TinyXP is XP with all of the wasteful crap stripped out.

For details, see this blog post.

To download, go here or here, depending on what you want.

To make new Firefox tabs open on the right, instead of the left, follow these instructions:
http://lifehacker.com/5456366/make-new-tabs-open-at-far-right-in-firefox-36

I forget how I installed, Flash, but you’ll probably want to do that, too. Feel free to leave a comment.

If you find this interesting, check out this LRC article by John Gatto.

I just wanted to take a moment to make three quick points:

1) The Internet is not going to stop working when we run out of IP addresses. In fact, that whole idea is incomprehensibly dumb.

2) There are PLENTY of IP addresses!!

Okay, get this… There are fewer than 300 million internet users in the world. There are over 4 BILLION IPv4 addresses.

Get it? There are plenty of addresses. The problem is not the number of addresses. The problem is that the crackheads assigning them don’t care whether or not they end up being utilized. What an incredible (and expensive) waste.

3) There is a very simple solution to this that doesn’t involve spending billions of dollars on forcing the world to move to IPv6 before it’s ready:

ARIN should just start reclaiming unused IP blocks.

It’s that simple. It really is.

Ping each IP address, and if there’s no response, check a few ports.

Use that data to create a utilization metric for each IP block.

If the IP block is underutilized, or not used at all, simply recover part or all of the IP block for someone else to use.

That’s it. That’s all that has to be done.

People are idiots.

So, I’ve decided to redo ChrisBrunner.com and make it less blog-centric.

One idea that I had was to create a photo mosaic from my Flickr feed. So, it would be one large picture of me made up of my last 1000 Flickr uploads. When I upload a new photo, it would update the mosaic automatically.

In order to do this, though, I need a PHP or Python script that generates photo mosaics and could be modified to run as a script.

This is just a brainstorm-in-progress, but here are a few pieces of software that may be part of the puzzle:

http://mopy.sourceforge.net/

http://lab.digitalinitiatives.net/?page_id=8

Flickr makes 75×75 px thumbnails readily available for all of its photos. So I could write a script that downconverts all of them to 20×20 px, generate a mosaic, and then cache it for speed and use on my website.

I’m going to shelve this for now, but I might develop and implement this in the future… just an idea…

(03:28:00 AM) Andrew Hayes: hello
(03:28:12 AM) Andrew Hayes: how are you doing?
(03:28:57 AM) Chris Brunner: a little tired, you?
(03:29:13 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am not good at the moment
i am in a deep mess and i need your help
(03:30:34 AM) Chris Brunner: What can I do?
(03:31:42 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am stuck in London Got mugged at gunpoint
(03:32:15 AM) Chris Brunner: That’s horrible
(03:33:06 AM) Chris Brunner: I’m sorry to hear that
(03:33:33 AM) Andrew Hayes: all cash on me was stolen including cell phone and credit card
(03:33:50 AM) Andrew Hayes: i was injured…little bruises on my neck
(03:34:10 AM) Chris Brunner: is this a joke?
(03:34:50 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am really serious
(03:35:00 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am just freaked out
(03:35:19 AM) Chris Brunner: how are you using a computer?
(03:35:38 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am presently in a loocal library
(03:35:48 AM) Chris Brunner: which one?
(03:35:53 AM) Andrew Hayes: i have limited time here!!
(03:36:05 AM) Andrew Hayes: here in London
(03:36:18 AM) Andrew Hayes: i need your help urgently
(03:36:22 AM) Chris Brunner: …
(03:36:57 AM) Chris Brunner: what is it that you’re asking me to do?
(03:37:46 AM) Andrew Hayes: my return flight leaves in few hours time
(03:38:28 AM) Andrew Hayes: i am having problems settling the hotel i checked into and getting a cab to the airport
(03:38:54 AM) Chris Brunner: what can I do?
(03:40:17 AM) Andrew Hayes: i need you to loan me some money to sort my hotel bills and get a cab to the airport
(03:41:41 AM) Chris Brunner: sure, no problem. just get any of our mutual friends to vouch for your character and I will happily loan you cash via western union or moneygram
(03:42:26 AM) Andrew Hayes: you are all i got at the moment
(03:42:46 AM) Andrew Hayes: to help me out
(03:43:14 AM) Chris Brunner: of our mutual friends, whose phone number do you need? I will wake them up.
(03:43:28 AM) Chris Brunner: I know most of them personally
(03:43:35 AM) Andrew Hayes: i don’t have access to phone
(03:43:46 AM) Chris Brunner: surely someone in the library has a cell phone
(03:43:58 AM) Andrew Hayes: the muggers stole away my phone like i told u ealier
(03:44:05 AM) Chris Brunner: I will call you on that phone, and conference in a mutual friend who can vouch for you
(03:45:19 AM) Andrew Hayes: there is no phone in the library
(03:45:19 AM) Andrew Hayes: there is no phone in the library
(03:45:35 AM) Andrew Hayes: besides it is a local one!!
(03:45:50 AM) Chris Brunner: so? I will pay the international toll. it’s an emergency, right?
(03:46:42 AM) Andrew Hayes: yeah
(03:47:02 AM) Chris Brunner: okay, then give me the number to any phone in london where I can call you, and conference in a mutual friend.
(03:47:09 AM) Andrew Hayes: yeah
(03:48:06 AM) Andrew Hayes: are you there??
(03:48:13 AM) Chris Brunner: yes, of course
(03:48:53 AM) Andrew Hayes: i really need your help
(03:49:04 AM) Chris Brunner: I understand that. That’s why I’m trying to help you.
(03:49:46 AM) Andrew Hayes: i have limited time here
(03:50:17 AM) Andrew Hayes: as their computer is even faulty
(03:50:56 AM) Andrew Hayes: all i need from you is a loan of 600$
(03:51:04 AM) Andrew Hayes: to get on my flight
(03:51:09 AM) Andrew Hayes: are you there??
(03:51:13 AM) Chris Brunner: okay, how should I send it?
(03:51:37 AM) Andrew Hayes: all you need is my name and address
(03:51:43 AM) Chris Brunner: okay
(03:52:04 AM) Andrew Hayes: do you know any western union outlet near you?
(03:52:08 AM) Chris Brunner: yes
(03:52:31 AM) Andrew Hayes: how long will it take you to get there?
(03:52:39 AM) Chris Brunner: about ten minutes
(03:52:40 AM) Andrew Hayes: as i have limited time here
(03:52:43 AM) Chris Brunner: but I will try to be fast
(03:53:21 AM) Andrew Hayes: should i give you the info
(03:53:34 AM) Andrew Hayes: you will need in sending the money?
(03:53:38 AM) Chris Brunner: yes. I will write it down
(03:53:53 AM) Andrew Hayes: Name:Andrew Hayes
(03:55:13 AM) Chris Brunner: okay
(03:55:23 AM) Chris Brunner: don’t I need the address?
(03:55:48 AM) Andrew Hayes: Location: 30 Leicester Square. City, London. Country, United Kingdom
(03:55:53 AM) Andrew Hayes: got it?
(03:56:01 AM) Chris Brunner: got it.
(03:56:09 AM) Andrew Hayes: ok
(03:56:23 AM) Andrew Hayes: can you please leave now?
(03:56:57 AM) Andrew Hayes: ??
(03:57:03 AM) Andrew Hayes: ??
(03:57:41 AM) Chris Brunner: yes, I’m leaving now
(03:57:51 AM) Andrew Hayes: ok
(03:58:31 AM) Andrew Hayes: are you there?
(03:58:41 AM) Andrew Hayes: i will be online waiting
(03:58:55 AM) Chris Brunner: wait, is it 600 USD or 600 pounds?
(03:59:26 AM) Andrew Hayes: pounds
(03:59:35 AM) Chris Brunner: okay
(04:01:15 AM) Andrew Hayes: are you still there?
(04:06:04 AM) Andrew Hayes: are you there??
(04:10:04 AM) Andrew Hayes: ??
(04:10:40 AM) Andrew Hayes: ??
(04:15:48 AM) Andrew Hayes: ??

Obviously, this is a scam. I’m guessing Andrew’s Facebook account was hacked. So, I called the London police and told them where the scammer will be trying to pick up the money that I didn’t send.

Facebookers beware.

If this happens to one of your friends, here’s the link to report it.

Anyway, it made me briefly consider getting a land line, and I stumbled across this page on AT&T’s website. Pretty funny.

My favorite reason listed is, “You need a way to call your cell phone when you lose it.” A close second is, “Your security system needs to be hooked up to something.”

Good stuff.

If so, you may have run into trouble finding the correct URLs for the Google Gears XPI. Let me help:

Linux: http://dl.google.com/gears/current/gears-linux-opt.xpi
Mac: http://dl.google.com/gears/current/gears-osx-opt.xpi

Enjoy.

I look forward to sitting down someday soon to blog about the adventure that RCG and TIDS have been, but my phone keeps ringing, so it’ll have to happen on another day.

Sure enough, they do publish the results. Here they are:

The difference between average speeds is marginal, but the lower latency that Sprint offers probably makes a huge difference.

I know people are going to post comments about how skewed these results are for all kinds of reasons, and they’ll be mostly right, but in the grand scheme of things, I’d be willing to bet that these results are more accurate than any one review that only surveys speeds in two or three states at a time.

Feel free to leave comments with your own experiences.

• Al Jazeera English 
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Qatari
• Description: One of the three largest English-language news channels worldwide.  It's a 24-hour English-language news and current affairs TV channel headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
• Russia Today
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Russian
• Description: Also known as RT, is a globally broadcast English-language news channel from Russia, and the first all-digital Russian TV channel.
• Press TV
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Iranian
• Description: An English language international television news channel, based in Tehran.  It has 26 international correspondents and more than 500 staff around the world.

These are just three out of about thirty content sources that I receive video from daily.  If you have one that you feel should be listed here, let me know.  Or, if you want to see my list of Technology or Libertarian content sources, let me know.

Click here for the article, and thanks to Jason C. for the link!

Says Moore:

“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie.”

This is just dumb. As John Stossel begins to point out, it’s not the private sector that is “fleec[ing] the American people out of their hard-earned money,” it’s the government. Who robs Americans of half of their hard-earned income at gun point every single year? Who counterfeits endlessly to the point of causing massive and widespread malinvestment, job losses, inflation, and depressions? It’s certainly not the private sector. And it certainly has nothing to do with Capitalism.

(Note: This post was authored for the LRC Blog.)

Right now, Google offers no way to prevent the ads for this cult from showing up all over your website. However, they say that in the meantime, they’re developing a category filtering tool.

It’s not available to the public yet, so in the meantime, you might consider Google’s competitor, the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Right now, NetworkManager just determines whether it has made a physical connection, and if it has, it thinks it’s on the internet, and if it hasn’t it assumes there’s no connection available.

So, there are to problems with this:

* Offline-but-not-really – When I’m in the car, I have two options for connecting to my phone for internet access. I can either turn my phone into a WiFi Ad-Hoc node, and use it as a gateway for my laptop. Or, I can use Bluetooth to create a PAN and do basically the same thing. Either way, I have to set up the connection from the command line on my laptop with one or two commands. Of course, when I do this, NetworkManager has no knowledge of the connection and all of my GNOME apps that rely on it think there is no internet connection. This gets really, really old.

* Online-but-not-really – So the second problem is captive portals. For example, I’m typing this from a Panera Bread. I turned on my laptop, NetworkManager saw the open WiFi connection, and it automatically connected. Great, except NetworkManager now thinks it has a working internet connection… but it doesn’t, because I have to pop open a browser window and hit “Agree” before I actually have internet access.

The solution to this is so fucking easy… just ping! Each second, or every three or five seconds, NetworkManager should just try to ping a host like google.com… if you get a response, you’re online. This way, it doesn’t matter how you’re connected, or whether or not there’s a captive portal in the way… Why is this so hard?

I had to do this recently due to a domain change.  Here's the easy way:

UPDATE tablename SET tablefield = replace(tablefield,"findstring","replacestring");

For example, when the shell service I started moved from silenceisdefeat.com to silenceisdefeat.org, I issued the following command to change all of the links in my blog posts:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content,"silenceisdefeat.org","silenceisdefeat.com");

You can do this via the command line, or using a tool like PHPMyAdmin by clicking on the SQL tab.  If you're running wp-cache on your WordPress blog, don't forget to clear your cache to see the change take effect.

We're also actively monitoring travelers at our land, sea, and air ports. We're watching them for signs of illness, and we have appropriate protocols in place to deal with those who are sick. Precautions are being taken to protect travelers and border personnel. Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destruction.

 The site has now been changed to read, "before proceeding to their destination."  However, a footnote still exists that references the typo and includes the original phrasiology.  Man, what a scary typo.

1. WhatTheFont – This site actually allows you to upload a sample graphic and then tries to do the matching automatically.  Very cool!  The only problem is that the sample needs to be at least 100 pixels in height for it to work with high accuracy.
2. Identifont – This site uses a completely different approach — the process of elimination.  If you don't have a high-resolution sample and don't mind answering a few questions, this is the way to go.

While we're on the subject, FontyPython is a really cool font manager for Linux that allows you to browse through tons of fonts before installing them.  This is really convenient if you happen to be pirating large font packs while looking for one of the fonts you identified using the sites listed above.  If you know of similar programs for Mac or Windows, feel free to leave a comment.

First, some background information… I had an interesting phone conversation with Adam Panagia, the manager of AT&T’s Global Fraud department. From a conference bridge, we placed an outbound call to his cell phone without passing ANI to see how easy it would be for him to trace the call. He immediately answered and knew who was calling, which was pretty impressive. As it turns out, Adam was already listening to the conference call by sitting on the line of one of the parties on the conference. We know this was the case because after Adam hung up his cell phone and kept speaking in the conference, the “Talking” light on the conference web interface for one of the other parties would illuminate. In other words, Adam was speaking through the phone line of someone else who was on the conference call.

Adam, who works for AT&T can intercept and even speak on behalf of practically any long distance phone call with ease. In this case, he was intercepting a call in real-time that was originating from a Verizon land line. So, the carrier matters not. Obviously he’s not the only one who can do this. It goes without saying that there are likely dozens, if not hundreds, of government employees who can do the same thing.

So, if you’re interested maintaining privacy, you only have two options: Bypass the PSTN altogether or use encryption.

Why not do both?

The software released by the Zfone Project, which was founded by the creator of PGP, is of particular interest to me. Two-party phone calls can easily be accomplished by using Zfone on both ends with a VoIP softphone.

But what about conference calls? That’s a little bit more complicated, but it seems that the ZRTP patch for Asterisk could be used to allow each party to place an encrypted call to an Asterisk box, where a conference could be mixed.

But who wants to be limited to softphones? In theory, you don’t have to be. Sure, a company called TiVi makes software for cell phones that allows you to place encrypted VoIP calls over WiFi, but what about the analog phones everyone is already used to? I have an idea as to how to accomplish this: Get a tiny motherboard like a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX, which can be had for cheap. Get a $10 voice modem. Install Asterisk with the ZRTP patch, and configure it to use the voice modem as an FXO port… and Bingo! You have a cheap homemade ATA with full encryption support.

I was going to go back and add links for all the acronyms, but since this was a very casual note-to-self, and since I have other work I need to be doing, you’ll just have to Google it if you see something you don’t recognize.