post about my thoughts on the matter, but I did want to share something I thought worth sharing.

I setup VioletBlueVioletBlue.net to house all of the Boing Boing posts that had been “unpublished”. These posts are all taken directly from archive.org where the old versions of the posts are kept. Boing Boing publishes their stuff under Creative Commons, so I am redistributing their work with attribution. I wanted this content to remain around and in a form that is easily locatable, i.e. not buried in archive.org’s wayback machine. If you have a blog post that previously linked to the post on Boing Boing, then feel free to link to its equivalent on VB2. These posts aren’t getting unpublished any time soon.

If I missed anything or made any mistakes on the site, please let me know. I make no claims to being perfect by any means.

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Domain Buying Scam?

Filed Under Internet, Scam, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I got the following email today:

From: Anne Gaskins <shuja@emirates.net.ae>
Subject: Your Website

Hello,

Browsing on the Internet I came across your website [domainname.com] . If you are interested in selling it, please email me back your phone number, so we can discuss it.
I have cash to buy today!

Thank you in advance

My first thought was why in the world do they want to buy this domain? It’s old, outdated, and the comments have been spammed to hell so it hardly even ranks in Google. Yes, it’s a site I totally neglected because a) I tossed it up in 20 minutes and b) it has only made $224 in Google Adsense in the 2.5 years it’s been up. I was planning on emailing them back just out of curiosity, but then I saw this post pop up in my news reader. Looks like I’m not the only one.

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Incredible contact juggling video

Filed Under Interesting, Skill Toys, Video | Leave a Comment

We interrupt your regularly scheduled posts of Ed complaining about computers to bring you this amazing video:

via Rubin

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Debating the QNAP TS-209 II vs building a PC

Filed Under Geek, Hardware | Leave a Comment

So I’m at a point where I feel like I need a good solid server in my apartment again. Something that I can use for the following:
- Media storage for serving to PS3/xbox
- Backup storage for photos, files, and whatnot
- Version control system for website development
- ssh server for tunneling back through my network connection
- Download machine for large files and torrents
- General Windows machine for video conversions and and other CPU/harddrive demanding tasks

I have basically two options to go with in my eyes: Build a solution or buy a prebuilt one.

Build a solution:
Pros:
- Completely customizable
- Upgradeable
- Limited only in price
- Can reuse existing IDE drives
- My choice of operating system (dual boot?)
Cons:
- Significant time investment
- If it breaks I have to troubleshoot
- Possibly overkill for what I need
- It’s been awhile (5 years?) since I built a machine

Buy a solution:
Pros:
- No building and only minor configuration needed
- Technical support available
- Minimal time investment
- Cheaper
Cons:
- Limited in hardware
- Not customizable
- Probably stuck with a custom linux distro

As far as building a solution, I quickly spec’d out this setup.
- It has both IDE and SATA ports so I can use old harddrives and new ones
- It’s a pretty decent system as far as CPU is concerned
- It will be large and probably loud
- It will consume a significant amount of power

And for buying, I was thinking of going with the QNAP TS 209 II (feature lists)
- It’s preconfigured with just about everything I need (except version control) and has ipkg to install whatever else I need
- It’s small, quiet, and consumes very little power
- It’s a wimpy machine under the hood
- It seems to do everything I think I’d need and then some, and I don’t have to set everything up manually

For those not following along, my life right now is kind of busy as I juggle a job, a web business, a relationship, and a fire arts group. At this point I’m more willing to spend money than time configuring something, so the QNAP is looking enticing. But the thought of paying a few hundred more, putting in a bunch of hours, and having a much more powerful machine is tempting.

Thoughts/opinions/criticisms? Any other suggestions?

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ShagOS is not the partition type

Filed Under Geek, Hardware, Old Hardware | 2 Comments

Once upon a time, many many years ago Ed bought a motherboard that didn’t support large harddrives. Apparently Ed installed some software called Dynamic Drive Overlay to get around this and was able to drop several 2-300gb drives in the machine. Now that it is finally time to move to a new machine that does support large harddrives in the BIOS, I really regret that decision oh so long ago.

See the thing is that Dynamic Drive Overlay fakes things via software so the entire drive is accessible. This trickery however requires that the DDO is installed, and apparently writes some nasty stuff to the MBR. After several hours of battling with the installation of Windows consistently failing, I realized this. I was getting odd error messages like:
“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll. Please re-install a copy of the above file.”

Turns out there’s not really a way to “uninstall” the DDO, so I ended up formatting the entire drive by writing zeros to it using Seagate’s SeaTools. That was great, I didn’t have any data on there anyways, so I was up and running in no time. Then it came time to drop one of the 300gig drives in the machine.

This 300gb drive (a Maxtor) shows up in the Disk Management in Windows, but is an “Unknown” but Healthy partition. Further exploration with various disk tools reveal that this drive thinks it is formatted in the ShagOS partition type. I had never heard of ShagOS before, but turns out it’s an operating system that was in the works over 10 years ago. Needless to say, I had never formatted this drive as a ShagOS partition.

So I’m stuck now, and hoping that maybe someone on the internet has some answers/suggestions/etc. I’m assuming at this point that it is in fact the DDO that’s causing the trouble, but it is entirely possible that it’s something else. This drive was working with zero problems in the old machine, and has never been recognized in the new one. I thought I might be able to use GetDataBack for NTFS to recover the data as the drive is really supposed to be NTFS. But GetDataBack doesn’t recognize it as an NTFS partition, so no go there. *sigh* I’m hoping that someone out there may have run into a similar problem in the past and has suggestions.

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Zappos + Twitter

Filed Under Fun, Geek, Internet | 1 Comment

Looks like Zappos is doing a Twitter experiment while they’re in town visiting the Twitter offices. Not sure what they’re up to, but I’m game.
The original twitter:

If you r in San Fran area, write “Zappos” on back of left hand w/ marker & twitter @zappos link to picture of it. Why? Details to come, 4 PM

And my response:

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What the heck are you doing Spotlight?

Filed Under Apple, Apple - Problem, Apple - Solution, OS X | 5 Comments

I don’t use Spotlight at all thanks to Quicksilver. But I’ve noticed in my system.log that I’m getting the following messages over and over again:

Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): posix_spawnp(”/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight”, …): No such file or directory
Apr 20 14:44:40 egads com.apple.launchd[102] (com.apple.Spotlight[4906]): Exited with exit code: 1

Anyone have any idea what’s happening here? I looked at “/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight” and it has no size, so I’m guessing it’s leftover from something? Anyone have any insight?

Update:
hmmm weird.. When I check the file through a console I have:
sh-3.2# pwd
/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sh-3.2# ls -l
total 1384
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 704720 Feb 5 22:30 Spotlight

But if I browse to it in the Finder, I see Spotlight (I’m assuming that’s Spotlight.app) with a zero KB size. If I try to open it it says it’s not supported in this architecture.

So confused.

SOLVED! Kudos go to Justin for hooking me up with the full copy of Spotlight.app. I backed up the old (apparently corrupt) one and the copied the new Spotlight.app from him into /System/Library/CoreServices. So far, so good and no more errors in system.log. Woohoo!

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How to reset a Windows Vista password

Filed Under Geek, Hacks and Mods, Software, Tools, Windows | 1 Comment


So you, er I mean “a friend”, forgot your password on a Windows Vista machine that you haven’t used in awhile. You would never forget a password, right? And now you need to get into the machine and don’t want to blast away and install Windows fresh. If you use Windows XP you can just boot into Safe Mode and use the built in administrator account, but if you’re in Vista that account has been disabled by default. Luckily there’s a tool that will help you reset that password in Windows NT and Vista. It’s called Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (pretty catchy name, eh?). Simply download the zip file containing an .iso, burn it with your favorite CD burning software, pop it in the drive and go. It will boot up a copy of linux off the CD and ask you all sorts of questions. When in doubt, hit Enter to accept the default. Before you know it, you’ll have a reset password and will be staring at your desktop again in no time. There is another way to reset Vista passwords, but it requires that you created a password reset disk before you forgot your password. You might want to do this now in case you forgot your password. There are instructions over on Microsoft’s site.

Of course all of this exposes just how easy it can be to get into a machine that’s password protected. In the end, it’s pretty safe to say that if someone has physical access to your machine, you’re just plain screwed.

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Full Screen Firefox and Safari on OS X

Filed Under Apple, Apple - Good, Apple - Solution, Geek, Internet, OS X, Software, Tools | 4 Comments

Maxmize to full screen on OS X

Anyone that has talked to me about what I don’t like about OS X has heard me complain about the inability to maximize an application to take up the entire screen in one easy step. Sure you can drag the corner out, but that’s an annoying “work-around” in my opinion. But thanks to Todd Dailey I have a more acceptable work-around for Firefox and Safari at least.

All you do is add a Bookmark to the Bookmark Toolbar (commonly called a Bookmarklet) that has this snippet of JavaScript instead of the URL that normally goes there:
javascript:window.resizeTo(1440,900);

Of course you’ll want to set the values to the same size as your screen resolution. You can check your screen resolution in System Preferences -> Display. And on Safari you can make it even simpler if you make this bookmarklet the first one in the list. Then you can just hit Command+1 and have a full screen web browser instantly.

This is also handy for web developers on all platforms. Want to see what your site looks like at 800×600, 1024×768, etc.? Make a toolbar button for each resolution! Quick and easy site previews while you’re working on pages.

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Macbook Pro Resurrected!

Filed Under Apple, Apple - Bad, Apple - Problem, Apple - Solution, Geek, Hardware | 3 Comments

It is back from the dead! Upon suggestions from a couple of friends and some vague posts on random forums, I swapped out the new 4gb of RAM I bought with the original 2gb that came with the machine. My Macbook Pro then booted without problems. *sigh* Looks like this RAM is headed back to Crucial. For anyone else that’s trying to figure out why their Macbook Pro is showing a grey screen and the light is blinking on the front 3 times, pausing and then blinking again, check your RAM! While trying to find out a way to test RAM, I finally found this page from Apple. I don’t know why I wasn’t able to find this page in any of my searching before. I guess it’s not well indexed for the search terms I was trying. So, this link is for Google to find the page when some poor unfortunate soul that ends up in the same predicament as I did, wondering what the heck three blinks means:
Macbook Pro grey screen, light blinks three times

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