Firefox locking up

Ended up having to troubleshoot an audio problem within Firefox tonight. The browser refused to play any audio and would lock up while visiting Flash-based sites. Fortunately, this was an easy fix. Notes are in the wiki.

Life expectancy?

Another thing that technology improves in our lives: the ability to pull new pranks. Tonight I ran across PhotoStamps from Stamps.com. Please note the statement that this is legitimate postage.

My wife has various pictures of her and her sibling's childhoods. [insert evil laugh here] I imagine that my in-laws will be forming a lynch mob sometime around Christmas.

Frustration

Why is it that finding info on streaming from a pipe to Ogg is easy, while the same info, involving MP3 streams, is a pain in the butt to track down?

Adding and deleting pages on Google

Here is my list of links which describe how to add, block, and remove various items from Google's search engine. For now, the links are mostly from GoogleTutor. I've added them to the wiki to make them easier to find (for me) and as a precaution against GoogleTutor's disappearance.

Stop yer whinging!

Got to eat dinner with the team captain for Skewl of Root. When asked (at the conference) how they did it, he replied, "Cooperation, Dedication, and Overwhelming Technical Superiority!".

Really want to know how they did it? Go back and take a look at their stats for the past 7 or 8 years. Notice how they almost always were in the top four finishers but most often had the suckiest "defense" stats? Care to guess what they fixed this year?

As for the other teams, they didn't place first but they definitely didn't place last. Those that actually played had to beat out nearly 400 other entrant teams (we're talking thousands of people here!). They all busted their humps to get there.

It is hilarious though, seeing team points graphed over time, with the Bossman narrating (similar to the effect of shifting into the next higher gear when the guy you're racing thinks you were at top end). Before you start buying torches and pitchforks, he was respectful of the other teams. Mebbe we can get him to digitize the commentary? (hint, hint!)

Adding and deleting pages on Google

Here is my list of links which describe how to add, block, and remove various items from Google's search engine. For now, the links are mostly from GoogleTutor. I've added them to the wiki to make them easier to find (for me) and as a precaution against GoogleTutor's disappearance.

He's so cheap that...

There's some advantage in being a tightwad. Your gadget money tends to go further. Friends know that I watch the local clearance bins like a hawk. I occasionally turn up some interesting stuff.

Example 1: The local Walmart dumped their shelf of Linksys PAP2's for ten bucks a pop. I donated them to Sploitcast and they were (mostly) given away at this year's Shmoocon.

Example 2: I just picked up an ATI HDTV video card for thirty bucks. I think the little OTA antenna may be missing but the price was low enough to be interesting.

Now my only problem is that I'm running out of slots.

Backdoor dialing

Hmmm... Gizmo's Backdoor Dialing feature looks interesting (i.e., free calls to land lines and mobile phones). I'm not in an area where this works but I'm willing to be some of my friends/family are.

MythTV and XMRadio

I added the MythTV hack to play XMRadio streams today. There's a couple things that the MythTV wiki doesn't tell you:

• you need to run xamp as the mythtv user at least once from the command line
• and you need to create the /home/mythtv/.xmonline folder (as the mythtv user) before you run it from the command line

Other than that, it's a pretty straight-forward install. My notes are here.

Ordering Pizza Without a Phone

I've added notes for making 1-800 calls from Asterisk without having to pay for a phone line or ITSP: 1-800 Calls via Google411.

Attack trees

A post over on Spark's Fedora blog about Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, and Rootkits in Linux prompted me to write a lengthy response. In doing so, I realized that I hadn't posted about basic security theory in a very long time.

Semi-related to Spark's topic is the following: attack trees. A good starting place is Wikipedia's article on attack trees and Bruce Schneier's 1999 paper on the topic is also a very good read.