Why not have a simple mechanism similar to automatic watches where this motion can be used to charge the phone. This doesn’t need radical design changes either.. rechargeable AA batteries can have something very small like this embedded inside, or in already common cell phone battery designs.

Sure it won’t power the whole unit all the time, but at least extend the battery life considerably. Worse case is that the battery is totally dead and you can shake it until it’s charged enough to use it to make a quick emergency call or take that breathtaking view you just discover right when you run out battery power on the camera.

1. Motion Powered Battery
2. ???
3. Long time Battery life

On the bright side, they are all on a single partition now. This is compared to before where they were spread across many machines, hard drive, backups and whole bunch of flash memory cards laying around.

Now on the hunt for a good program to organize them. So far I have tried F-Spot, Picasa, DigiKam. They were alright, but didn’t fit my needs, and I doubt there is anything out there that would. So the features I need are

• In Place file access - should not require the program to import the pictures to it’s own backwards folder structure
• Restructure folder tree - For example all your pictures are a mess, but with this you can tell it to put all the files in folders according to date or category name
• Categories, Keywords - All the programs I tested did this pretty quick
• Automatic Categorization according to date and other information

So the automatic categorization is the most important feature I want. Picasa does a good job at this.. but it simply clumps pictures that were taken in the same day together. What I want is for this to happen in a more elegant algorithm that uses the timestamps to figure out and distinguish between different events.. but allow the user to easily merge or split categories.

I think I will put to my work stack to develop such an algorithm, does not seem to hard. I am thinking it would make sense if you graph the amount of pictures taken per day, any grouping of pictures can be thought of as a single event or category. Lets see where it goes…

But for now considering I haven’t had any rest at all for the past few days, I think I will let all my photo’s chill for a while.

• Study for Finals - Just two more days
• Cisco Systems Internship - Again this summer, need to pack up and go
• Canon SD1000 - Play with the chdk firmware.
• WRT350N Bricked - Poor 802.11n router, need to bring it back to life
• Organize local files - Several TB over about 20 hard drives makes me a sad panda
• Organize online files - Makes me sick looking at my web hosts root directory
• VoIP - Put my SPA3102 with my Asterisk box to good use
• Box of Networking stuff - Need to bring them back to life
• Bye WordPress - Needs replacement or upgrade
• Web Photo Album - Any ideas on Flickr, Picasa Web, maybe I will just host my own
• The list just doesn’t end…

Back to cramming… wish me luck.

You have a server with only port 80 open. How can I rig the server so it would continue to serve web data as normal on port 80 to regular clients, but at the same time allow special access or services through the same port

A way this can be accomplished is by using a port multiplexer. I searched around for this idea and the only thing I can ran across was a 1988 RFC 1078, that kind of does what I want, but not really. My thought on designing a port multiplexer is have it work like a NAT, except instead of IP address translation, it would do service translation.

This would work like this. First need to have the webserver process (apache/IIS) listen on some other port (lets say 81). Now have the Port Mux program listen on port 80. Now how it works from the time a user tries to connect to the server. The second service would be listening on port 10000 for this example.

Client requests connection to port 80
Port MUX creates connection with client
Client sends packet
PortMUX inspects packet
_ if packet has specialheader
_ _ _ router all traffic to port 10000
_ else
_ _ _ route all traffic to port 81

So when a connection comes in, PortMUX will make the connection and accept the first packet and if it has a special string, it not it will forward the traffic from that connection to the web server. If it is a special character, the connection would be to port 10000. Its easy to detect if it’s a HTTP request by looking at the first string in the packet and find “GET” or “POST”. As for the special string, you could put something like “SPAMSPAMSPAM” which is definitely not a HTTP request… and would allow access to the second service.

I will make an implementation of this sometime later and post it, if you have some free time now feel free to make one and test it out.

Concept seems simple enough, all I need now is some free time to implement this.

• Room Cleanup (load of empty boxes, anyone want any?)
• Door-Desk, two of them for the room
• New Book shelves, having a space issue now
• 3TB worth of data to be organized, and the countless number of cd and dvd spindles
• Old cloths, old electronics, old everthing…

Wow.. thats a lot of random stuff. Maybe I should get started as soon as possible when I find some time.

This vulnerability isn’t on all of them, but about half the systems I tried, it works (Yahoo and Google to give two examples). It seems internally, when a new captcha image is generated, the corresponding plaintext is stored in a database. The problem is that this database just stores the plaintext without any connection to the client’s identity (For example IP). So how can this bad?

Well you can refresh the captcha images in this system repeatedly and write down the plaintext values from the image. Now you can store those value’s in a bot and have the bot enter those plaintext value’s in.

Here are the steps for a proof-of-concept.

Go to Computer A, get a captcha image. Write down plaintext
Go to Computer B, go to same page, enter previous plaintext from different session

Opening the case up and tracing the 4 pins to the internal serial connection terminals proved that they were indeed for a serial connection. Some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Now I just have to figure out where to get a RJ-45 jack that has the pins on the opposite side so I can hook it up without soldering my own ghetto RJ-45/Serial jack. Let me know if anyone know where to find such a RJ-45 Jack.

Thunderbird + Lightning + Provider for Google Calendar

This was so good it was enough reason for me to switch from Evolution to Thunderbird… the interface for Lightning seems a little out of place compared to thunderbird and gnome’s default theme… but I can live with that. Now adding a event in my laptop, desktop or google calendar online is all I need to do and the other places are automatically kept up to date. Fabulous!

I had used other calendar synchronization application combinations before, but this is by far the best one I have come across and highly recommend you to take a look. Enjoy!

But I decide to call them beforehand. A minute later, my local UPS location gives me 1800 number, and two minutes into that call, the customer rep asks me for my tracking number and the new destination address. Thats it… Wait, they didn’t even verify who I was.

Is it me who sees a huge security hole here. It seems anyone with a tracking number can re-route a order to any place they wish.

So that means one should not go through the trash at the UPS store and should not find receipts of recently shipped items, and should not follow their tracking to see if it’s still being shipped, and should not call them and reroute them to your neighbors house. It’s illegal and unethical to tamper with someone else’s shipment so you should never even think about this.

A really easy way to set up multi-factor authentication for one your systems is to use the conventional username/password as one factor, and then using the SMS technology in your phone as the second factor. An example case will better demonstrate this.

User enter username/password and log in to the System
System sends a SMS message to pre-defined phone number with a code
Enter code in next step in the log in process
Log into website

When you set up the account, you need to set up a phone number to pair up with the given username/password pair. To make things a little more secure, you can change things around

User enter username/password and log in to the System
System sends a SMS message to pre-defined phone number with a code
Unscramble the code manually (reverse the code)
Enter unscrambled code in next step in the log in process
Log into website

This might seem nice and all, but as most cool ideas, you might say the implementation is too much trouble to go through. Wrong, this is extremely easy to implement. Most mobile phone carriers now have email to SMS gateways. For a few of the gateways you can visit my previous post or just google. There are a few services popping up online that allow you to send a email to a single phonenumber@domain which will select correct SMS and send it.

For example to send a SMS to a t-mobile phone number with 123456789 you would send a email to 123456789@tmomail.net and thats just a single php function.

Good luck, this is a very easy mechanism to implement to make it harder for someone to gain illegal access to your systems.

The solution is easy. Blacklist the pata_marvell. To do this add the line “blacklist pata_marvell” to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and restart the system. This should speed up the boot process if it was hanging before trying to load the pata_marvell driver.

I wrote this so anyone else who might be having the same issue can resolve it quickly. Good luck!

Go to Device Manager, Show hidden devices, Scroll to the Non Plug and Play Devices and disable the Beep device.

This was the only problem I was having with the laptop, and now it’s gone! Best laptop to date I have used.

Hey interns,

I’m selling a brand new iPod nano silver 4gb for $160 and a brand new Macbook Pro 2.2Ghz (Santa Rosa) for $2000 (no tax on either). FYI the retail price on the iPod is 199+tax and the Macbook Pro is 2000+tax. The Macbook Pro is the 2007 version of it. Both are brand new sealed in box. Please give me a call at 408-???-???? or reply (NOT REPLY ALL) me if youre interested.

Thanks!

This was sent to the Cisco Intern mailing list. Almost everyone here knows that you could get the laptop for 1800 + free iPod if you are student. Talk about looking stupid… Moral of the story: Know who your audience is.

First, it’s best if you are ordering a new cable connection your place. If not try to find some problem you are having with your cable connection, maybe quality is bad or lot of disconnects or look into your bill and find some type of mistake. If it’s ordering new cable, when you are talking with them on the phone find something that will not make you happy, usually they take forever to send a technician out to activate your service.

Now that you have something to be upset about cable company, call them up and complain. Try saying you are unhappy and ask them what they can do. Usually they will cut a deal. If they say no, just ask for the manager and say you’re unhappy about the service (in which case you should be now). Most of the time the managers will cut a deal with you. Remember to ask for some premium channels for no extra charge. Other things you might be able to ask is to lower your current service cost. Of course this won’t work 100% of the time.

You have nothing to lose doing this other than a few minutes of your time, and if you are reading this page, thats something you definitely have. Enjoy! I am going to go enjoy some free HBO.