Category Archives: Misc

Things that are not techie stuff, but I feel like I want to talk about anyway.

Review: Ghost In The Wires

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This post is a little bit different than normal, but still applies overall to the scope that I am going for here I think.  I just finished reading a really cool book called Ghost in the Wires written by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon with the foreword by Steve Wozniak.  Sounds like a thrill ride already, doesn’t it?

I am sure I don’t have to tell anyone reading this blog who Kevin Mitnick is, but just in case, he’s a well known (in geek circles at least) hacker/social engineer who spent years breaking into corporate systems all over the U.S.  Some of the systems he gained access to belonged to Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Novell, and more.  By the time he was caught and arrested the final time in Raleigh, N.C., in 1995, he was the most wanted computer criminal in the United States.

This book basically tells his story from early in life up to when he got arrested in 1995.  He talks about his exploits, his hacks, the people he hacked with and what is the most entertaining, how he managed to pull off all this crazy stuff.

So, if you are looking for an informative book, as well as one that is funny and entertaining as heck as well, look no further.  The audio book is good, with a great reader, and the hard cover and kindle editions are great too.  I advise you to check one of them out, this book was great!

Check it out at Amazon now: Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker … Or if you’d rather get it for your Kindle, click HERE for the Kindle version!

VMware Virtual Machine Startup Shortcuts

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I am going to share a VMware tidbit with you, something that some of you may already know, but for those of you that don’t, it might help out a little bit. This is particularly aimed at the VMware Workstation crowd. OK, first let me setup the background here. I have a virtual machine that I use for development all the time. It’s running on my laptop, along with my dev tools. I can open VMware workstation and then select the machine I want and fire it up and then close Workstation (since it is set to keep VM’s running when Workstation closes) and all that, but this is time consuming and somewhat aggravating if I am in a hurry. The point is, I am lazy and nit picky and making all those clicks and waiting for programs to load is tedious, especially when I sometimes do it several times a day.

So, I found a nifty little command in the directory where VMware Workstation is installed called vmrun.exe. This command allows you to manipulate your VM’s on the command line. With it you can start and stop, pause, take snapshots of your VM’s, plus many, many more actions. Look at the bottom of this article for more information, I have included the output of vmrun.exe’s usage text, and there is a bunch of stuff there!

Now, back to the article here and my purpose for writing it, what I wanted was a quick and easy way to fire up or start that virtual machine so I could use it when needed, but not have to go through all of the above mentioned steps and wait times. What I came up with was a quick little batch file that when executed, uses that vmrun.exe command to start my virtual machine, easy as pie.

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Mobile Data On Disk

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Today I thought I would show you a neat trick you can do with your PC or laptop and a blank CD or DVD.  Using something that Microsoft calls their Live File System, you can create or format a blank disk that will then allow you to use that disk (while it is in your disc drive) just like you would use a floppy disk or USB flash drive.  You can copy files to and from the disk, erase files you no longer need, etc.  All without “burning” files like you might be used to, just drag and drop right from Windows Explorer or whatever your favorite file manager might be.

There are some caveats with this, it appears that creating these disks is something you can do on Windows 7 machines only.  However, once created, they can be read on Windows versions going back to Windows XP and in some cases even Windows 98.  There is a URL at the bottom of the article that will take you to a Microsoft page with more information.  In addition, the reason I so far have only said CD, DVD and disk without getting specific is because you can create this kind of disk on standard writable media (-R) as well as re-writable media (-RW) meaning the list of disks you can format for mobile data storage starts to get kinda long, like so: CD-R, CD+R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, or DVD-RAM.

The process for setting up a disk for this kind of use is quick and easy, you simply insert your blank disk into your drive and wait a second.  If you have autoplay enabled, you know where your CD’s that you insert start automatically, you will get a window that pops up asking you how you want to use the disc, like a USB flash drive, or with a CD/DVD player (like a normal writer).  If you don’t have autoplay enabled, simply open Windows Explorer or My Computer and locate your CD or DVD drive.  Double click on it and you should receive the same window asking you how you want to use the disk.

Once you see the window, make sure that use “Like a USB flash drive” is selected and then press next. You will then get a message that the disk is being formatted.  Just wait and watch, and after a minute or two it should be complete and will disappear.  Once the formatting windows goes away you are done and ready.  You should now be able to drag and drop files to and from the disk, delete any that you want to, and manner of good stuff like that.  I hope you find this useful!

Get more information at Microsoft’s site

Tools for eBay

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I am sure that just about everyone has at least looked around on eBay if not purchased something from someone through there.  There are a smaller number of us that have actually sold stuff on eBay, and as anyone who has done this can tell you, it ain’t pretty.  The good folks at eBay have tools, ways and means to get your stuff listed for sale, but as easy as it is it’s also very complex and confusing.  You can take some time and figure it out,  but it never hurts to have some help, and this is where third parties have made a small fortune making tools, software and even books that aim to make eBay easier to learn.

I am all for learning and making things easier to use, and I ran across this site earlier today where the author sorts through a bunch of tools for eBay posting only the good ones and giving reviews on the “9 Excellent Free Tools For eBay Buyers and Sellers”.  I took a look and while I can’t vouch for all of the tools, some of them I have used and I can say that I liked what I saw.  So, go check it out and see if any of these tools can help you in your eBay journeys!  Thanks 🙂

Information Is King

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OK, kiddies, gather round.  Let me pontificate loftily standing upon my bubbly box of soap, in order to loudly proclaim that information is king (or queen if that is your perspective).  Why is information so important?  The reason is simple!  The more information we have (at hand, it doesn’t have to be memorized, it can be in a book or anything readily available), the more we know.  The more we know, the more we can do!  The more we can do, the richer we become.  Not just in dollars and cents but in self-reliance, survival and practical sense.  Take that information that you know, and add it to what your friend knows and now you both know even more.  Take that and share it with what many other people you know and oh my goodness!  We have a revolution on our hands, a real live revelation revolution springing up.  It is natural that folks will still have their areas of expertise, but all of that shared knowledge is only going to help us out.  More people can then do more things, you have more people to help when one thing gets really busy and backlogged, like when everyone has generator problems during an ice storm.  Would you rather have 1 person trying to fix all those 100 or so broken gennies, or 2 or maybe 4 or 5 or even 10.  Do you see where I am going with this?

What I just wrote about above is the sole reason I started this site.  I had lots of information that I wanted to share with folk, anyone who could benefit from it.  I have been working with computers and related “stuff” for over 20 years now, and whether it was trying to pass along some basic info to keep Grandma safe while checking her email, or sharing the intimate technical details of setting up SVM software RAID on Solaris UNIX servers, I felt like I had information that would be worthwhile to others.  So far I’d say it’s been a success, while I don’t share the popularity or traffic that Slashdot gets for example, I get quite a lot of visitors compared to your average website or blog, and I do get some email now and then from people thanking me for the site or telling me that they found help with their problem they were trying to fix, and that makes all of the work and effort that I put into this site worthwhile.

If you have managed to read this far, you are probably now asking yourself what in the world I am going on about.  Well, keeping what I have previously said in mind, I have decided to expand the site a bit.  You see, when I started this site, it was only natural that I focus on IT related topics.  However, I have experience with and work on much more than just IT stuff.  In the past years I have been an electronics technician, why at one point I could repair the copper runs on a circuit board complete with new green (or amber or whatever) over coating so that one could hardly tell it had ever been broken in the first place.  At one point I spent years as a mechanic, working on everything from air and electric tools to outdoor power equipment to diesel trucks and buses and damn near anything in between.  In both of these cases I was lucky enough to work for business owners who were also masters in their field, I mean pure freakin’ geniuses at the technical work that they did.  This allowed me to not only learn a great deal, but also develop some of the habits that I have now that make some people call me a perfectionist.  I just say that if it’s got my name on it, I want to make damn sure I do it right.  I am not saying that I am perfect or anything, I make mistakes just like anyone else, I just try really really hard to avoid them!

I could go on about other stuff I have done, some good learning experiences and some not so much.  The point is that I have decided to start adding more information to this site as I get the oppotunity to do so.  Because after all, information is king (or queen if that is your perspective), and if I can share something that helps someone, who cares if it’s about a computer or about a truck or maybe a CD player or who knows what.  I don’t know everything but I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I love to learn.  Maybe I feel it’s my duty or maybe my mission to give back and share that information.  Worst case is that I waste some time and take up some extra binary real estate on my server and no one notices, or they notice and shake their head and mumble something about that crazy guy and his weird website that sounds like something out of Harry Potter.  On the other hand, what we might call the best case, someone and maybe many someones come along from Google or however they get here and find something useful to them and helpful in solving a problem they were dealing with.

How is that, eh?  How is that for a long winded rant about information! LOL  I hope you enjoy this site and find something useful here, I have put a lot of time, energy and money into it because I believe in sharing information.  If you have something you want to share, to add to the data archive, please by all means let me know about it via the contact page.  I am unable to pay you for any information that you share, but I will make sure that you get full credit for it, in whatever format you like (i.e. your name, pen name, alias, whatever).  That could be a good way for aspiring writers to easily get content published for reference later on when needing to provide examples of your work.

Many thanks to all of my readers and visitors that have stopped by and even taken the time to come back!  (Cue the mysterious pipe organ)  Enjoy!

The Evolution of Link Popularity

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Anyone who has developed a website hoping to quickly achieve a high ranking in the search engines, especially Google, has probably discovered that the task is much more daunting than they originally thought. That is because new websites and even existing websites must prove to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines that they are worthy of being ranked high.

There are many factors involved in getting a website ranked high in the search engines, including good, relevant content that gives visitors the information they are searching for along with strong link popularity.

What Exactly is Link Popularity?

Many people think link popularity equates to the number of incoming links a website has linking to it. In other words, how many other websites are linking to your website.

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