My Thoughts, Views, Tips and Commentary on Technology, Politcs and Health.
This cartoon should be watched by children and adults everywhere.
Right now!
This is well worth the time to see the whole thing.
Adolf Hitler once said “It is so fortunate for rulers that men are fools”, and that statement is just as true today as it was then. The American people voted Obama into office just like the Germans voted for Hitler…. human nature never changes.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6p5QPVhPI]
Nancy Pelosi is going around saying the same old crap, “Bush lied, I didn’t know, it’s all the republicans fault….” etc.
Well here she is, getting caught in her latest BOLD FACE LIES about not knowing about our interogation techniques.
Why won’t the mainstream media show this? Oh yeah, I forgot… it is against their religion.
Techniques which I should add have saved LOT’S of American lives!!
http://www.liveleak.com/e/568_1242351356
Excellent tools:
DeviceRemover is a Device manager on steroids!
You can view almost any data on a device, update or backup drivers, and pretty much control anything you want for the device.
This can be a great help when some device all of a sudden stops working – like after an update, or when re-installing/installing an operating system.:
http://www.pro-it-education.de/software/deviceremover/DeviceRemoverSetup.exe
Using this utility is very easy.
But this is one utility you’ll want to use with a great deal of caution unless you really know what you are doing!!
You will be dealing with device drivers and settings and could easily ‘brick’ your devices or even your entire Operating System!
So make sure you have everything backed up before tweaking.
To back up just the drivers first you can use the above mentioned ‘DeviceRemover’ application or try this one:
http://small.drivermax.com/soft/dmx/drivermax.exe
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/copy-windows-drivers-from-one-machine-to-another/
Better yet and more preferable is to have an ‘image’ available of your entire system.
I have previously gone on about the utter importance of having recent images of your entire system should you have to recover data [your hdd drive dies, you get a virus or trojan, you need larger drive, etc.] so I won’t prattle on too much.
A disk image is a giant file that saves the state of an entire disk.
Disk images can re-create an entire disk drive.
I recommend having an external drive or secondary hdd for images.
I you don’t have one of my favorites, and most important, tools – Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, there are freeware applications available to create complete system [hard drive] images.
Good Description of the difference of image vs backup is here.
Here is one:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
Here is the direct ISO download that can be ‘burned’ to CD:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/systemrescuecd/systemrescuecd-x86-1.2.0.iso
Safe computing……..
Change your Login background Image with a single “Drag-and-Drop” with this tool
http://www.loginox.branox.com/
Or you can do it ‘manually’ by using the terminal:
Find a desktop wallpaper image, save it to your desktop as background.jpg, and in the Terminal enter:
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg.old
You’ll have to enter your password to complete the operation. Then, in your Desktop directory in the Terminal, type:
sudo cp background.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg
Now, next time you log off, your logon screen will have your new custom background. To undo the operation, in the Terminal, type:
sudo cp /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg.old /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg
Alternately, you can modify your logon background by changing a preference versus overwriting the file.
Here’s the command:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture “/Library/Desktop Pictures/Aqua Blue.jpg”Substitute “/Library/Desktop Pictures/Aqua Blue.jpg”
with the path to the picture you want to use.
This technique works in both Leopard and Tiger.
Yes folks, it looks like the worm is very active again.
Please take the time to protect yourself and your data. A few minutes of safety can save hours or days of frustration and money.
The worm started spreading late last year, infecting millions of computers and turning them into “slaves” that respond to commands sent from a remote server that effectively controls an army of computers known as a botnet.
The Worm is quietly turning personal computers into servers of e-mail spam, flooding users with malicious emails that in turn can spread the worm again.
It is loading more malicious software onto computers under their (botnet creators) control.
According to Russian-based security researcher Kaspersky Lab.
“Conficker installs a second virus, known as Waledac, that sends out e-mail spam without knowledge of the PC’s owner, along with a fake anti-spyware program.
The Waledac virus recruits the PCs into a second botnet that has existed for several years and specializes in distributing e-mail spam.
Conficker also carries a third virus that warns users their PCs are infected and offers them a fake anti-virus program, Spyware Protect 2009 for $49.95.
If they buy it, their credit card information is stolen and the virus downloads even more malicious software.”
Please don’t be one of those who get scammed, lose control of their system or lose their data altogether.
Microsoft has some good resources here:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx
And offers a great free scan that I recommend here:
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm
For further steps you can take read my two previous posts:
http://mycraniumdrain.blogspot.com/2009/03/conflicker-protection.html
http://mycraniumdrain.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-conflicker-check-for-infection.html
Peace and safe computing
As most of you know I am a huge Firefox fan, primarily because of the extnsions;
things I could not do without, like ‘Better Gmail, DownloadHelper and Stop Autoplay.
All of which I have discussed in previous posts.
But one thing I wish Firefox did was ‘render/display’ pages as nicely as IE 7.
Because, with IE and XP/Vista using ‘ClearType’ and the ‘Aero’ interface pages just look great and I can read them very easily with my old eyes.
Here is a tweak I have used to enable much better font selections (for me anyways) in Firefox.
oops…
Looks like the folks at life hacker have already done a great tutorial (better than mine) on it so go here:
http://lifehacker.com/5197352/force-firefox-to-use-windows-vista-cleartype-fonts
Please note that before you change ANYTHING take COMPLETE and thorough notes of your settings – ALL of them, in all tabs, in case you don’t like what this does!!
Lean languages on the cheap!
Free here:
http://www.oculture.com/2006/10/foreign_languag.html
http://lifehacker.com/5194843/a-master-list-of-free-online-language-lessons?skyline=true&s;=x
and some very good pay ones:
http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/default.htm
Showing how ignorant and misguided politicians really are:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5196924/texas-just-now-bans-vista-from-government-computers
note the line:
“because one state senator has heard… of the many reports of problems with Vista.”
This ‘tard has no idea how to use technology and certainly should have no business in legislating on it!!
I just point this out to make another point about how out of touch elected officials really are.
I am willing to bet that not one politician in congress has ever done their own taxes, started a small business from nothing (no help from rich daddy), shops at the local super market regularly for groceries, or even pays their own bills!!
Time for a political enema I say!
If we don’t flush these people out they are going to give it to us!
IncredibleThe ‘nanny-staters’ are everywhere.
From the top office to the local states.
http://taxdollars.freedomblogging.com/2009/03/23/state-considers-ban-on-big-screen-tvs/12993/
It is time we removed all elected officials and showed them they are not there for their asinine self serving purposes but to represent US.
This idea of legislating behavior and beliefs is getting out of hand.
It has been tried before, check history; Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Eastern Block (USSR), Imperial Japan, Monarchical Europe.
Controlling leads to destitution and eventually revolution!!!
Freedom and liberty have lead to the greatest (for now) country the world has ever seen. With the most advances in human kind in such a short time.
Let’s do something to protect our country.
CONFLICKER UPDATE:
Symantec’s got a pretty simple (and free) tool specifically for Conficker:
Download this file on an uninfected computer, follow the steps, and you should be okay.
Or.
Doxpara Research has release a ‘scanner’ to check for conflicker infection.
Security expert Dan Kaminsky, working with the Honeynet Project’s Tillmann Werner and Felix Leder, have discovered an easier way to detect if a machine on a network is infected by Conflicker.
Dan writes:”What we’ve found is pretty cool: Conficker actually changes what Windows looks like on the network, and this change can be detected remotely, anonymously, and very, very quickly. You can literally ask a server if it’s infected with Conficker, and it will tell you.
Go here:
http://www.doxpara.com/
download the scanner:
http://www.doxpara.com/scs.zip
Extract to folder and run it against your workstaions and servers:
Open command window – Start>run>type ‘cmd’
Navigate to the exanded directory and ‘run’ the scanner on each individual computer.
Example:
C:\ yourdesktop \scs\scs>scs.exe 192.168.31.2
[For the admins out you can use a host file for a range of IPs]
If you are unsure of how to find your IP address.
Open up command windows – – Start>run>type ‘cmd’ then type in “ipconfig /all”
[If you don’t know how to navigate in the DOS window check this out:
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/how-to-use-dos-command-prompt/ ]
Update – Another way to scan:
1. Download and install Python 2.6.1: [www.python.org] [python.org]
2. Download Impacket from [oss.coresecurity.com] [coresecurity.com] (or maybe [pypi.zestsoftware.nl] [zestsoftware.nl] or some other mirror)
3. Download the scanner from [iv.cs.uni-bonn.de] [uni-bonn.de]
4. Unpack Impacket into a folder, then install Impacket from a command line with c:\python26\python setup.py install
5. Run the scanner with the command c:\python26\python scs.py [starting_ip] [ending_ip]