WD TV Live Hub
June 23rd, 2011
I got my tax refund this year and went on a home theater system shopping spree. One of the things that I purchased was a WD TV Live Hub for serving up my collection of ripped DVD movies and TV series. I chose this device on a whim and without any research. I was tired and short just one piece to bring my home theater together. I probably could have bought or put together my own media center for around the same price and with much more flexibility. This is a review of that crappy device that I bought.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ubuntu 10.04 Installation – Gateway GT5432
June 22nd, 2011
Gateway GT5432
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
NVIDIA GEForce 6150SE (not in use)
Dual Acer x223w Monitors on Dual Head ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
WMP54G Wireless Mini-PCI Card
Install
Installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Created 2gb swap partition, 12gb root partition, and the rest went /home.
Ubuntu 9.10 Installation – Sager NP7620
April 29th, 2010
Sager NP7620 Laptop
I set this system up for a friend of mine. The laptop power supply is going bad and the Windows XP installation was riddled with malware. I had quite a few issues installing, since the power supply is dying and various devices will only work intermittently.
Install
After trying to boot into the Ubuntu Live CD a few times and failing, because of the dying power brick, I came across a utility called UNetBootin. I used UNetBootin’s “frugal install” option to boot directly into the Ubuntu Live CD stored as an ISO on the solitary NTFS partition. I was able to install Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala alongside Windows XP. After transferring personal files between the partitions I decided to get rid of Windows entirely to make more room for personal files. Unfortunately, I ran into a roadblock with UNetBootin not wanting to run when installed on Ubuntu. I tried loading the ISO of the Ubuntu Live CD, other ISOs, and eventually got the actual physical CD to spin up in the CD-ROM. At which point I made the unfortunate decision to just reinstall Ubuntu from scratch off the CD. Of course, the installation failed about half way through and I was left with a system that only booted into a grub recovery shell with little to no options. It would seem grub didn’t even install all the way. Now what? Well, since I was able to boot from the Live CD (once out of every ten times I tried), I went ahead and sunk my teeth in.
Ubuntu 9.10 Installation – Gateway GT5432
April 11th, 2010
Gateway GT5432
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
NVIDIA GEForce 6150SE (not in use)
Dual Acer x223w Monitors on Dual Head ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
WMP54G Wireless Mini-PCI Card
Install
Installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Created 2gb swap partition, 12gb root partition, and the rest went /home. Setup my user for auto login, waited for a few minutes while the install did its thing, and rebooted into my new Ubuntu system.
Insecure Online Banking
October 30th, 2008
I always choose a very good password, and I don’t forget my passwords, only which one I used. My passwords contain numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols. Every website I’ve ever had to use a password for has allowed me to create a password of my satisfaction, with one exception: banks. I’ve used online banking with two or three banks so far and both times my password has been stunted by either a maximum length requirement (even though the user name can be any length I choose) or doesn’t allow special characters.
What benefit could they possibly be gaining from disallowing me to choose a more secure password? Or maybe it’s just the programmers, but then the question becomes: Why on earth would they hire programmers dumb enough to limit the security of a client’s account? Then again, maybe it’s just me; perhaps I just have really bad choice in banks.
Is this some sort of bank conspiracy to make identity theft and theft of our funds easier? They would certainly have something to gain in the case that they offered some protection. Reminds me of the second Dragonheart movie where the guy gets paid by the townspeople to slay the dragon that is working with him.
I see insecurities like this in various different forms on all sorts of websites. Once I found a bug on a major retail site that let anyone view any and all invoices, which includes the customers’ personal information. I’ve sent e-mails to everyone in these companies I can get a hold of, complained in person, bounced up through the ranks over the phone, etc. All of this in an attempt to help these companies fix their issues and protect their customers’ (which may be you) information. I get the run around and they never fix the bugs.
I see this as a serious problem, and in this case I see absolutely no valid reason for the limitation of a user’s password. Don’t let this one go unfixed! Check if your bank has this issue, and if so, make them fix it!
CSS3 Suggestion
September 28th, 2008
Is it too late to request something like ‘background-position-x’ and ‘background-position-y’ to be added to the CSS3 spec? These would be extremely useful in cutting down the amount of code needed when the X position of the background needs to be as previously set but the Y needs to be changed.
This is useful for sprite techniques. For example, say you have a single image with a bunch of icons in a matrix. Different icons are represented horizontally in the image and different styles of those images (e.g. hover, selected,disabled) are represented vertically. So, now you can style all elements that contain icons with the ‘icon’ class which defines the background-image. Then add an additional class to each of these based on which icon it represents, which would change the background-position-x to display the appropriate icon image. Finally, you would have addition rules that define current state of the icon, such as a ‘select’ class or a ‘.icon:hover’, which would change the background-position-y.
An example of 5 icons with 3 states (e.g. normal, hover, selected) would require 15 different rules as follows:
.icon {
background: url('images/icons.png') 0 0 no-repeat;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
}
.icon1:hover {
background-position: 0 -16px;
}
.icon1.selected {
background-position: 0 -32px;
}
.icon2 {
background-position: -16px 0;
}
.icon2:hover {
background-position: -16px -16px;
}
.icon2.selected {
background-position: -16px -32px;
}
.icon3 {
background-position: -32px 0;
}
.icon3:hover {
background-position: -32px -16px;
}
.icon3.selected {
background-position: -32px -32px;
}
.icon4 {
background-position: -48px 0;
}
.icon4:hover {
background-position: -48px -16px;
}
.icon4.selected {
background-position: -48px -32px;
}
.icon5 {
background-position: -64px 0;
}
.icon5:hover {
background-position: -64px -16px;
}
.icon5.selected {
background-position: -64px -32px;
}
Whereas with the background-position-x/-y properties it would only need the following 7 rules:
.icon {
background: url('images/icons.png') 0 0 no-repeat;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
}
.icon2 {
background-position-x: -16px;
}
.icon3 {
background-position-x: -32px;
}
.icon4 {
background-position-x: -48px;
}
.icon5 {
background-position-x: -64px;
}
.icon:hover {
background-position-y: -16px;
}
.icon.selected {
background-position-y: -32px;
}
Of course, the more sprites used the more redundancy is needed without the use of a background-position-x/-y. Without separate X and Y properties it takes i*s rules, where i represents the number of icons and s represents the number of states. With them it would only take i+s-1. The benefits are obvious.
Motorola S9 Fix
September 27th, 2008
So I bought these really nice wireless bluetooth stereo headphones from Motorola back about a month ago. I opened the package while I was out and about and promptly made the huge mistake of just throwing out the packaging and reciept after making sure they work with my BlackBerry Curve. They are pretty sweet, and not too expensive for the convinience of being able to control volume up/down, track back/forward, initialize voice calling, and play/pause right from the touch of an ear peice.
The problem? They were broken and I didn’t even know it! That is until I started fiddling with them and hit the volume down button. I quickly found my volume at the lowest setting. Cool, nice feature, but wait, where’s the volume up button? I took them off and sure enough I was hitting the right button. Nothing is happening! Now they are stuck at the lowest volume setting and its the volume on the headset not on the phone.
So, I tossed them into a box for a while until I finally sat down and took out a handy soldering iron and started to strip a few wires and make some connections. I’m no electronics genious or anything, but I guessed right that black is always ground and found that the red wire is for the voice dial initialization. After accidentally ripping that wire out (no matter, since I planned to cut the activation strip off the earpiece so that this wouldn’t happen again) I found the yellow wire on my second attempt. The yellow wire was indeed the volume up!
I then soldered a hole right through the volume up and down connectors before remembering I cut out by accident. No worries, one day I’ll get around to repairing it and the connector is still there, so it will work.
Apparently this is a common issue with these headphones. Whether it just be sweat interfering and/or frying connections or, in my case, the circuit was just torn to bits when I got them. I didn’t check all the wires since I got it on my second try, but maybe I will later. Nonetheless, anyone that has these now has a partial pinout! Black is ground, red is voice, yellow is volume up. Comment with more if you’ve got them 😀