Geek Stuff category archive

Running Spybot S&D while listening to Old Time Radio in a VM of Windows 7 in VirtualBox on Slackware –Current.

If you use Windows. you should use Spybot S&D.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do. Learn how to use GNU/Linux and its plethora of free and open source software to get stuff done with computers.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

When: Monthly TWUUG meeting at 7:30 p. m. on the first Thursday of the month (November 2, 2017). Pre-meeting dinner at Chicago Uno, JANAF shopping center, 6:00 p. m. (map)

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room (map). (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

Using the Amazon Key as a starting point, Christine Emba muses on what passes for innovation (specifically, commercial consumer innovation) in the tech world.

The thought processes of Silicon Valley innovators are a curious thing. Many observers have noted that the most common proposals seem to fall into the category of “things that I, a 25-year-old man, wish that I could still get my mother to do for me.”

Follow the link to see why she says that.

One small quibble: Amazon is not located in Silicon Valley.

(I wouldn’t get one on a bet.)

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*Unless, of course, you are a 15-year-old boy.

You may have noticed that I rescale embedded media to 500 pixels in width. When I started blogging, 800×600 monitors were still not uncommon, and 500px seemed a sane choice. I’ve maintained the practice for consistency’s sake.

At one time, I maintained a spreadsheet of common dimensions and their scaled values. I could enter the existing values and it would calculate the scaled ones, then I could save it with the additional data.

Ultimately I replaced the spreadsheet with a command line alternative, which works quite nicely (if you can remember high school math, you’ll recognize the equation; piping the output to bc is necessary because BASH by itself can parse only integers):

Code:
echo 500/[original width]*[original height] | bc -l

This outputs the proportional height.

Here’s an example:

Code:
bash-4.3$ echo 500/640*423 | bc -l
330.46875000000000000000 <---I round the output to the nearest integer

Read more »

Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website devoted to checking the factual accuracy of US politicians’ words, appears to have been hacked so that it secretly mines cryptocurrency in visitors’ browsers.
(snip)

Coin Hive is a legit outfit that offers free JavaScript to web admins . . . .

However, the code hidden on Politifact.com at this moment appears to be malicious: it is completely non-throttled, and kicks off eight instances of the miner, which means it hammers the visiting machine’s processor, taking up 100 per cent of spare processor capacity.

The story goes on to say the malware was removed within hours after discovery.

(Link fixed.)

Listening to Old Time Radio with Real Player in a Virtual Machine of Windows 7 in VirtualBox on Slackware –Current.

Is nothing sacred?

AOL Instant Messenger will be shut down in December.

I still have an AIM account. Mostly I use the associated email account as a spam trap.

I think the last time I used the instant messenger was in 2008.

I have a new podcast up at Hacker Public Radio.

Debian Sid with the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Delusions of grandeur frolics.

There’s a reason I seldom log into Facebook. (When I do, it’s because that, if you want to do reach-out, you must reach out to where the people are).

Facebook as a company–remember, it’s company that desires profit, not a community–is a vortex of [de/il]lusion.

Even as it preys on its users, Facebook pretends that it is a community.

It’s not.

It’s a milking-machine for profit. It’s a really well-designed milking-machine, but a milking-machine that is suckling on your anatomy none the less.

Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

I suspect the mope is having second thoughts right about now.

After a three-day trial this week, Mittesh Das, 48, of Atlanta, Georgia, was found guilty by a jury in North Carolina of knowingly transmitting malicious code with the intent of causing damage to an Army computer used in furtherance of national security.

Specifically, Das deliberately introduced malware – seemingly designed to delete files and knacker services – into the US Army Reserve payroll systems after his employers lost the contract to provide the technology. The military estimates it cost $2.6m to fix the damage.

The Enlightenment v. 21 desktop environment* on Mageia 6.

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*Some contend that E is a window manager. They’re wrong for this reason: Enlightenment configuration is managed using GUI tools, not text configuration files. That lifts it out of the “window manager” category.

My hosting provider has notified me that it will be doing maintenance on my VPS (and, I suspect, numerous other VPSs) starting this evening. The site may be unavailable for short periods over the next 24 hours.