Archive for the ‘computers’ Category
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
This is a useful tip on those rare occasions when you absolutely need to get into a remote server and all of the connections are tied up.
While I’m sure we all agree that this is an awesome feature, sometimes in an emergency you need to log into a server and all of its connections are already in use. There are a couple of really useful and mostly unknown command line utilities that will allow you to remotely find and kill other remote desktop sessions, whether they are in a connected or disconnected state.
Posted in computers, networking | No Comments »
Monday, July 30th, 2007
This Firefox extension makes the saved passwords feature of Firefox safer by forcing you to click on the Secure Login button in order to fill in your login name and password on forms. This helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks on malicious sites that try to steal your passwords.
Secure Login provides you with a number of Security enhancements and helps protecting you from phishing:
Disabling the prefilling of login forms prevents malicious JavaScript code to automatically steal your login data.
This is due to the fact that no login data is inserted in form fields before the user clicks on the login button or logs in using the keyboard shortcut.
To make sure you login to the right website, the second level domain of the login url is compared to the second level domain of the current page.
If they do not match a dialog prompt is displayed before login.
Secure Login provides you with an optional setting to protect you from all JavaScript code during login.
This can prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks without having to deactivate JavaScript completely.
If you enable this option, your login data will never be inserted in any form fields nor will the login form be submitted.
Instead your credentials will be sent to the login page using internal Firefox methods.
Not all login forms will work this way, e.g. not those using JavaScript routines. Therefore, you can add such websites to an exception list.
Posted in downloads, security | No Comments »
Friday, June 22nd, 2007
Matthias Wandel built this clever adder that uses marbles. It is quite pleasant to watch it in action…check out the video.
It had occurred to me that perhaps with an insane amount of perseverance, it might be possible to build a whole computer that runs on marbles. My second marble machine was however much less based on logic – more on just making lots of noise.
But a few months ago, I had an idea as to how the divide by two mechanisms from my first marble machine could be cascaded together to actually function as a sort of adder or counter. Once I had that idea, I knew I had to try it at some point, and recently, I finally got around to building my marble binary adding machine.
The core of the invention is a modification of the divide by two flipflop to retain the marble that falls off the right side, and retain it until the flipflop is flipped to the left by the next marble. See small diagram above right. The retention of this extra marble allows the state of the marble accumulator to be dumped. The adder would just as well add without it, but the number would have to be read off by the angle of the rockers, rather than have the device dump the count out. Really, if such an adder were integrated into a hypothetical marble computer, reading out the result as a series of marbles would be an essential element.
Related:
Posted in computers, diy, odd, technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Touchstone, 1998
In Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Hafner and Lyon take us all the way back to the earliest days of computer networking. We are introduced to all of the central figures that were responsible for building the precursors to the internet we know today. In contrast with the rapid growth we see now, the early days seem glacial. The equipment was primitive and had to be custom built. No one had any idea initially how they could connect disparate computers together and make them talk to one another. The fact that the protocols that they eventually came up with are still in use on the internet today, and have managed to survive its explosive growth, is a testament to the genius and vision of these pioneers. The authors have managed to capture not only the tough technical hurdles that needed to be overcome, but also the motivations and the leaps of insight of the people involved during this historic time. This is an enjoyable book that moves at a fairly brisk pace, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more of the technical details.
Rating: 8/10
Links:
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Posted in books, computers, culture, history, networking, technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
The Computer: An Illustrated History
Mark Frauenfelder
Carlton Books, 2005
This is computer pr0n at its finest. This large, beautiful coffee-table book chronicles the evolution of the computer through hundreds of photographs. Following the earliest counting devices, hulking mainframes, personal computers and game consoles, the book documents the seminal figures who shaped the industry and the complex machines they created. It’s a delight simply flipping through all of the pictures and reading about the genius and vision behind these fascinating devices. The historic photos and the evocative writing both really draw you into the book and make you feel like you are reliving the golden age of computing. The Computer is a wonderfully nostalgic book that belongs on any computer geek’s shelf.
Rating: 9/10
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Posted in books, computers, culture, history, technology | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
If you are interested in HDR imaging, give this open source tool a try. It helps you create and tone map HDR images from bracketed exposures of a scene.
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Posted in apps, downloads, photography | No Comments »
Friday, April 20th, 2007
Just like CRTs, someone can eavesdrop on the electromagnetic emissions from your LCD display.
Back in 1985, Wim Van Eck proved it was possible to tune into the radio emissions produced by electromagentic coils in a CRT display and then reconstruct the image. The practice became known as Van Eck Phreaking, and NATO spent a fortune making its systems invulnerable to it. It was a major part of Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.
CRTs are now well on the way to being history. But Kuhn has shown that eavesdropping is possible on flat panel displays too. It works slightly differently. With a flat panel display the aim is to tune into the radio emissions produced by the cables sending a signal to the monitor. The on-screen image is fed through the cable one pixel at a time. Because they come through in order you just have to stack them up. And Kuhn has worked out how to decode the colour of each pixel from its particular wave form.
Posted in computers, security, technology | No Comments »
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 was released with an improved UI and some new features like Saved Searches and Vista support:
Posted in apps, downloads | No Comments »
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
Use this useful utility to recover files from damaged disks.
Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.
Posted in apps, downloads | No Comments »
Friday, April 13th, 2007
Run another instance of Firefox inside a tab with this trick.
… With all these favorites inside Firefox, How about Opening Firefox inside Firefox? Not bad huh? and its really easy too just type in this url in a new tab in Firefox and there you go! Firefox inside Firefox!
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Posted in apps, tips | No Comments »
Sunday, March 25th, 2007
This is an invaluable site that reviews numerous freeware apps.
My mission: To replace as many retail/shareware software as I can with first rate FREEWARE alternatives, such that one day every installed program that I use will be FREE.
But this site will not list every single free program on the planet. Sometimes less is more!
I assume that for every category there are one or two programs that anybody would want to use. This site will present you with these handful of options, filtered and picked out.
If you have better things to do than scour the web for cracks, serials, and hacked copies of the software you use, then this site is for you, because the free software that is presented here is in most cases BETTER than anything you could pay for.
Posted in apps, downloads | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
This is an impressive feat: designing and building your own processor.
I’ve been a software guy all my life. However, I was always fascinated by electronics, and part of my success as a programmer was due to my thorough understanding of how computers work.
Back in 1999, I put that understanding to the ultimate test: I actually designed, and built, a simple but functional 4-bit computer from low-level electronic components (TTL logic gates.) Although this machine has less then one tenth of a percent of the speed and one millionth of the memory of a modern Pentium system, not to mention that its “user interface” is just a set of miniature switches and blinking LED lights, I still consider this a proud accomplishment.
Related:
Posted in computers, diy, technology | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
The latest update to the TrueCrypt encryption utility is now available.
We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 4.3 has been released. Among the new features is full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista, support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (such as new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.), auto-dismount when a host device (e.g., a USB flash drive) is inadvertently removed, and many more. In addition to new features, there are many significant improvements. Some portions of the TrueCrypt device driver have been completely redesigned and several bugs have been fixed. For a comprehensive list of changes, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history
Posted in apps, downloads, security | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Engadget has a fascinating series of articles on lock security and lock picking.
The most popular locking mechanism in the world utilizes the pin tumbler design, first developed 4000 years ago in Egypt and then rediscovered and perfected a century and a half ago by Linus Yale. There are billions of these locks in the world and they come in all sizes, configurations, and security ratings. Some are secure; most are not, and even some high security rated cylinders can be easily compromised. All that is required to open many times of pin tumbler cylinders — the kind of lock that probably keeps the bad guys out of your home — is a bump key and a tool for creating a bit of force. The bump key shown above opens an extremely popular five pin lock, and the plastic bumping tool is produced by Peterson manufacturing, although many others are now being offered for sale. With these two cheap implements, anyone — and I do mean anyone — can get into your home or business in a matter of seconds.
Related:
Posted in security, technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
A new tool has been announced in the piracy arms race. This tool can be deployed by network administrators to monitor network traffic in order to identify people using P2P services, and can automatically boot them off the network. The question is whether or not it can distinguish legitimate uses of those P2P technologies. The price: “$1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.”
Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors “a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others,” and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.
Posted in networking, rights, security, technology | No Comments »
Monday, March 5th, 2007
TaskList.org can tell you whether or not a process in your Windows task list is spyware.
Posted in security | No Comments »
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
Some useful tips for making your Ubuntu experience even better.
In this article i describe some of the things to do immediately after installing ubuntu on your machine . Since most of the people reading this would be shifting from Windows to Linux with a system dual booting so i would focus more on making transition easy from Windows to Linux.
Posted in operating systems, tips | No Comments »
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
This is a handy tip from Lifehacker:
You accidentally typed liefehacker.com into Firefox’s address bar, and now it suggests that whenever you enter “li.” Remove mistyped URLs from the fox’s suggestions by selecting the entry in the list and hitting Shift-Delete. Works for fat-fingered usernames and other form entries, too.
Posted in apps, tips | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007
You can now download all of the Sysinternals utilities as a single package.
The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.
Posted in apps, downloads | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
This is a pretty slick Windows version of the Mac OS X application dock. Freeware.
Posted in apps, downloads | No Comments »
