Tagged: Personal

TuxBoot

Tuxboot, a bootable USB drive for Clonezilla, DRBL Live, GParted Live and Tux2Live, is a lifesaver.  I cannot recommend it enough.   I got a new, 3x bigger drive for my laptop and cloned it with Tuxboot/Clonezilla and resized the primary partition with Tuxboot/GParted.  All went without a hitch.  I love free things that work.

Safe(r) Surfing

I don’t do a whole lot online that really warrants anonymity, but I still don’t care for the idea of being watched.  Further, I’m no fan of the growing trend of linking logins, such as the ubiquity of Facebook, or of browser tracking.  Just because I’m not doing anything wrong doesn’t mean I don’t want privacy.  Regardless of the existence of darknets and freenet I don’t think there’s a way to really hide online if the right (or wrong) people really want to find you – but there are definitely ways to make it more difficult.

  1. Use Firefox (or, conversely, Chrome) and not IE.
  2. Install the Adblock Plus addon for Firefox.
  3. Install the NoScript addon for Firefox.  This one’s a pain in the ass to initially configure, but soon you’ll get used to it and find approving (and not approving) sites will become second nature.  NoScript not only covers your tracks, it prevents other nasties like malicious code execution and cross-site scripting.  You’ll be amazed to see just how many connections you’re actually making when you hit a single site.
  4. Install and use HotSpot Shield, a free IPSec VPN solution that masks your originating IP address and encrypts your traffic.  Bonus:  although HSS is ad-revenue based, you’ll never see a single banner pushed from it if you have the aforementioned Adblock Plus installed.  Good times.

There are other paid options for online anonymity as well as TOR – which is almost unbearably slow in its default configuration, not to mentioned riddled with its own dark corners and dangers – but the above represents the easiest free as in beer way to cover some of your tracks online.

Disabling comments on WordPress posts

Done to this site because of the amount of absolute garbage coming in.

To kill the ability to comment on all existing posts, hit your database and zap it thusly:

UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’, ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’;

To turn off future, log into WP and head to Settings > Discussion and uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles.

Post greenpois0n – appsync

Not that I’m suggesting anything illicit or illegal.

Add the appropriate repository in Cydia:

  1. Cydia -> Manage -> Sources
  2. Edit -> Add -> http://cydia.hackulo.us
  3. After it completes downloading:
  4. Search for appsync for 4.1 and install.

    Automating Usenet

    I’m an old schooler, and an avid Usenet user since way back when there was actually a reason to break an upload into a billion tiny pieces.  I prefer it over every other means of mass filesharing on the intertoobs.  The advent of NZB made it even awsumer.

    My goal now is to automate the process as much as possible.  Unfortunately, thus far there is no all-in-one solution for this.  Fortunately, there are great apps made by industrious people to take care of most of it.  My current test setup includes the following:

    • NZBDownloader – for automatically pulling the NZBs.  I’d say it’s too bad that this can’t be configured to monitor multiple site feeds, but NZBMatrix does a good job of keeping up with most of what I’m after.
    • NewsLeecher – for automatically using the NZBs to download from the newsies.  This is the only bit of the setup that isn’t free (as in beer).  There’s probably an alternative to NewsLeecher out there, but it works well and is extremely configurable.
    • AutoUnpack – Automatically unpacks the files downloaded  by NewsLeecher and discards the source data.

    My download path differs from my storage path – I have a separate set of shared drives to hold video.  Right now I still have to move the video file to the appropriate drive/path.  The last step of my process is to write a bit of code that detects the unpacked video files and move them to their final destination (eg: move the file “futurama.s06e01.dvdscr.xvid-mspaint.avi” from its unpacked location to its proper home at “F:\video\Series\futurama”).  This is relatively trivial.  I just need to take the time to do it.

    Monitor a site

    So a friend of mine is after an old school Toyota Landcruiser, but he’s finding it difficult as it appears he’s not alone.  Any such beast in decent shape seems to sell within 48 hours of being posted online.  As such we were discussing ways he could be notified when one is listed for sale.  Bam!  Google Alerts.  Brilliant.  Simply set up your search criteria as THINGYOURELOOKINGFOR site:SITEYOURELOOKINGAT, eg:

    landcruiser site:atlanta.craigslist.org

    or

    landcruiser site:ebay.com

    Set your notifications up, and you’re ready to rock.  If you want to get specific or tricksy about it, check out Google’s advanced search magick.

    Prey

    Given that I have a multitude of laptops I’m test driving Prey.

    Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

    Hopefully I’ll never have to use it.