The Internet in Numbers

Wow...these numbers are quite staggering...90 trillion emails in one year!!!

The Internet in Numbers: "Pingdom has compiled a very interesting collection of Internet statistics from 2009. From the number of emails sent in a day (247 billion) to Internet users worldwide (1.7 billion) the blog post has a long list of stats in categories including social media and online video. While a lot of the numbers are estimates and pulled from sources all around the web, it's still an interesting read and a nice summary of the year online.

The Internet in Numbers originally appeared on About.com Graphic Design on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 21:38:05.

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Epson Stylus R1900 CD / DVD Label Template

After fruitless searching the web up and down for a template to create CD labels with my Epson Stylus R1900, I decided to bake my own. This printer (as many other Epson's, for which this template may very well work too!) come with a beautiful way of putting some ink onto inkjet-printable media. There is a tray you place the CD or DVD on, and the printer takes care of all adjustments, etc. By default the only way to print these labels is the somewhat mediocre (and that is putting it nice!) software that comes with the printer. I however was looking to print them directly from Adobe Illustrator, so I spend a little time and a lot of patience until everything lined up just right. And because I am such a nice guy I decided to save you the time and hassle that I went through trying to find this somewhere on the web, and will share the template with whoever has a need for it! The template is a zipped Adobe Illustrator (.ai) file created with CS4 and saved as CS3.

You can download it here, courtesy of NOTZDesign, the pet-business-project of yours truly.

That Pesky Conficker Gets Busy

Just a quick reminder that there are still plenty of infected systems out there, and making sure yours is not one of them has never been easier if you use the Conficker Eye Chart (might be a tad slow at times as I am sure it is getting plenty of hits these days, some even talk about a DDOS attack on the site! If that is the case, try this link instead). Apparently there are also some speculations that Conficker infected systems have begun to download a rather large file, possibly a key logger.


Via Lifehacker - That Pesky Conficker Gets Busy, Updates

How about catching some lectures at Yale or MIT?

This is a pretty cool site - kind of like Netflix Watch Now for university lectures! There is an ever growing archive of lectures from some of the most prestigious universities online that can be accessed for free! The subjects covered span pretty much anything from astrophysics to psychology and, call me a geek or whatever else you want, but I find myself watching a lot on that site lately. Funny, how just a few years ago (OK, I admit, a decade ago...:D) I could not wait to get out of these things, or pretty much do what I can not even having to listen to it, and now I am actually looking forward to watching some of those lectures ;-) Check it out after the jump...Good Stuff!


Academic Earth - Video lectures from the world's top scholars

April 1st - What Will Really Happen?

There is more than a lot of talk about the Conficker worm (also known as Downadup) on and offline going around these days, especially as doomsday (April 1) inches closer, and there are more than a few sources out there that make Joe Average PC user quite uncomfortable in his chair at home and this little article over at SANS is cutting it down to the facts and offers a few links to some clear cut information about the worm and related dangers.

I am in no way saying to take this one lightly, but also don't want all kinds of people spending all kinds of money on the next best popup-ad telling them that their entire computer will be worthless after April 1 if they do not spend $59.99 right away to get immediate protection (and a free Laptop, PS3 and iPod) and their credit card information published in the prestigious collection of some Russian CC vendor for at least 0.0001 cents a number...

Catch the basics after the jump.

Via ISC Website - April 1st - What Will Really Happen? - isc

Self-signed Exchange 2007 Certificates

I won't be going into the details why this may or may not be best practice, or a good idea, or the other ups and downs of using self signed certificates to secure your communications between E2K7 and Outlook, OWA, ActiveSync and so on, but just in case you get into the same bind as myself recently, and have to create a new certificate either because the old one is about to expire or domain names changed, and can't remember how to, here it goes!

This requires a CertAuthority to be setup on your E2K7 CAS and E2K7 PowerShell installed.'

We begin by creating a certificate request. And because we most likely need the certificate to cover multiple names/aliases for our server, we use the following command:

New-ExchangeCertificate -DomainName mail.domain.com, e2k7.domain.lan, autodiscover.domain.lan -FriendlyName "Exchange Hosting Certificate" -GenerateRequest:$True -Keysize 1024 -path c:\e2k7hosting.txt -privatekeyExportable:$true -subjectName "c=us, o=Organization Name, CN=mail.domain.com"

This will create a certificate request with the name e2k7hosting.txt in the root of C. Make sure you replace the -DomainName with the values appropriate for you, covering all the names that OWA, Outlook or ActiveSync might be using to connect to your server.

Now open this text file and copy the content of it to the clipboard. Once you have done that, open an internet browser and navigate to https://servername/certsrv which will open the web interface of your certification authority on the server where you can paste the previously copied certificate request and then download the certificate. Make sure you grab the .cer as well, in case you have mobile devices connecting via ActiveSync. It makes certificate install a breeze.

Next import the certificate into the default IIS site for your E2k7 server through the PowerShell once again by using the following command:

import-exchangecertificate -path c:\certificatename.p7b | enable-exchangecertificate -services iis

Check the IIS default site if the correct certificate is now listed as installed.

Distribute the .cer to your mobile clients and install.

Done!

I want my cupcake...NOW!

This is just not fair, and especially not when you are a geek like me with new-release-iatis as one of your major ailments. First off, I do not want to complain whatsoever about Android. I have literally had WindowsCE/Mobile/PocketPC phones with the Redmond flavored mobile OS for years and years now, and none of the phones have ever felt as well rounded out of the Box as my current G1.
With EVERY WinMo phone I would spend hours and hours upgrading, flashing ROM's, finding bits and pieces of software whereas with the G1 I have now asked myself at least 10 times in the 10 days I had it if there isn't anything I need to upgrade, install or anything else to make it work, and there really isn't. It just works.

Certainly, it is lacking the most crucial enterprise feature right now, exchange active sync, but that's not a flaw of the phone IMHO, and I have a feeling it is something that will be implemented down the road, most likely through a sync app. Because it is my personal cell and not my work phone, all the google-syncing-goodness it does is much more important to me!

But I am sure you know how it is reading this blog as a fellow geek, or if you are not a geek, please do try to understand - there is a constant hunger for the newest update on whatever it is, heck, if there is a new version of blades for my blender I would put them in there! It is the constant pursuit of punishment for living on the bleeding edge of technology, a somewhat self-sadistic way of punishing one self with update-caused equipment failure only to find ways to make it work again...so yes, no matter just HOW good that G1 already is, I want my cupcake and I want to eat it too!

Via Engadget Mobile: Latest Cupcake build flaunted on video, still no closer to retail G1s

Office Supplies Fetish: Hanging Buckets Organization Rack

Yes, even a geek can sometimes get excited about considerably low-tech things...and if they involve IKEA, one of my favorite place to find materials for "furniture-hacks", especially in their scratch and dent section, then I can naturally not hold back than to blog about it. And guess what I will be doing over my lunch break? Have I mentioned that I have an IKEA literally around the corner from my office?
It really looks like a great idea for a workplace or even a garage, workshop and such, and from what I remember, IKEA has all kinds of different attachments for this system! Go and have a look after the jump!


Via Lifehacker: Office Supplies Fetish: Hanging Buckets Organization Rack

PortableApps Menu and Suites 1.5 released!

If you are like me and often have to support MS/WIN machines, and carry a USB drive with your favorite utilities around, you are probably familiar with the PortableApps menu and suites. It always was a great way to launch and organize all the utilities I schlep around on my WIN-Troubleshooter-USB-Drive, but there were a few minor annoyances especially with adding your own programs that are not part of PortableApps, e.g. I carry a lot of SysInternals stuff with me. Prior to this release, there was no way of renaming the items that are displayed, or even being selective which executables are picked up by the menu without workarounds. Well, that's all gripes of the past - the new version does all of that and more, and in case you care, it looks a little nicer too...

So head on over and grab your copy - I certainly will!

Link

Cam on the sushi conveyor...

Just because it is a beautiful Sunday and this is totally pointless I need to share it with you all...this is what happens when a camera makes the rounds on the Kaiten:

Linux on the HTC Blue Angel

I think I have found a new challenge - I have this aging HTC Blue Angel laying around at home. Now the really cool thing about this PocketPC Phone Dinosaur is that it is an incredibly nice, big, QVGA screen and a very powerful XScale PXA263 400 MHz CPU that successfully run at around 600MHz, which is leaps and bounds faster than most of the current PocketPC Phones on the market.
Unfortunately it has been collecting dust since quite a while now, which is really a shame as I am sure I can come up with 101 projects once I can get Linux running on it! I am not too worried about the GSM portion of the unit, as it will probably never ever have a SIM in it again, but the rest could be very useful. I am still trying to make a nice all-house-HTPC remote, and over wifi this would be the perfect little thing to use. There are some efforts already underway as a starting point...any suggestions or ideas out there???

Install Google Chrome without Google updater

If you are like me, and rather take care of your own updates instead of having some task running on your computer all the time and checking for updates to a particular software, but still like to use Google Chrome, then there is a solution right from Google for you now!
Needless to say, that means that from now on you will have to manually update Chrome, but what does it have that feature for under HELP->ABOUT! I much rather do that when there is a new release that I find useful, especially since every little piece of software wants to install it's own little updater these days - Oh the luxury of having all this memory and processing power available to us! (insert sarcasm here!).

So go ahead and grab your not-updating-when-it-feels-like-it copy of Google Chrome here!

How-to manually add items to dmenu

Dmenu is one of my favorite parts of #! CrunchBang Linux, which as most of you know is my favorite distribution, and I keep crunchbanging every computer that I can get my grimy little fingers on, but it was always somewhat of a mystery to me how dmenu actually picks up the programs it can find - well, that was until tonight, when I took a look at the associated scripts.

Let's say you installed a little python script that you want to be able to call from dmenu - I placed it into /usr/share/ with the hope dmenu would just pick it up magically, but no such luck - would have been too easy anyways. It is not much harder though, because all it needs is for you to create a symbolic link to the executable you want to start inside /usr/bin/ and dmenu will automagically find it! To do so, just type

sudo ln /path/to/your/file /usr/bin/symlinkname -s

and to make it a little more clear, let's say we have a program called “helloworld” in /usr/share/samples/ and want to call it from dmenu by the name “helloworld”. For this to work we would type:

sudo ln /usr/share/samples/helloworld /usr/bin/helloworld -s

Ummm…yes, that's it already - short HOWTO, but good to know none-the-less!

Better Interface for Uploading Gmail Attachments

Awesomeness right here!!! One of the things I have been waiting for. See how easy it is to make a geek happy? Just this little bit of additional functionality in gMail will make me smile all day and every single time I have to attache a bunch of files to an email! Thank you, gMail team!



via Google Operating System Blog:
Better Interface for Uploading Gmail Attachments

QUAKE Live - Beta

So after not being home when the gates opened, spending about an hour in the queue to download the browser plug-in, starting at #30,044, installing the browser-plug in which required a browser restart and guess what? Yea, back in line and back at #29,884 or something like that!

But who cares, it's Quake - it's gotta be worth the wait! Logged into gMail (which luckily works again without a hitch, as opposed to this morning, when I thought the world as we know it came to an end, gMail not being accessible) and wrote some emails until the game finally told me to log in and customize my character!
Shortly thereafter I was introduced to Crash, your virtual sparring partner...now sure, they had to give you some cute, female android to battle - just because they know geeks have a soft spot for fragging female androids and thought they'd have it easier that way! You basically are supposed to frag a 10 minute match in the beginner arena with her, then possibly move on to intermediate and so on. After this "evaluation" period you are supposed to be matched up with player at the same skill level as yourself, and that's where the thing went haywire - either I am THAT bad that they could not find anyone as poorly playing as me, or there is something wrong, possibly caused by the huge number of people flocking to the site - I played the beginner arena 4 times, each time winning the match, and each time being told that I have to complete my 10 minute eval match after I was done, so for now I gave up and try tomorrow again. I have to say though, a minimal download, short loading times and a lightning fast, full screen FPS with maybe not the best graphics and so on, but the fun factor sure seems to be there...Quake style! I think me likey!!!

QUAKE LIVE

Micro-USB is the new phone charging standard *BANGS HEAD REPEATEDLY*

I usually do not go on rants on my blog, but this is just ridiculous IMHO - how many appliances do we already have that use Mini-USB to charge or communicate? And now we need to change chargers, etc. again, where probably many of you, like myself, just recently found themselves in the "happy zone" of not worrying all that much about different chargers and so on all that much anymore, because no matter if it was our head set, cell, camera, ps3 controller and many other items, we could charge them all with the same cord, wherever we wanted, and now this...*goes and bangs his head a little more*

The $1.94 reason micro-USB is the new phone charging standard - Engadget Mobile

Best practices against hacking

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Best practices against hacking

This is some really great, even if very basic, information about some of the "bread & butter" kind of attacks your web site could face, should you have one! Not saying you will be a security expert after reading it, but it will give you some understanding what could happen to your web site and how, and what you might be able to do to prevent that. Also includes a bunch of links to some of the best resources on the subject.
Many of these things you might not be able to change or improve on if your site is hosted at the hosting company of your choice, but it is still an interesting read!

Happy Birthday, Niki Lauda!

One of my childhood idols, Niki Lauda, turned 60 today!

I am sure he is far less known over here, but in my home country he is a well known figure. When I think of my favorite race car driver, of who got me into racing or who I consider an idol of my childhood years, then it is Niki - I used to follow him through his F1 career as far as I can think back. He is a 3 times Formula 1 champion who had his career interrupted by a horrific accident suffering severe burns (hence the hat that he is never seen without) only to come back from a coma stronger than ever, finishing that season after only 6 weeks of absence. After his active racing career he became a professional pilot, owned and operated two airlines, managed the Jaguar Formula One racing team and worked as an advisor to the Ferrari F1 team. These days he is still involved in the F1 circus and is often found piloting a flight of his current airline, "Niki".

Here is to many more years, Niki! Happy Birthday!

Goodwill / DELL Reconnect Hardware Recycling Partnerships

I am not sure about all of you, but in my life of geekdom, I tend to collect unbelievable amounts of hardware over the time. But even more so at work, if you are working in the field in some IT department somewhere. And every now and then, you revisit either your basement or your corner in some storage closet at your work and you think that by now there really is no need to hold on to those 286's anymore...sure DSL will run on it just fine, but come on, how many lightweight Linux installations do you really have a use for? So, if you are trying to get rid of your old hardware, your options are pretty limited and if you want to do it in a responsible way, even more so.
DELL has partnered with many Goodwill agencies all across the US to start a partnership called "Reconnect", with it's sole purpose to recycle old computer hardware and keep it out of landfills. It's a triple win situation - You get rid of your junk, Goodwills gets reimbursed from DELL because they provide their Store/Donation Center/Logistics infrastructure, which allows them to fund programs for people with special challenges in their life, and you do something for the environment, because everything is recycled, separated and so on. Find some more info after the jump to the DELL Reconnect page.

Link

Hulu: Hulu Blocks Boxee, TV.com, Kicks Early Adopters in the Face

Hulu: Hulu Blocks Boxee, TV.com, Kicks Early Adopters in the Face

Many of you might have heard about or maybe even used Boxee for keeping up with their favorite shows - I have come to love it over the last months since I got into the Alpha. The biggest thing for me about Boxee was having a slick interface to Hulu, that I can control with my remote, and after finding a way to integrate Boxee into Vista Media Center I was as happy as a pig, because there is a lot of VMCE functionality and plug-ins that I just do not want to live without anymore. Now Hulu's content providers, speak our friendly broadcast networks, seem to have pulled the plug on this. Why, I have no idea - your bet is as good as mine, as I believe all that will do is move people once more away from the legal way of doing things, and just accepting ads to pay for all of that, to go back to do it the other way - IMHO there will be a lot more torrent use again.
One thing though - I used Boxee just last night to watch an episode of Psych, and it was still working fine! What's your Hulu inside Boxee doing?