Computer Tips -Tech Info

I heard on the local news last night that the North Carolina Department of Revenue has lost a laptop that had ~30,000 state taxpayers information on it. Social Security numbers/etc… The report I saw that the state has setup a hotline to “teach citizens about identity theft” and have sent letters to those affected. Thanks… lose a laptop with 30,000 and then teach US about identity theft. How about teaching employees with sensitive information about encryption? ……. so I looked into it a bit further this morning.

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Well… there was a news story a few days back about a pilot that had seen a strange orange light in the night sky near Chicago I think and claimed that the light was “not of this world”. It was later found out that it was likely a military flare (suspended by a parachute.) (Reportedly those flares put out 2 million candlepower..) Then LAST night on the local news there was a mention of people calling in reporting a green light in the sky. Today it’s all over the local news….

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Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen…. I thought why don’t I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but was a bit disappointed to see that the version was not the most current. (Yes, they may have merged changes from the current version and left the version number at 2.0.6, but 2.0.9 is out and easy to build an rpm from source….. so….) I’ve compiled from source before, I’ve built RPM’s on Mandrake/Mandriva, but never a deb package.

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This is a good quick reference for some command line linux commands…. pixelbeat.org – linux command line tips. Nice reference. (of course you can also make use of man/apropos and -h to find out more….)

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I found a peculiar problem while I was setting up an openvpn link the other day. The goal was a simple shared key setup and I started with the sample configuration and modified it a bit to fit the circumstances, I allowed the correct UDP port through the firewall (I think 1194 if I recall correctly) and … it didn’t work. So…. I started over and worked from empty config files and put in the bare minimums… it still didn’t work – no appearance that it was making the connection at all to negotiate the link. I double and triple checked the firewall config/restarted it… nothing Then I decided to try TCP instead of a UDP port. Changed the firewall config to allow the TCP traffic on 1194, adjusted the server and client config and lo and behold it worked. The firewall in question….

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I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line… n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating system like Linux. They do ship with a freedos install disc, but come without formatting/preinstalling anything on the hard drives.

They do note that they don’t support a non-dell installed operating system. (i.e. even if you put XP pro on it well make you prove that it’s a hardware problem.) Still, it’s good to see the option becoming available.

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Spam spam spam spam…. the last couple days have been busy for the akismet spam plugin for my sites. They’ve been catching a lot of spam comments it appears. Many of them (the comments) seem to be filled with links to forum posts. I’ve noticed several have been shut down at this point. It’s not clear to me if the spammers are exploiting true vulnerabilities in the forum software, or simply finding forums that allow anyone to sign up and post. Either way, they’re leeching other peoples bandwidth to try to hussle (hustle?) their stuff. Along those lines, I wonder if there is a good listing/directory of legit sources of prescription drugs online? The topic is so awash in spammy/spamvertised/offshore based sites it’s hard to know easily who to trust/who not to.

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This isn’t tech related except for the mail merge side of things. We got a letter in the mail day before yesterday from Discovercard. It had my name and address on the outside just as it’s on record with Discover and everything looked like a normal “account information notice” (read…. ad for some of our services) mailing. When opened up…. The name and address on the letter inside were different (in our town, but someone else/different road/etc.) And the last four digits of the acocunt number were listed. All in all, it could be a much worse data leak, but still…. it’s annoying to see Discovercard go and botch a mailmerge like this. (I guess this is why they use “Windowed” envelopes for their bills…) In the past I’ve had communications from credit card companies that printed my entire account number on the letter, which usually makes me grumpy at least…. My only question is how many people got someone elses letter.

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I wanted to make a note here about a recent news story related to a topic that’s fascinated me for the ~10 years or so since I first heard of such things…. For some time there have been 3d printers. Devices that would use a liquid of some sort to “print” a real physical object. Usually these were plastic-ish prototype parts/proof of concept samples. These “printers” cost 10s of thousands of dollars and typically just have one material to choose from. Certainly out of reach for a home tinkerer… But recently I read this article about a desktop fabricator… The project name is fab@home and for ~$2500 in parts YOU can build your own personal fabricator….

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One of the slickest video editing tools I’ve used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it’s geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video clips are in mpg format…. so there are ways to get it converted… here’s one such suggestion….

ffmpeg -i some.mpeg -s PAL -r PAL -ar 48000 -ac 2 out.dv

of course, you may want to adjust the format (PAL/NTSC) according to your situation.

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