Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Monday, July 5th, 2010
pre.Cygwin
{
background-color:#000000;color:#00FF00;
padding:5px;
}
I experienced a very strange situation where rsync simply stopped working. It wouldn't even output anything for rsync --help or even plain rsync. which showed it to be in /usr/bin/rsync as expected. A closer look revealed something odd:
$ ls -lah /usr/bin/rs*
-rwxr-xr-x ...
Posted in Cygwin, Technology | No Comments »
Monday, July 5th, 2010
I was able to download and install Valve's Steam client on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, but when I tried to run the client I would instantly receive this error:
Steam.exe (main exception): To run Steam, you must first connect to the Internet
I tried changing port-forwarding rules in my router, ...
Posted in Network, Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
I just read a fascinating story about investigating a bad batch of Kingston MicroSD cards. Some of the things I learned:
Toshiba and Sandisk co-own the same fabrication facility.
Samsung does not sell their own cards retail, only through resellers who re-brand them.
Kingston does not appear to manufacture their own memory ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
I wanted to change the behavior of the Microsoft IME bar using AutoHotkeys, a utility which can be used to create macros, remap keys, or do any of a variety of other related tasks.
This led me to ime_func.ahk, which appears to be an AutoHotkeys script which uses DllCall to access ...
Posted in Technology, Windows | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Publishing GPG/PGP keys to public keyservers has one glaring fault: once you commit something, you can never remove it. I made the mistake of adding my email address at an employer's domain. Now it is permanently tied to my public key and email address.
Assuming that you own ...
Posted in Network, Security, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
I was having trouble using the GnuPG plugin for vim under Cygwin. The GnuPG plugin allows seamlessly integrated decryption, editing, and re-encryption of GPG-encrypted content within vim. However, on my Windows 7 box, it just showed gibberish. Attempting to edit my encrypted password file resulted in a ...
Posted in Technology, Windows | No Comments »
Friday, February 5th, 2010
Here is a script I wrote to convert MP3 files to AAC for my Softbank 821SC phone. The script uses FFmpeg, which I downloaded from here.
@echo off
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM Set the following variable to the ffmpeg.exe path on your system.
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
set FFMPEG_PATH="c:\tools\FFmpeg\ffmpeg.exe"
REM make sure the user provided an argument.
if ...
Posted in Scripting, Technology, Windows | No Comments »
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
I have an A-DATA 8GB MicroSDHC card from NewEgg.com. On the back appears:
9A0275
MMAGR08GUDCA-DB
S FLH3E6X3 941
If you search for MMAGR08GUDCA-DB, you'll find posts listing this same product identification number for Transcend cards.
Corporate profiles list different CEOs (Peter Shu for Transcend, Simon Chen for A-DATA). The product details, however, seem ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
This article explains how to securely port-forward Windows Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) over SSH, using standard SSH command line syntax. If you prefer to use GUI SSH tools, such as PuTTY, there are other guides for that.
Terminology Notes
My terminology assumes that you are connecting to a machine on your ...
Posted in Linux, Scripting, Technology, Windows | No Comments »
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
An arbitrary external application can be executed from C# using System.Diagnostics.Process. If you want to run as another user, setting the System.Diagnostics.Process.StartInfo.Password field can be a bit confusing. Here is one way using System.Security.SecureString.AppendChar to avoid having to resort to unsafe code:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
namespace CSRunAs
{
...
Posted in .Net, C#, Technology | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 8th, 2009
Trillian's installer complains that it cannot create "buddy.dll".
An ugly workaround is to right-click on the installer executable and select "Run As Administrator".
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Windows 7 was very troublesome to install on my system. My system specifications:
Motherboard: Biostar TF8200 A2+ (nVidia chipset)
Processor: AMD 4080e Athlon 64 x2 (45W version)
Memory: 4GB
Optical: Sony/NEC SATA DVD-RW
Hard Disk: Seagate SATA 320GB, 7200RPM
Installation would hang at the "Starting Windows" logo. By pressing ...
Posted in Hardware, Technology | 8 Comments »
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
I was tired of burning perfectly good DVDs repeatedly for Windows 7 beta testing. Instead, I decided to follow these excellent instructions and copy the contents of the ISO image onto a USB stick and boot from that.
My Biostar TF8200 A2+ motherboard has an American Megatrends BIOS. Configuring ...
Posted in Hardware, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
For the last several weeks, I've noticed excessive CPU usage whenever GMail (GAYD-hosted email, specifically) is open in Firefox. By turning off add-ons one at a time, I found that this is caused solely by Better GMail 2.
Firebug, FireGPG, Greasemonkey (on which Better GMail relies), and AdBlock Plus all ...
Posted in OS X, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
After updating to Ubuntu 8.10, I started to get tearing artifacts. This crop up especially badly during scenes that involve panning.
The MythTV Wiki explains the fix for tearing:
echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq
Well, it works for me, anyway. I just keep forgetting what to do when it crops up.
Posted in Linux, Technology | No Comments »