JB's Blog

I’ve been recommending Macbook Pro’s as replacement laptops for my clients for a while now and what’s crazy is that they’re actually buying them!

I had a strange request the other day from a user who was adamant that something was wrong with his Caps Lock key.  Working away on his machine I didn’t notice anything wrong with the key, and couldn’t find anything jamming the key.  So I wrote it off as a once off and told the user I couldn’t find anything wrong.

Time passed and a week later I had the same angry request that the Caps Lock key was annoying the user.

This time I had the user sit down and demonstrate to me their problem.  He said that it seemed like the key wasn’t responsive and began jamming away on the Caps Lock key.  Sure enough, as he smashed the key repeatedly you could see the LED light only blink sporadically at best.

I jumped on to test it myself and realised why I didn’t see it as a problem at first.  I very rarely use the Caps Lock key whilst this user uses it literally every time he wanted a Capital letter.  When I used the keyboard I didn’t pick up the problem as I naturally tapped the Caps Lock key a little longer then a normal key press.

Turns out, this is a feature and is intended to prevent people from accidentally hitting the caps lock key.  It’s been a feature since 2009 and I haven’t noticed the change.

Good news for the user I retrained him to use the Shift key instead when typing capital letters.

Lately I’ve had quite a few Windows laptop machines become infected with nasty spyware ( lots of variations of the infamous MS Antivirus ).

I do a lot of my work remote, so when the system is this crapped up you really need to mount the infected harddisk outside of the infected operating system to have a chance cleaning it up.

SystemRescueCD is a popular tool I have lying around.  If the infected person is remote I have them burn and pop a copy of this CD into their machine so I can remotely ssh into it.

Clamscan can usually pick up the nasties and remove them, but it is incredibly slow.  A little trick I use to speed up the rescue process is limit the scanning to .exe files only…

clamscan -ri –remove –include=’.[eE][xX][eE]‘

This way you’ll speed up the scanning significantly to get the machine to a usable level.

Fixing the damage of the malware in Windows is another process entirely altogether, but by removing the executable malware you have at least a fighting chance.  If not it’s rebuild time!

One of the gamers in the LanSmash forums posted a question about these new fan-dangled Gunnar Computer Glasses so I thought I’d have a look up and give my internet opinion.



By reading the marketing blurb it makes me think that these glasses will give me super powars!




Let’s go through the features…
—– i-FI lens coatings
They say: Our proprietary nano-filters help capture all of the good light coming from the computer screen while diffusing the bad reflective light and glare…

JB says: We tried to come up with something other then Polarized glasses and failed, so we started playing connect the dots.

I think you’d be better of by reducing the glare in your work environment by say closing blinds, moving monitors and tables, and having anti-glare non-reflective screens.

If all else fails just wear a set of Polarized glasses or move to an underground bunker.

—- fRACTYL lens geometry
They say: Aiding the natural focusing power of the cornea, our lens geometry eases eyestrain caused by near distance computer viewing.

JB says: We thought it would be cool to magnify the lenses so you wouldn’t have to sit so close to the screen; but then our marketing department figured out a way to make it sound like these glasses will make you focus so hard your eyes will become superman style laser beams.

—- iONik lens tints
They say: iONik lens tints take harsh artificial light and precisely tune it to match the anatomy of the eye. Our custom organic dye compounds condition and shift transmitted light into the preferred color spectrum, increasing visual contrast, detail and resolution…

JB says: We coloured our glasses amber to make your computer terminal look like it’s from the 70′s.




It is true though, Amber coloured glasses do help you with high contrast. Gun nuts have been using amber glasses for decades.




That all said, if you’re struggling with contrast with your computer you should probably change the settings on it to a high contrast settings.




Your desktop will look like shit however.

—- diAMIX lens material
No existing lens material had all the properties we needed. So we gave our lab techs the task of developing the lightest, most optically pure lens material possible

JB says: We sprinkle dust over our glasses and make sure no less then three unicorn’s pissed on the lenses.

I’ve been experimenting using FreeNAS for some online archiving systems.

I put together a cheap AMD64 system for a client with less then $300AUD of parts (excluding harddrives).  It was an attractive alternative from something like a Drobo, because I could use NFS easily and not be limited with how many drives we could stack in one box.

Shock horror though, the server kept crashing with panic: kmem_map too small errors.  I thought initially it was having only 2Gig of RAM in the machine so I stole another 2Gig from an accountant’s desktop PC.

That didn’t work, so then I disabled ZFS compression, and still had the same results.

Then I realised I’ve mistakenly used the 32bit version of FreeNAS, so I lazily used UNetbootin to create a new USB thumbstick install with the 64bit version.

So what I’ve learnt is…

+ Minimum 4gig for ZFS compression
+ 64bit Freenas for ZFS

Googling around I saw quite a few people mention that if you want to use ZFS with FreeNAS then 64bit is the way to go.  Makes me feel safer knowing the data is being stored with ZFS voodoo!

I have a few customers who have massive Spam traps and Catch-all email accounts.  These accumulate an enormous amount of email, and like any good tree need to be pruned.

I was going to write a small PHP script, or some crazy sieve scripts but of course someone has been there, done that, and compiled the source already for me.

An easy solution is to use archivemail - http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/

archivemail  --delete --days=60 imaps://spambox:hereismyawesomepassword@lansmash.com/INBOX

Archivemail will let you delete emails older than a date or time and works with IMAP, POP3, etc

So how can you measure how much water is in a tank?

There are a couple a ways that are quite simple, like plugging a hose on the tap (with no pump); turning on the flow and then hold the hose up until the water stops flowing.

Or if it’s a metal tank you can sometimes feel on a hot day where it is cool and guestimate where there water is. Even shock horror, climb up the tank and stick your head in to see where the water level is.

All of these methods are boring and don’t involve enough electricity. So I took it upon myself on a wet Sunday afternoon to electrify the tank.

I swear there is nothing in this world that a little bit of CAT5 and a lot of luck won’t solve.