HTC EVO 4G – A week later
I wanted to hold off writing my review of my new phone because I wanted to spend a week with it and learn all about it. I got the HTC EVO 4G on launch day and I immediately fell in love with it. I'm not the only one either, because I ended up ordering my wife one 2 days later.
So far the phone is amazing. Yes, I will admit that there is a bit of a battery life issue, but with a screen this size and the fact that you're going to spend every extra second playing with the damn thing, you're going to burn through some battery. You can get 2 spare batteries and a charger on eBay for about $11, so it's no big deal to carry an extra in your pocket.
Android and HTC Sense are amazing. With the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, everything runs like a bat out of hell. In fact, I can't say anything bad about the software on this phone. It's very intuitive to use and you pick things up very quickly. It took me all of 3 days to figure everything out, but I'm an experienced user. When it only took my wife the same time to figure the phone out, I knew it wasn't just me. The phone is that easy to use.
My wife told me "I've never been excited about a cell phone before, but I am out this". I feel the same way. Going from the Treo Pro to this is like going from a Yugo to a Ferrari. It's that good. The camera puts out some excellent pictures and now that Qik is up and running, the video calls are really good. I've also tested video calling on Fring with my friend Jef and it seems to work great too. Everything on this phone is snappy and beautiful. From what I've seen about the specs on the new iPhone 4, the EVO 4G should kick it's ass in everything except resolution.
If you're on the fence about getting an EVO, I'd say go for it. You won't be disappointed.
Oil Spill ROV cameras
I've put all the ROV cameras in one place.
My pain is your gain: Installing Windows after Ubuntu and the joy of GRUB2
Do yourself a favor and never do this if you have other things on your mind. The information is sparse and not very well written, so I'm going to fix that right now. Today I had to install Windows XP on my wife's laptop because some company that makes software that she needs decided that it would be too easy to allow people to use virtual machines to run their software. When I installed Ubuntu on the machine a few months back, I left a 30GB partition at /dev/sda1 to put Windows on there at a later date should she need it. Well, she needed it and I installed it. Once installed, I needed to get GRUB back. If you haven't done this with GRUB2, consider yourself lucky. Here's the easiest way to do it.
- Boot to the LiveCD Desktop (Ubuntu 9.10 or later).
- Open a terminal by selecting Applications, Accessories, Terminal from the menu bar.
- Determine the partition with the Ubuntu installation. The fdisk option "-l" is a lowercase "L".
-
sudo fdisk -l
If the user isn't sure of the partition, look for one of the appropriate size or formatting.Running sudo blkid may provide more information to help locate the proper partition, especially if the partitions are labeled. The device/drive is designated by sdX, with X being the device designation. sda is the first device, sdb is the second, etc. For most users the MBR will be installed to sda, the first drive on their system. The partition is designated by the Y. The first partition is 1, the second is 2. Note the devices and partitions are counted differently.
-
- Mount the partition containing the Ubuntu installation.
sudo mount /dev/sd''xY'' /mnt
Example: sudo mount /dev/sda1 Note: If the user has a separate /boot partition, this must be mounted to /mnt/boot
- Run the grub-install command as described below. This will reinstall the GRUB 2 files on the mounted partition to the proper location and to the MBR of the designated device.
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdX
Example: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
- Reboot
- Refresh the GRUB 2 menu with sudo update-grub
That doesn't look that difficult, does it? Yeah, well, it was a pain in the ass to get to that point. If you notice, I highlighted the example for #5. If you do what I did and try to sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda1, then you're going to end up getting something that looks like this:
grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a partition instead of the MBR. This is a BAD idea.
grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and its use is discouraged.
You don't want this. You're going to try to force it and you're going to fuck something up. Make damn sure you do it right. Let's look at my particular situation.
My setup looks like this:
/dev/sda1 is NTFS
/dev/sda2 is ext4
/dev/sda3 is swap
I would have to enter the following commands:
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
After knocking that out, it should tell you that it's been successful and all you now need to do is reboot! It took me 5 different times to get this damn thing back. I ended up bombing out the Windows MBR by installing GRUB on it, which made me have to do a fixboot/fixmbr from the windows recovery console and start all over again. Once I was back to square 1, following the commands above got me done in 5 minutes.
I hope this helps you!
-Greg


How to get past the new isoHunt Lite and get to the old original site
If you are a torrent hound like some people, you have probably noticed that on April 5th, isoHunt changed the site for US users. This REALLY sucks because it basically takes away your filtering capabilities and the ability to view the comments on the files. The thing is, isoHunt is my favorite .torrent search engine and I want my old isoHunt back!!! Well, if you're like me and you want the old isoHunt back, here's how you can do it. This also works on TorrentBox.com and any other site that blocks US users.
1. First off, you should already have a copy of Firefox installed on your computer. If you are only using IE, you have problems that I can't solve in a simple blog post. Go get Firefox and get it installed. If you have it installed already, go to step 2.
2. We need to download a Firefox Add-on called FoxyProxy. You can find it at http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/ or you can skip straight to it by clicking here. Add FoxyProxy to Firefox. You'll need to restart Firefox after you install it.
3. You'll notice at the bottom right corner of Firefox that FoxyProxy is Disabled. It'll look like this:
Go ahead and click on that or you can go to Tools -> FoxyProxy Standard and it will open the next window (click for bigger version):
4. Now we need to add some proxies. I like to use xroxy.com to find my proxies. One reason I like it is because you can setup the proxies with a single click. I'll show you how to do both. We need to find a proxy to use that will get us past the isoHunt lite and to the main site. To do this you can use proxies all over the globe. For this how-to, I'll use a proxy in Canada. I suggest that you try out various proxies until you find one that works best for you. I've used proxies in Canada, the UK, and many other countries, it just so happens, that Canada seems to be the fastest for me.
5. At xroxy.com you need to click on "By Country" or click the picture below:

6. Click "Canada" in the list on that page to bring up the list of all Canadian proxies. Once there, there's 2 ways of setting up a proxy in FoxyProxy, manually or automatically. For the auto setup, just click the FoxyProxy icon next to the proxy:
.
7. To setup a proxy manually, there's many different how-to's out there that can be found in the help section of FoxyProxy's website. There's one with screenshots for an older version of FoxyProxy, and there's one written by FoxyProxy on how to configure the software.
8. Once you have the proxy setup, you need to tell the software how to use it. For the sake of simplicity, you can simply right click on the "FoxyProxy:Disabled" and tell it "Use proxy 'XROXY Proxy' for all URLs". You can also setup patterns for that proxy to use.
9. To setup patterns, double click the XROXY Proxy from the main screen in FoxyProxy. Click on the URL Patterns tab and Add New Pattern. When the screen comes up, enter the following:

Type the URL EXACTLY like I did with the /* behind it to use as a wildcard. If you don't do this, only the main page of isoHunt will go through the proxy and all the search pages will kick back the Lite version. Click OK and you'll have setup the pattern. Now you can tell FoxyProxy to "Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities". Once you do that, all traffic going to isoHunt will pass through the proxy and all other traffic will go straight to the internet without going through a proxy.
Once you're back to the main isoHunt site, you're good to go. I highly suggest using µTorrent as your client and I would definitely download PeerBlock to use block unwanted traffic. Once you have PeerBlock installed, you can get your lists from iBlockList.com to stop all those evil people that you don't want accessing your network. If you want to surf anonymously, you can download Tor, but that will really slow you down. Onion routers like Tor will bounce your traffic all over the world before it finally makes it out to the cloud.
That should be all you need to know to get back to the main site of isoHunt. We really shouldn't have to take such measures simply to view a website. We need to support net neutrality and tell our lawmakers that we will NOT be censored, and if they do, we will simply find a way around them.
P.S. For all those Canadians living in the US and would like to watch shows like Canada's Worst Driver but can't, you can use this same method. Make sure you use a Canadian proxy.
Slipping past cell phone voice mail greetings
I hate people that put long drawn-out voice mail greetings on their cell phones. In fact, very few things will cause me to just hang up the phone and not leave an important voice mail more than that. That's why I've done a bunch of searches and decided to tell you guys (and leave it here for my future reference) just how to skip past the greetings. I have a friend of mine, we'll call him "Mary" that has a greeting in which he'll tell you his life story, website, and read "War and Peace" before it ends. I VERY rarely leave him a voice mail because I don't want to sit through that long ass greeting, not to mention eat up an extra minute on my cell phone. Now I don't have to!
Verizon: press *
Sprint: press 1
T-Mobile or AT&T: press #
Of course, you need to know what carrier the person you are calling is using. The way I figure out is simply trial and error until I hit the right one. I timed Mary's once (he's on Verizon) and if I would have left a message, I would have been into the 3rd minute of the call and eating up my shared minutes. After his long ass greeting, Verizon gives all the options (including giving a fax options!) of crap you can do. I'm not sitting through that crap. Now as soon as I hear that voice mail pick up, I slam a * into the phone and I'm done.
What I would like to see is people to put this info at the beginning of the greeting. Something like "Hi, this is Greg. Please press * to skip this greeting". That would go a long way and I'm willing to bet more people would be willing to leave voice mail for you if you did.
Uploading multiple vCards to Google Contacts
As you can see from my last post, I've been messing around with my contacts list as of late. I'm trying to get as much info on these people as possible. Stuff like their birthdays and anniversaries, mailing addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc. While I'm putting all of this together, I'm also adding pictures for everyone on their vCard; a head shot for friends and the company logo for business contacts. Since I'm using Outlook 2007 as my main mail program, it's pretty easy to get all of this stuff in one place. The only problem I was running across was, like I said in the last post, Google was screwing with my contacts list. First off, you can only import 2 types of files to Google; a vCard file and a CSV. You can't upload a .pst file which would contain all of my contacts' pictures. The CSV file does move all the info I want except the pictures, and the vCard file moves everything, but you have to do it one at a time... or do you?
For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, this is what a Business card vCard looks like in Outlook if I were to email it to you. It's a .vcf file and contains all kinds of rich information on the back end. There's a link under the picture for you to download a full vCard for the president. There's also tons of other formats out there to store your contacts; everything from simple text files all the way to QR codes. If you have an app on your phone that does 3D barcodes, snap a pic of that one and you'll get the same info that's in the vCard.
Now, back to what I was originally talking about. Seeing as I want all that rich information in my contacts and I want to import them into Google, I need to use a vCard. I don't want to have to upload 239 individual files, so this is what I'm going to do.
- Go to your contacts in Outlook and highlight them all (ctrl-A). Right click and "Send Full Contact" then "In Internet Format (vCard)". Depending on how many contacts you have, you may have to split them up into groups. I did...
- An email should pop up with a bunch of attachments. Send that email to yourself.
- From the email you just sent to yourself, highlight all the attachments, right-click, save as. Save them somewhere easy to access.
- Open up a command line. (Windows Key + R, then type "cmd" and press OK)
- Navigate to the folder where you saved the contacts. I saved them in C:\contacts, so we'll use that.
- The command to type from the directory you have saved your contacts is:
copy /B *.vcf all_contacts.vcf - This will create a file in that directory called "all_contacts.vcf". In that file will be the vCards of all of your contacts.
- Now you just go to Google.com/contacts, click "Import" on the right side of the page, and upload that file!
It's pretty easy when you think about it. I don't know of any way to do this from the GUI, so you're going to have to use the command line. Once you have everything uploaded to Google Contacts, you should be set. All you pictures and information should have been transferred and now you have a full backup of your contacts list should your computer crash! I also use the same contacts list on my Windows Mobile phone, so I have multiple backups of my contacts list. I'll never have to run around trying to rebuild it after losing my phone again!!!
-Greg
A message about security
When I originally started this blog, it was entitled "Adventures in Networking" and it dealt primarily with networking and, more specific, Cisco network security. Since that time I've written about everything from hurricanes to hacking an Western Digital NAS device and giving a $50 Linksys router the power of a $500 Cisco box. Lately, I've been posting how-to's for all kinds of stuff and it's time to take a step back and talk about security for a little bit.
A web hosting client of mine got his site hacked in the past couple of days. About a year ago, I installed phpBB3 for him and setup his domain on my server. After that, I acted as admin on the forums and stuff like that. Well, phpBB3 got neglected and hadn't been updated in a while. It was running version 3.0.6 while the latest version was 3.0.7-PL1. 4 versions have been released since the last update. When the site got exploited, he looked at me like it was my fault. In fact, he told me something along the lines of "I paid you to build a site that was secure and you didn't do that". Well, I did build him a secure site a year ago, but in the past year, there has been enough holes found in phpBB3 to kill a horse.
I'm sure that any freelancer or businessman out there has had to deal with clients that don't understand what it is exactly you do. This happens a lot to me due to the range of things that I do. But in this instance, the client was under the illusion that I was going to maintain the website and keep it up to date for him. The original invoice that I sent for the site was simply 8 hours of work to get everything installed and setup properly and for a year of hosting. Since that first invoice, I have fixed little errors here and there for him without invoicing him because it's little things that only take a few minutes to take care of. Plus, the guy is a real good friend of mine and has been my friend since before we started doing business together. I do freebies for a lot of my customers from time to time. Maybe I messed up by doing these repairs and not charging him for them and by doing that I lead him to believe that I was doing it all for free.
I logged into the site this morning to notice that it had been defaced. Some hacker managed to get in and screw around with the AdminCP. Language packs were messed with, 300+ accounts were created and a bunch of spam had been posted. I went ahead and fixed everything that happened and went through the process of upgrading phpBB3 to the latest version. It took me about 2½ hours to get it all cleaned up and upgraded. Once I was done, I submitted a service ticket for the work. Here's another place I screwed up. I should have asked him if he wanted me fix it first because we don't have a service agreement between the two companies.
Well, the site got upgraded to the latest version of phpBB3 and it was working fine.... for about 3 hours. That's when our little hacker managed to get back in and lock me out completely. My best guess is that there's a zero-day exploit on phpBB 3.0.7-PL1 that will also work on all previous versions. In that instance, there's not a whole lot I can do about it other than block the proxies that he's used to get to the site with or just shut the site down. Well, I shut it down.
Here's where the main problem starts. The customer assumed that it was my responsibility to update the software for him. I don't go to HP and bitch at them because there's holes in Windows. Once I install the software, it's up to the client to keep that software up to date. All of my other web clients know this and they keep their CMS software up to date. If we would have set up a service contract in which I said I would maintain the security of his site, then it's no problem. It's my responsibility to fix the security issues that come up, but there's no agreement there.
Also, the client wants 100% security. We all know that 100% security does not exist and never will exist. He didn't like the fact that I used open-source software for the site because people can read the source code. Well, the open-source stuff is free, so that's why it was used. But even closed-source software has security holes in it.
To wrap up this rant, I wish people could understand that the only secure computer is one that's powered down and unplugged from the internet. A friend once told me that if you installed a fresh copy of Windows XP (no service packs) on a computer and plugged it directly into the internet, it would be rooted within 12 seconds. 12 seconds! There is no security, only the illusion of it.
-Greg
Idea for a new kind of company; looking for public opinion.
I was sitting around the other day and came up with an idea for a different kind of company. It's not exactly a Co-Op, and it's not exactly an ESOP. It's something different, but a cross between the two. I've spoken with a friend of mine that's a business management consultant and he's never heard of someone doing what I'm thinking about and that's why I turn to you, the internet. It's hard to put this idea into words, much less try to convey it in a short period of time, so please bear with me here because I'll be all over the place. We'll call the company QWERT for the sake of space and time.
QWERT would be a partnership of freelance web designers and programmers. Every freelancer has a project that he's never gotten too because it's just too big for them to do alone or they just don't have the time to complete the entire project alone. A bunch of talented people come together to work on each others projects. I would pick 2 or 3 people that I know are VERY talented individuals that have money making ideas that just haven't been worked on yet. Once the 4 of us are together, we start looking for more people. To become a member of QWERT, you need to have a project that all other members agree on unanimously. You also have to have talents that are provable through your portfolio and all other members have to agree on that unanimously. The projects should be picked by the complexity of each part of it. You want to make sure that throughout the projects the work would be spread around evenly based on each person's specialty. You'd have one heavy programming project and one heavy flash. One heavy database and one heavy graphics. You get the idea... spread the work around so no one "department" is consistently working more than anyone else.
One we build a team of 10 or so people. Once the team is built, we vote on which projects we want to work on or we chose them at random. I don't know on that one 100% yet. Once we finish a project, we move on to the next and so on. During the voting process, we would try to bring projects up for vote in such a way as to give the specialty of the last project a "break" on the next one. You don't want to do two heavy database jobs back to back. Every person has to work on every project. There are NO exceptions. That's the only way this plan works.
Every member of QWERT will be an equal "owner" of the company. All profit of the company is split equally between everyone. There 's no managers. The person who's project we are working on will act as project manager for that project. They will still do their specialty, but they run the project. An outside management company will run the financial aspects and be the registered agent. No member of QWERT will have access to any of the company credit or anything like that, but all financial decisions will be made by the democratic process. The Agent will only act on our behalf and under the direction of QWERT. The Agent would be the ones paying the members their share out of the company fund after all expenses are paid. And no, a new laptop for you to work on is not a company expense. Pay for it yourself.
There's no sales department, we only work on our own projects. Once we run out of the original projects, we start coming up with new ones. This would not be a full time job, but something that people who have some free time and want some side work would do. Our meetings would be held over something like GoToMeeting and we'd use collaboration software to make sure everyone's on the same page.
Well, that's the basics. There's more holes than a brick of Swiss cheese, and there's a lot more thought that needs to go into it, but I want to get opinions on the basic idea. Do you think this is something that could work? If you were in a position to do some side work and you fit what QWERT needs, would you consider doing it? What would you change or add? Please, PLEASE leave a comment with your opinion, no matter how harsh you think it is or how dumb. I want ALL opinions here. Let's use the hive mind of the internet and create an entirely new kind of company and an entirely new way of doing business.
DD-WRT and the WRT54G-TM
So I do a lot of DD-WRT how-to's. I don't know why, I guess it's just that I seem to put DD-WRT on a bunch of different routers and decide that I'm going to document what I've done. Today's how-to is for the WRT54G-TM. Let me give you a little info on the WRT54G-TM.
The WRT54G-TM (TM stands for T-Mobile) is also called the T-Mobile "Hotspot@Home" service. It allows calls to be made via T-Mobile's GSM network or via WiFi Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), using the same telephone and phone number (a special dual-mode phone designed for the service is required e.g. Blackberry Pearl 8120). Additionally, once a call is in progress, one may transition from WiFi to GSM (and vice versa) seamlessly, as WiFi signal comes and goes, such as when entering or exiting a home or business. A special router is not needed to use the service, but the T-Mobile branded routers are supposed to enhance the telephone's battery life. This is the only known tweak to the TM version of the firmware. Obviously, none of this will be worth anything seeing as you're about to flash it with DD-WRT.
The hardware appears to be like WRT54GL however has 32MB ram and 8MB flash. Yeah, this thing is a monster. Until not that long ago the only way to upgrade this router was through a JTAG cable and header, but luckily we don't have to worry about that anymore. Let's get to it.
First off, download the software you're going to need. Here's a rar file with everything you're going to need. In the archive are 3 files:
CFE_Updater-WRT54G-TM.bin
dd-wrt.v24-13064_mega_generic.bin
tftp2.exe
The upgrade is pretty straight forward, but it has a little twist. The default LAN IP Address of the Linksys WRT54G-TM is 192.168.0.1. The default IP for everything else is going to be 192.168.1.1. A way around this is to simply setup 2 static IP addresses on your computer. I setup 192.168.1.9 and 192.168.0.9, but you can put whatever you want as long as they fall within the /24 subnet of 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.0.0.
1.) As always DO A HARD RESET BEFORE YOU FLASH FIRMWARE. This does not mean hitting the reset button and saying you are done. This means doing the 30-30-30 reset. To do a 30-30-30 reset you must push the reset button with your router powered on. Hold it for 30 seconds with the router powered on. STILL holding it, pull the power cord for 30 seconds. Still holding it, plug the router back in and continue to hold the reset button for 30 more seconds. You will have held the button for a full 90 seconds without releasing it. You will not get a password renewal page as you have stock Linksys firmware on the router still.
2.) Open a command prompt window and type ping -t 192.168.1.1 and hit enter. Leave this window open. We're going to come back to this later, but you need to keep this open.
3.) Log into the WRT54G-TM's web interface @ http://192.168.0.1 and go to the Administration Tab - Firmware Upgrade. Upload the CFE_Updater-WRT54G-TM.bin to the router.
!!!ATTENTION!!! You MUST wait at least 5 minutes after clicking the Upgrade button to allow the CFE_Updater to replace the stock CFE on the router and for it to erase the rest of the flash, otherwise you will brick your router.
A few seconds after clicking the Upgrade button the Linksys web interface will report that the upload has been successful and the power light will begin flashing on the router. Do NOT assume that the CFE replacement/flash erasing/reboot process has finished as the power light will continue to flash after it has rebooted. So there is no way to tell when it is ready for you to TFTP the DD-WRT firmware to it except when you begin to see the ping respond.
So once it is finished replacing the stock CFE and erasing the rest of the flash, the router will reboot. When the router is ready for the TFTP upload of the DD-WRT firmware, you will see the ping -t 192.168.1.1 begin to respond in the command prompt window that you opened before.
4.) Open up the TFTP utility and set it up like this:

The file there is the path to the dd-wrt.v24-13064_mega_generic.bin in the archive
Now click the Upgrade button. Once the firmware is sent to the router, it will reboot. The power light will change from flashing to solid when it is ready to be configured. The default IP will be 192.168.1.1.
If you do not see a progress bar as the tftp utility transmits the file, you may need to power cycle your router. Wait until the tftp utility has finished its attempts, then power cycle (possibly waiting a few seconds) and wait until you can ping 192.168.1.1 before clicking Upgrade again.
A few notes:
- Tornado has made it so that the router will retain it's MAC Address that is on the label on the bottom of the router with the new CFE replacement.
- Tornado is in the process of making a revert bin for those who may choose to revert back to the stock Linksys firmware (god only know why)
Many thanks goes out to Tornado, Eko, and Brainslayer for their work on this! Also, thanks to Luniz2k1 that wrote the original how-to that my lazy ass ripped off to make this one.


