David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
If you’ve ever tried to run Knoppix on a Compaq or HP Proliant with a Smart Array controller, you probably got a rude surprise.
Here’s how to make the hard drive(s) show up.Open a shell window.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) to become root.
Type ‘insmod cciss’ — you may get a message that it’s already installed.
Type ‘cd /dev’
Type ‘MAKEDEV cciss’ (this is case-sensitive).
Now Knoppix will see your drives so you can mount them and/or edit the partitions with qtparted.
Grisoft has offered a free edition of its AVG 6.0 antivirus software for several years. Unfortunately it has discontinued the product and will stop offering updates on 31 December.
The solution is to download their new free version.It’s a pain, but unfortunately, free things almost always have some kind of strings attached. To be entirely fair, for-pay antivirus software often has some strings attached too.
So if you’ve been using AVG, or you have friends who have been, download (or get them to download) the new version and update it.
Some people have been complaining lately about AVG not updating their definitions as quickly as the other vendors. The result is that some viruses that Norton Antivirus would catch go undetected by AVG. If you can afford better virus protection, buying it is probably worthwhile. If not, the AVG free edition is still better than no protection at all.
That got you going, didn’t it? At least I hope it did. I know I’m not the only one who has a problem with the screw-in posts on the back of computers coming off. I’m talking the posts next to your video port, your parallel printer port, serial ports, and all that.I was working on a computer tonight that had that problem and I finally thought of a way to keep that from happening. It’s an old trick I first heard of more than 20 years ago, but I only just now remembered it.
Glue those posts into place so they won’t turn on you. Before you screw something into them, of course. Permanently attaching your monitor to your computer isn’t a good thing.
Superglue works just fine for this. For a bond that’s less permanent–and less manly–but nearly as strong, use nail polish. I’m sure there’s a proper way to apply it but I just brush on a little bit like paint. It doesn’t take much.
Make that minor modification, and then after King Kong comes and tightens all of your connections on the back of the computer–I know my house isn’t the only one he visits, but I do wonder how he manages to put everything back exactly the way I had it–you’ll be able to get those cables disconnected without taking all of your posts with it.
At around 9 PM last night, Southwestern Bell lost a data line. My DSL connection became sporadic and my telephone became so full of static as to be unusable for voice. Within an hour, I lost all use of my voice line. DSL would drop and come back occasionally.
They are aware of the problem and gave an ETA of 10 PM on Wednesday of clearing it up. The DSL has been reliable for a couple of hours now, but that’s not really an indicator. We’ll see what happens.
You probably don’t want to know what I was searching for on Ebay that matched this.
But, whatever people want to collect, I have no room to talk.
I’ve been playing around with the perspective correction feature in Gimp 2.0, and while it’s invaluable, I’ve noticed that it really has a tendency to blur up a picture.
You can reduce this some by not editing JPEGs–it’s always best to convert JPEGs into PNG or TIFF format before editing anyway–but it only reduces the problem. And Gimp’s sharpen tool leaves a lot to be desired.
Enter SharpControl.There’s something of a tutorial available online. To be honest, I really don’t know what most of the things he’s saying mean. What I do know is that I can just load an image into it, take the defaults, and get a better-looking image than with any other program I’ve ever used. And if I fumble around a bit, sometimes I can get lucky and improve it even more.
Hey, I was trained as a writer. I had to stay after class one day to get what little Photoshop training I did get.
The program only speaks TIFF or JPEG, so you’ll have to convert to TIFFs if you decide to load into the program from files. The alternative is to paste the contents of the clipboard into the program, manipulate the image, then copy it back to the clipboard and paste into your imaging program.
It’s a free download, so if you’re playing with fuzzy images, go download it now.
It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. The time of year when nostalgia runs high and ancient toy trains come out of the basement or the attic and get set up again until sometime after the new year.
Well, hopefully they make it that long. Here are some tips for getting old Lionel, American Flyer, Marx, and similar electric trains running again.
Lycos has released a screensaver that combats spam. It just tries to repeatedly download the web content of known spammers in hopes of driving up their bandwidth costs.
I am famously opposed to screen savers, but…
It’s out, and the entire inventory of 250K units was bought by QVC.
So much for getting one of these at Kmart. Anyway, it’s a C64 in a joystick enclosure with 30 games built in, similar to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision units you see in stores.The game selection is a bit disappointing, with an awful lot of obscure titles and, aside from the included Epyx titles, very few big hits. According to the designer, the problem is tracking down the copyright holders of some of these 20-year-old titles in order to get permission to use them.
Two of my all-time favorites are on there: Jumpman Jr. and Pitstop 2. But, alas, no Seven Cities of Gold, no Dig Dug, no Pirates!, no Giana Sisters…
I’d think about getting one, but I’m sure the main appeal would be turning it into a full C64, which is supposed to be possible.
Even if you aren’t really a Linux person, the live CD Linux distribution Knoppix is incredibly useful. If nothing else, you can use it to replace Ghost, Partition Magic, and Nero or EZ CD Creator. That’s $100 worth of utilities for the cost of a download, or, if you don’t have broadband, for $5-$10 from a Linux distributor.If you’re not a Linux person, here’s how to boot and fire up the utilities you need. Once they’re up and running, they’re very intuitive; it’s just finding them that can be difficult.
PartitionMagic:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘qtparted’ (no quotes) and hit enter to bring up a free Partition Magic clone.
Ghost/DriveImage:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘mkdir /smb’ (no quotes) and hit enter to make a point to mount a network share.
Type ‘smbmount //server/share /smb -o username=myusername’ (no quotes) and hit enter to mount the network share. Enter your NT password when indicated.
Type ‘partimage’ (no quotes) and hit enter to launch Partimage, the closest thing there is to a free/open source Ghost. Save your image to /smb and you’ve got it made. No more paying for Ghost licenses, no more dinking around with boot floppies to try to find the right driver for your NIC and trying to find enough room to cram the ever-more-bloated Ghost…
Nero/EZ CD Creator:
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘k3b’ (no quotes) and hit enter to launch a CD burning application.
Drive wiping utilities:
This assumes the drive you want to wipe is the primary master on your first IDE channel. Unless you really know what you’re doing, disconnect all other hard drives!
Boot Knoppix.
Click the shell icon in the toolbar at the bottom.
Type ‘su’ (no quotes) and hit enter to become a privileged user.
Type ‘dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512’ and hit enter.
For something approaching military-grade security, you need to overwrite seven times. Here’s one line to do that. This will take a good, long while.
Type ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=512 ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512’ and hit enter.
To securely wipe floppies, substitute the string “fd0” for “hda0”.