All posts by Shawn

“True” Video iPod Coming

The rumors have started about Apple releasing a “true” video iPod at the end of March or beginning of April. If the rumors are correct, they will go from a 2.5″ screen (on current iPod’s) to a 3.5″ screen and do away with the click-wheel, and instead use an on-screen touch-panel interface.

Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display.

//www.thinksecret.com/news/0602videoipod.html

6 Year Old Suspended For Sexual Harassment

Some first grader was suspended from school for 3 days for sexual harassment. hahaha!!! The beginnings of a true pimp. πŸ™‚

There have been similar cases. In 1996, a New York second-grader was suspended for kissing a girl and ripping a button off her skirt — an idea the boy said he got from his favorite book “Corduroy,” about a bear with a missing button. Earlier that year, a Lexington, North Carolina, 6-year-old was separated from his class after kissing a classmate on the cheek.

//www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/02/09/sex.harass.ap/

Canon VB-C50i/R

I need to get a good pan/tilt/zoom camera for the site of the house construction (to automatically make a time lapse of the house being built and also just to see what’s going on at any given time).

I’ve done a little research on it, and so far the Canon is the best one (for the job) I can come up with… It has good zoom capability (26x optical + 12x digital for a total of 312x zoom), it has a built-in server (no need to connect it to a computer), you can schedule it to take pictures (at a pre-set pan/tilt/zoom) for the time lapsing, has a night mode with an infrared illuminator to see in the dark, etc.

So go test drive it over here, and tell me what you think:

//www.nuspectra.com/vbcam/large.aspx

Or if you know of anything better, please let me know…

France Legalizes Peer To Peer Networks

It seems French Parliament has legalized the use of peer to peer networks to share otherwise copy-written music and movies. Now they are just trying to figure out if they are going to impose a $5/month tax to users.

This is the best reason I’ve ever heard of to move to France. πŸ™‚

The French courts have ruled that using peer-to-peer networks (P2P), providing you are doing so for personal rather than commercial reasons, is legal. The decision comes just as the French Parliament meets to discuss whether internet users should pay a voluntary tax or surcharge of Γ’β€šΒ¬5 a month to use P2P networks.

The decision was actually made back in December but has only just been made public.

//www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/08/france_legalises_p2p/

Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS)

There has been a bunch of hoopla lately about CableCARDs finally coming to market this summer, so I decided to read about it a little more…

The CableCARD system basically lets you insert a PCMCIA card into your TV and then you don’t need a digital cable box to receive high definition signals. The CableCARDs are going to let things like digital video recorders work for high-def signals (TiVO, Windows Media Center, etc.) Anyway, after poking around the web on it, I realized that the whole CableCARD system is already obsolete and it hasn’t even been released yet. CableCARD 2.0 is going to follow about a a year later which will allow bi-directional data (you will have to wait for 2.0 for things like Pay Per View). But the really lame part is existing CableCARD TVs aren’t going to work with 2.0 CableCARDs (so you already need to buy a new TV… even if you have one that supports CableCARDs).

Then probably a year after CableCARD 2.0, cable companies are going to start switching to Downloadable Conditional Access Systems (DCAS). This will be much better than CableCARD (even 2.0) because it’s essentially a CableCARD that is downloaded automatically from your provider (no need to rent a CableCARD for each TV then).

I can’t imagine anyone reading this actually cares about any of this… but I don’t care. It’s more for my own archive purposes so I can look it up later, so piss off! πŸ™‚

If you *do* actually care, here’s some reading for you…

//arstechnica.com/guides/other/cablecard.ars

Random Email #2

Here’s one I got this morning…

can you help me to find my coponents and open them to my desktop pc. If youcan wouldyou help meto reprogram my computer and download the correct information i need to do different tasks.

Sure, I’ll get right on that.

Random Email #1

I get so many random emails where people think I’m support or sales for whatever company they are trying to reach. So I decided I’ll start posting the emails in their entirety starting now (I’m not going to go digging for old ones).

My printer color is not printing good, igot new ink.but it still want work.

Did you try contacting the printer manufacturer by chance? Or maybe someone who knows who in the hell you are?

Home Theatre Revision

I always had plans to do a home theatre in my house, but it was going to be a bedroom that was turned into a home theatre. Well, I was finally talked into reversing that stance. It’s now going to be a home theatre that could be turned into a bedroom (if really needed).

So this…


is going to become this…

Prevent DoS Attacks Via DNS (BIND)

A malformed UDP packet to your DNS server can cause it to respond to an IP address that never made the request (with the response being being more bytes than the request). So someone malicious could use one of your name servers to throw unwanted traffic at a 3rd IP address. Annoying… but pretty easy to solve. You can setup BIND to only answer DNS queries that it’s authoritative for except for specific blocks of IPs which it will do recursive lookups for (basically internal IPs that could use the DNS server as it’s name server for lookups).

Besides your server becoming part of a DoS attack, it can suck a ton of your own bandwidth (I was seeing cases where short-lived attacks were saturating 3Mbit worth of my bandwidth). Not any more! πŸ™‚ I figured out what was causing the bandwidth spikes with my friend, tcpdump.

I’m too tired to get into more details (that’s what Google is good for), but you can basically add something along these lines to your /etc/named.conf file:

allow-recursion {192.168.1.0/24; 216.9.35.0/24;};

That will ignore DNS requests from any IP (except those 2 subnets) when the IP makes a request about any domain that the DNS server not an authoritative server for.

Restless Leg Syndrome

I saw a commercial for some drug to help combat “restless leg syndrome” where you have a tingling feeling in your legs, and you have the urge to move/shift your legs. Is this a real thing?

Why do I feel like maybe a drug manufacturer made up this “disease”?

Maybe if your body is telling you to move your legs, you should move your legs, rather than take a drug to suppress the urge… But hey, what do I know? I’m not a doctor. πŸ™‚

It seems like there are so many commercials for drugs these days. Most to help combat stuff you didn’t even know you had. Maybe we should leave prescriptions to doctors, rather than people going to the doctor to tell them what you need to take. eh?

I Need A Job Title

I was thinking today that I’ve never actually had business cards before (never really needed them). But sometimes it might be handy to have them (I dunno… maybe you need something to write on real quick…)

So I decided if I’m going to get business cards, I’m going to make cool ones. But then I realized I don’t really have a job title… So you guys needs to think of a job title for me. The best one I could think of myself is “Digital Inventor”, but I want to hear all suggestions (leave a comment with the suggestion).

Buick Invitational

I went VIP style to the Buick Invitational golf tournament today (thanks to Bank of America). It was pretty fun to lounge on the 18th green/fairway with all the food/drinks you want. πŸ™‚

I’m sure you must find that terribly exciting (whoever is reading this), eh? πŸ™‚

Me and Tiger Woods are becoming old friends these days. πŸ™‚

Tilt Shift Photography

Been seeing some interesting pictures floating around the last week or so where people take a picture of a real scene, but it’s done in a way so it looks like a very detailed model.

For example, check out the pictures on these sites:

//www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1760>
//blog.so-net.ne.jp/photolog/archive/c22183

Being a dork, I started digging into the “how-to” side of things and found a really informative site…

//www.photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift

100 Patty Burger

A group of 10 drunk friends went to In-And-Out Burger and demanded a cheeseburger with 100 patties. Aaauuuggghh…

//whatupwilly.blogspot.com/2006/01/in-n-out-100×100.html

I need to stop right here. Please take a CAREFUL look the picture on the right. There is a common misperception that the 100×100 has a hundred buns. No, that’s not true. It’s one set of buns and ONE HUNDRED meat patties and ONE HUNDRED pieces of sweaty-oily cheese in between the buns. Clearly, the worst part of this experience wasn’t the meat..it was the sweaty cheese.

World’s Smallest Fish

Last time I was deep sea fishing, I swear I caught one of these, but threw it back because it seemed a little small. God dammit… if only I knew it was fully grown!

The tiny, see-through Paedocypris fish have the appearance of larvae and have a reduced head skeleton, which leaves the brain unprotected by bone.

They live in dark tea-coloured waters with an acidity of pH3, which is at least 100 times more acidic than rainwater.

//www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2006/jan/news_7501.html

Fiber To My Door

I just found out today that the house I’m building is going to have fiber to the door from the phone company (SBC/AT&T), so there will be no old school twisted pair copper wires coming into my home. πŸ™‚

The downside to this is the temporary construction trailer is going to need special equipment to get a temporary phone line from the fiber. Oh well. πŸ™‚

39Mbit “DSL”, here I come!

tcpdump

If you ever need to figure out what is eating bandwidth on a server, tcpdump comes in handy…

tcpdump -n -i any

That will spew out everything, so you might be able to find anything that looks suspicious in there. Say you find the IP address of 1.2.3.4 doing something suspicious, you can zero in on them to see if they are doing anything naughty like so:

tcpdump -n -i any host 1.2.3.4

In my case, someone was utilizing one of my DNS servers for about 200 lookups per second (not logging DNS lookups and it’s UDP traffic so it was hard to figure out where the bandwidth was going).

Once you find a naughty IP address, now just block them like so:

route add -host 1.2.3.4 reject (Linux)

or

route add -host 1.2.3.4 255.255.255.255 -reject (Mac OS X/BSD)

Stock Market Set For A Good Year Thanks To The Steelers

Time to invest in the stock market! πŸ™‚

//money.cnn.com/2006/01/23/news/funny/super_bowl_indicator/

The National Football League playoffs produced a Super Bowl matchup that suggests a winning year for stocks is now a lock.

When the Pittsburgh Steelers upset the Denver Broncos Sunday, it meant that neither team in the Feb. 5 game will have American Football League roots. The Steelers, which moved to the American Football Conference when the NFL and AFL merged in 1970, will face the Seattle Seahawks in this year’s championship game.

And according to the Super Bowl Stock Indicator, a victory by an old NFL team means a bullish year for stocks, while a victory by an old AFL team gives the bears the upper hands.

I’m Psychic (No Seriously)

I get very few phone calls on my cell phone… maybe 3 calls per week or so. Anyway… sitting in the car with my roommate, I started singing my ringtone (which I don’t do normally). And 10 seconds later my cell phone started ringing. My roommate had a pretty weird look on her face. πŸ™‚

3 Year Old Smoker

Teach ’em young! πŸ™‚ At this rate smokers might die of lung cancer before they are legally allowed to buy cigarettes.

Maybe Gerber should just make tobacco flavored baby food. πŸ™‚

I can just see this kid on Santa’s lap… “I’ve been a good boy, I would like a carton of Marlboro Reds please.”

Powder At Mammoth

Was at Mammoth mountain the last few days and the day we left (this morning) it was snowing pretty good. Got a half day in before driving home. The mountain got about a foot of powder overnight and was snowing hard enough all morning that when you went back up the lift, your previous tracks were gone, so every run was virgin powder. Nice! πŸ™‚