Schinckel.net

Rsync Backup System | alexking.org Note to self: re-read this after the new hard drive arrives.

Hidden Threat: Alternate Data Streams Hmm. This is quite interesting. Under any Windows machine with an NTFS disk, you can hide applications inside other files: C:> type nasty.exe > plain.txt:nasty.exe You can then run this command with: C:> start plain.txt:nasty.exe Now, this might not seem like much, but this is virtually undetectable. You can add any file to another file, and even exerienced sysadmins probably won’t find it!

An even better method of getting a random (ascii) password: $ head /dev/urandom | strings -n 5 | sed 'N;s/$//;s/\n//g;s/\n//g' | sed 'N;s/$//;s/\n//g' | head -n 1 (All on one line, naturally). I had to do the two seds to make it work properly. It would have been nicer if this combined all of the lines, and then I could just trim as many chars as I wanted, but this was tricky. The head -n 1 discards any lines other than the first.

Autopia

Texas environmental officials have delayed a proposed ban of biodiesel fuel in the state to allow further studying of the emissions of biodiesel blends.

Really? And the oil companies let them delay the ban?

The skeptic might say that Texas regulators passed a law that exploits the one negative aspect of biodiesel to protect the oil industry in that state.

You don’t say.

UK pair’s tickets caught behind – National – theage.com.au

… But when they arrived in Sydney yesterday morning they were told their luggage, in which the cricket tickets were packed, was still in England and would take three days to get here.

So let me get this straight. They didn’t carry their tickets in their hand luggage? That’s just plain stupid! It’s not like tickets are particularly bulky even! Whenever I take teams touring, they always pack all of the stuff they need for playing in their hand luggage, just in case the airline loses their checked stuff. And it’s a bit harder fitting playing gear and boots into hand luggage than some tickets in a small folder. They deserve to miss the match.

I finally got around to installing a demo of Aperture. Since I’m under spec. for the app, I had to firstly hack the Installer (not easy, I had to copy the ApertureTrial.mpkg ‘file’ (it’s a package, which is really a folder) to the disk, and then go inside it. I then had to enter the Contents folder, and finally edit the ApertureTrial.dist file. This file is the file that tests to see if it can be installed, and since I’m on a desktop, I needed to change the first non-intel test: if (!checkCPUFrequency(1590000000)) I removed one of the zeros, so that it was testing for a much slower clock speed. I then needed to fix the RAM check: if (!checkRAMRequirement(1000)) { I changed this to a 1. Both of these edits can be done in any old text editor. This meant that Aperture could be installed on my Mac. However, it still wouldn’t run. For this to happen, you need to actually edit the application file itself, which must be done in a hex editor. If you don’t know how to do this, then you probably shouldn’t. The location of this file is: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture I found the instructions at david.djsiska.cz, which deal with version 1.1, to be enough to enable me to succeed here too. There are also instructions for 1.5 at aperture 1.5 hack. Ignore the offsets, and just search for the first and second location of: 40 9e 00 80 to: 48 00 00 88 And then, if you need it, the resolution hack; the next appearance of: 40 9E 00 E0 becomes: 48 00 00 D8 I’ll just point out that you should be working on a copy of this file, in case it fails. I also suspect that in the updated version (1.5.2) this hack will still work. • Now that that is out of the way, how does it stack up against Lightroom? Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent quite a few hours working in Lightroom already, but I didn’t warm to Aperture much at all. It seems to have most of the same tools, although there are a couple of differences (colour tinting, for instance, allows for black/grey/white tinting, rather than just shadow/highlight tinting, but I didn’t find the ability to alter some channels but not others, which is a pretty cool feature). I also found the application somewhat slow. Of course, the laptop I’ve been running Lightroom on is a bit newer than my Mac, and has twice as much RAM, so perhaps I’m just being unfair in that aspect. Having the ability to fix red-eye would be good, but that is something I am sure Adobe will be implementing soon. My Desktop PC is fairly tooled up – the only advantage of the iMac is the lovely large screen, so perhaps that will become my main working machine for photographs. So, I’m going to stick to Lightroom for now. I hope they make it better in the next couple of revisions, and I hope I can come up with a way of making my previews accessible via my Xbox and xbmc, so that I can view them on the TV. That would be cool. Like I used to to with iPhoto, when albums were stored as a series of aliases within folders of the album name. As I think about it, there is one thing I liked about Aperture: you can work on a new revision of a file. This is something I was trying to do in Lightroom just a couple of hours ago (I was resizing some images to be my screen backgrounds on my phone!), so I had to make the modifications, and then export, and then undo the modifications. It would have been much nicer just to have a revision of the original photo. I also think that there is no reason that the develop tools can’t be accessible in the library mode of Lightroom. Why have that distinction? You can already do some minor edits, why not just allow the whole gamut? It just complicates everything. Just saying that reminded me I haven’t really used the final three sections of Lightroom. For printing, I just export without restricting the size, and for Web, I export restricting the width to 500 (that’s the column size on this blog). Perhaps I will investigate those features, as well as the slideshow.

I needed a nice random password, something that is fairly strong. Enter /dev/urandom and md5: $ head /dev/urandom | md5 e98afcb4f093bafa0cc5f90f150df8b7 Obviously, that’s not the password I used. Problems with this method: if you don’t write it down, or save it somewhere, you will not be able to get it back. Second, it only uses a small subset of the ascii codeset – 0123456789abcdef. I’ve tried to come up with something that converts this to ascii, but I’m still working on it. You’d also likely want to ignore 8-bit values, as these can be extended characters. If you ever needed to type this in, it’s sometimes hard to do. The big advantage is that this is a totally random method, and you won’t get the same code twice.

Ain’t this the cutest dog in the world? By the way, this is as shot. ISO400, 68mm Equivalent Focal Length, 1/15 second (with no tripod!), and f/5.6 Mind you, it did take a bout 50 shots to get the one good one!