X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 699 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 11 of 70).

Tallying up electric vehicle savings

I was showing off my electric car to an engineer friend when he asked me a very engineer-like question.

“So, how much money have you saved?” he grinned. “I know you’ve figured it out, right?”

“Well, yes and no,” was my response. I went on to briefly explain fluctuating electric and gasoline costs and how the solar panels must also factor in. It’s not so simple to say “I have saved x dollars.”

That said, I do have a record of my electricity usage, both before and after EV. I can figure out my cost of charging during off-peak hours and extrapolate that over the time we’ve owned the car. Perhaps I can find a resource that shows the average price of unleaded gasoline for the past year or so. Finally, I can say for certainty how many miles I’ve driven. Putting all of this into a spreadsheet ought to give me a ballpark figure on how much it has cost to drive. Then I can factor in the skipped oil changes and other unneeded mechanical work and get a decent guess as to what we’ve saved.

This might be a fun Saturday afternoon project.

Is Facebook secretly snooping on my photos to serve ads?

I’ve been taking part in an experimental drug study at the local Veterans Administration hospital. Now that the study is wrapping up, I thought it might be wise to take a photo of my medicine bottle for future reference. So, during a break in traffic on my way to my appointment the other day, I picked up my work Android phone and snapped some photos of my medicine bottle, like this one.

Until this blog post I hadn't shared this photo with anyone.

Until now I hadn’t shared this photo with anyone.

All seemed well until I logged into Facebook on the same phone yesterday. That’s when I was astonished to see this targeted ad show up in my Facebook feed.

Holy shit! What are the odds that Facebook would just happen to serve up an ad that matched a photo I took less than 24 hours earlier, a photo that I hadn’t shared with anyone? Call me paranoid but I can’t even fathom the odds that this is coincidental. I don’t post any medical stuff on Facebook, have never mentioned medicine or bottles or … anything. No keywords. There is nothing I’ve shared voluntarily on Facebook that could have summoned an ad that just happens to match a photograph I had just taken but never intended to share.
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KeePass2Android password manager

keepass2android

At $WORK, I use a commercial password management tool that seems to fit my needs as well as the company’s. For my home use, however, I prefer open source.

My password manager of choice has been KeePass. I like it’s open nature and wide variety of supported platforms. As I began to use it regularly, though, I realized that keeping all these password databases in sync is a huge challenge. Earlier this week I went searching to see if another open source password manager might do the trick and thanks to this post on the excellent Linuxious blog I discovered KeePass2Android.

KeePass2Android is a fork of KeePass and uses KeePass’s same libraries to manipulate its databases. The big win for KeePass2Android, though, is its extensive support for remote files. It supports databases hosted on popular file-sharing tools such as Google Drive, DropBox, Box.com, as well as SFTP-and-WebDAV-hosted files. It’s also been rewritten from Java to Mono for Android, which seems to be snappier than the Java version.

Now I have KeePass2Android installed on all of my devices and pointed to the same database! That’s one big feature now no longer solely the domain of commercial password managers. Score one for open source!

How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code – Quartz


This is a fascinating story of how one programmer’s deletion of 11 lines of his code wound up breaking the Internet. Yes, we are really that interconnected.

A man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world last week by deleting 11 lines of code.

The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of code that itself relies on the benevolence of fellow programmers. When that system breaks down, as it did last week, the consequences can be vast and unpredictable.

Source: How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code – Quartz

How I almost invented Wikipedia

Wikipedia Logo

Wikipedia Logo

I sold one of my domain names this month, reliablesources.com. I had that domain longer than I’ve had kids, registering it on 17 January 2000. Two months ago the domain became old enough to drive.

I remember just where I was when I decided to register the domain. I was in my entrepreneurial phase at the time, working with some extremely talented friends at NeTraverse and while I was on a business trip to Austin I dreamed up what I thought would be an innovative website.

I was a regular reader of the Slashdot (which was recently sold) nerd news website back then and was intrigued by its “karma” system of ranking posts. I wanted to apply this karma ranking to the people in the news, giving users the ability to rank what someone in the news says based on that person’s known credibility.

It was inspired by President Bill Clinton’s time in office. The Office of the President carries a lot of built-in credibility, for instance, so right away you’re going to listen to what the President says. But what if the President is caught lying (i.e., “I did not have sexual relations…”)? That should make one skeptical of whatever that President says, knocking down his or her karma score.
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Fearing the radio

Console radio

Console radio

News and Observer reporter John Murawski wrote today of a group of electricity customers who fear that the smart meter Duke Energy uses is poisoning them with radio-frequency (RF) radiation.

Andrew McAfee of Raleigh submitted a 45-page filing, noting prominently: “Sent from a cabled computer with the WiFi turned off.”

“Your body basically becomes an antenna,” he said from his landline phone last week. “I immediately feel a tingling, burning sensation on my scalp.”

“These meters are designed to burst a radiation signal out a couple of miles,” McAfee said of smart meters. “Imagine every house in your neighborhood blipping out these things all day.”

Apparently, people don’t understand that radiation of the RF variety is not the same as radiation of the nuclear variety. One is a known carcinogen. The other brings you Fox News (whether Fox News is a carcinogen is post for another day).

Blaming RF (which I’ll call by their better-known name, radio) for something is akin to blaming sound: it all depends on what the sound or radio is. Listening to music with your ear placed on the grill of a 1000 watt audio amplifier will likely cause you injury, whereas the same music at a reasonable volume on your stereo at home can be safe and enjoyable.
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Ubuntu upgrade kills network

I recently applied some software updates to my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop. I noticed right after I did that that the NetworkManager applet disappeared, leaving my laptop unable to automatically connect to the network.

When I tried running nm-applet manually, I got this message:

(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files

(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
^Cnm-applet-Message: PID 0 (we are 6238) sent signal 2, shutting down…

I know how to run

dhclient eth0

… and plug in an Ethernet cable to get back onto the network, so I did and then did some sleuthing. It turns out that I had the trusty/proposed repository enabled, and that a network-manager package in that repository has a bug. This resulted in the following error message when one tries to run NetworkManager manually:

root@savannah:/etc/init.d# NetworkManager

(NetworkManager:6288): GLib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory.
This indicates a bug in someone’s code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it’s set.
The overwriting error message was: Key file does not have group ‘connectivity’

According to this bug report, the initial fix was to downgrade network-manager (according to this page). However, a fixed version of network-manager has since been placed in trusty/proposed. If you do

apt-get upgrade network-manager

… your Ubuntu system should fetch a working network-manager.

This is all just in case my fellow Linux geeks run into this same issue.

Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer

Time-Warner-Cable
Former Raleigh City Councilor Barlow Herget wrote to the N&O about his abysmal recent experience at the Time Warner Cable office.

Mr. Herget asks if the City Council could change the law to go back to local control of cable TV franchises. Local control went out the window in 2005 when a group of “business-friendly” Democrats in the state legislature successfully passed the “state franchise for cable television” bill into law for their friends at Time Warner Cable. This stripped control of cable franchises from city and county governments and placed it in the hands of the state. It’s easier to pay off state leaderss rather than local leaders, it seems.

I predicted this would happen back in 2006 and time has proven me correct. I just wish I could’ve convinced more state legislators at the time.

I recently had the dreadful occasion to visit Time Warner’s office in Raleigh. We needed a “box” for a new television. It was a hot 95 degrees outside, and inside the Atlantic Avenue office, there were 35 to 40 people waiting, including one crying baby.

The room was the size of a typical school class. We took a number and asked how long we should expect to wait. Thirty minutes. We luckily found two chairs together and sat down.My fellow subscribers were lined along the walls, a few standing, more coming in. Mostly patient, the steam was starting to rise in some of these customers. There was an inane game show on a big screen TV that a few were watching.

One lady came in carrying a big box, saw the crowd and asked how long she had to wait. Told 30 minutes, she declared she was on her lunch break and, after waiting 10 minutes, departed, muttering, “Some people have to work for a living,”

Source: Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer

setupupgrade.fixbugs.club attempts to install malware

This morning, my wife returned to her Google Chrome web browser to see the following tab had been opened:

setupupgrades.fixbugs.club attempts to install a fake Adobe Flash player

setupupgrades.fixbugs.club attempts to install a fake Adobe Flash player

The text reads:

WARNING: Your Adobe Flash Player version is out of date. Your computer is prone to malware attacks! Please update the latest Flash Player version

At the bottom of the page is this:

UPDATE INSTALL
About | End User License Agreement | Contact | Privacy | Terms of service | Download Manager | How to Uninstall

By downloading, you accept our Terms of use and Privacy Policy. This free download is done via download manager which may offer other applications you can decline or uninstall. This site and the download manager have no relationship with the author. Software may also be available for free from the original author’s site.

setupupgrade.fixbugs.club © 2016 | All Rights Reserved.

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Amazon’s customer service backdoor — Medium

Everything you do to secure your Amazon account Customer Service can undo in a heartbeat. A scary tale of how easily Amazon’s customer service can be socially engineered.

As a security conscious user who follows the best practices like: using unique passwords, 2FA, only using a secure computer and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away, I would have thought my accounts and details would be be pretty safe? Wrong.

Because when someone has gone after me, it all goes for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor, customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com

Source: Amazon’s customer service backdoor — Medium