Beyond the Red Stone

Officially can't wait. :-D

Nick says so, July 14 all new episodes following the Day of Black Sun.

Adobe has always been in its own little world and we just live in it. So when I came across this security advisory I made a point to follow-up on it.

As I suspected Adobe Flash doesn't auto update because I had and older version that IS affected by the vulnerability. I'm sure a lot of other people don't update this manually so here's how to do it.

So how do you find out what version of Flash you are running? Simple, just go to the about page. I found out about the 'about page' from the good folks at SANS Internet Storm Center. You can also go to this version checker KB article at Adobe, but the about page is probably the easiest to remember and won't likely go way or change URLs.

Download the lastest version of Flash from the download center. Install and your good.

I had a chance to see Jeff Beck opening for Stevie Ray Vaughan back in the day. Life got in the way as it usually does, couldn't get out of my college Trig final... don't even remember what I learned in that class. I guess it wasn't such a good trade-off in the end considering the legend SRV passed on the following year.

This got me thinking about what else I missed in that same point in my life and I remember having to eat tickets to Robert Cray show. I haven't had a lot of Robert Cray until it pop up on my playlist tonight. Good times.

Later this week the city is having a e-waste recycling drop off day. Like most computer users I have some old technology laying around. It can be hard to get rid of e-waste with all the chemicals you don't want getting into the environment. Even used batteries are something we store to drop off at the hazardous waste center when we have enough.

Recycling day has been on my calendar for a month so I won't forget. Bad news is I'll be out of town so I'll have to wait for another e-waste event to take place but all was not lost. In preparing for this weekend I was able to try out Darik's Boot and Nuke for the first time.

The background for this post is something we didn't have to worry about until recent years, Idenity Theft. In gearing up for a transfer of storage electronics to another party it should be common practice to wipe the hard drive of any useful data. The weapon of choice, Darik's Boot and Nuke or alternatively known as DBAN. If you can't remember the name you can always just google DBAN. It's always the first result.

For this old technology I also have kept around an old system that can still talk to these old hard drives. In preparing the drives I also wanted to double-check the data on the drives to make sure I no longer needed the data. To do this I settled on using the Damn Small Linux live CD or just DSL for short. This is a live version of Linux that can be booted directly from the CD drive. I also considered using Knoppix but didn't need all the extra weight (programs). Since DSL is based on Knoppix all was good.

My method basically involved:

1. Rebooting the PC with only the Hard Drive I'm currently inspecting and CD Drive attached.
2. Update the BIOS setting so it recognizes the hard drive properly.
3. Boot into DSL and auto-mount the hard drive.
4. Open the emelFM file manager to take a peek at the drive's data.
5. Shutdown and reboot with DBAN.
6. Run DBAN using the "autonuke" function.
7. Rinse and Repeat.

Each drive was different and needed BIOS settings adjustments. So you will need to know how to interupt the boot prcess to get into the BIOS. Usually it will be the F2, F10 or DEL key. All my drives autodetected in the BIOS fine.

DSL was able to read and mount every drive accept one but this is the oldest drive I have and had sector errors, so I skipped it. DBAN couldn't read and write to it so I figured no one else could.

All together I wiped data from 4 old hard drives after inspecting them. DBAN and DSL worked flawlessly. The drives are now ready to be sold, donated or given up to the e-waste gods.

Several sites on the net have documented screen cleaners for laptops and LCD screens. In fact that is where I got the information to proceed in building my kit. What I wanted to do is give you a picture so it's more friendly and less scary. Basically the screen cleaning kit consist of, a. Distilled Water, b. Isopropyl Alcohol, c. Spray Bottle and d. Microfiber cloth. I bought everything here for less than $5.

Mix a 50/50 solution of Distilled Water and the Isopropyl Alcohol. Distilled Water is important because it will dry without leaving a film because it contains no minerals or other impurities. Also do not substitute Rubbing Alcohol because it may contain oils and the microfiber cloth must be safe for lens cleaning. You can find these in optical shops or electronic stores.

To clean your laptop, shut it down and remove all power sources including the battery. Spray the screen and wipe off the solution using your microfiber cloth. The Alcohol aids in cleaning and allows the water to evaporate and dry quickly.

You can do a quick test in advance if you are not sure about your screen. Here's another helpful article from wikihow that includes more sound advice. This solution also works on cleaning CDs and DVDs.

Tonight I was playing with the TCPView tool from Microsoft, via the folks at Sysinternals. I'm sure uncle Bill threw enough bags of gold at those guys but I digress. I noticed some weird TCP connections from Firefox going to google.navigation.opendns.com. Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed this. So what gives?

As far as I was concerned I wasn't doing anything special with the opendns servers. They should just be faster than the Comcast servers right? I have noticed some increased slowness over the past month and have been poking around my computers to determine if I had a virus problem, hence the TCPView tool among others.

So here is what I did to verify what was happening. I opened a command prompt and used the built-in nslookup tool. In debug mode resolve the www.google.com name. Here's what I got.

Ah ha! Bad OpenDNS. I'm sure there is monetary reasons behind the blatant domain hi-jacking (?). Google has plenty of money after all they fund most of the Firefox juggernaut with their quick search drop down.

I know the good folks at OpenDNS will say I enabled shortcuts, but no. I never did. I just wanted an alternative to the Comcast servers. Apparently OpenDNS plays nice until you don't notice or care.

After seeing that this could be a privacy issue I dismissed OpenDNS from my router config. As you can see with my default Comcast servers www.google.com answers come from where else... the Goog.

I know this is an understatement. Unlike most people my introduction to Arthur C. Clarke was the Mysterious Universe TV  series. A show where they would investigate UFOs, Bigfoot, Crop Circles, Nazca lines and other oddities. I'm not of the 2001 Space Odyssey generation, but you really don't have to be with all the references popping up everywhere. Cool t-shirt.

I'm politically active enough to generally know what button to push in November. It's still a crap shoot most of the time. I'm not entirely sure just how much my vote counts. So while were waiting here's something to I hope to never see.

Now if that isn't scary enough here's the source... The Star Wars Guide to the Candidates.

This recent article from Wired kind of supports the fake moon landings theory. If we did it before, couldn't we just do it again? Dust off the old Saturn 5 blueprints and replace the Eniac with a Nintendo DS? That launch took decades with modern computing power, shouldn't it just take us a couple of years?

Just like Zephram Cochrane played "Magic Carpet Ride" at the launch of the Phoenix, NASA should probably play some Jerry Lee Lewis.