Best headphones for your needs

I know it's a bit late for this post since people would have probably liked to see this before Christmas but hey, maybe there are some people exchanging gifts or looking for a nice pair of headphones to buy with their gift certificates.

I don't know why but it bugs me so much every time I see people wearing the stupid Beats headphones like it's jewelery. I supposed it shouldn't since that's basically what it is. I would love to know that people buy Beats headphones because it's fashionable rather than because they are good quality headphones, since they are not. If you are going to spend that kind of money on a headphone and you know anything about audio quality, you will stay away from that brand. Beets only has one thing they excel at, marketing. Below I posted a nice picture of Dr. Dre using his Audio-
Technica headphones :P (relevant http://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/16n8vb/i_bought_beats_by_dre_it_was_a_mistake_what/)

I should have made this post a few years ago when I was looking for headphones. I knew all the best ones at the time and I ended up picking up a pair of Sennheiser HD555. It was the best $200 dollars I could have spent on headphones at the time. The sound on them is absolutely brilliant, great treble, solid mids with good enough bass for my taste. Perhaps if you are going to be listening to music that is heavy on the low bands there may be a better match for you out there. Overall though, I don't think I could have spent my money on anything better. These are amazing for listening to my music, but also do an exceptional job for gaming and movies, which was definitely a consideration for me.


Now, this was a few years ago and now the models are different of course. But for anyone looking, here is a great resource that inspired me to make this post http://www.reddit.com/r/headphones

I think explaining the types of earphones you can get would be relevant before I continue:

Earbuds - I think everyone knows what these are. Basically the little ones that go inside your ear canal and will generally come with your iPod or other music players. These tend to be cheap and you will not get the same type of quality in these as you would with bigger pieces. A variation of eabuds are the IEMs (In-ear monitors) which are basically the same thing, but actually go further in your ear kind of lodging themselves a bit tighter. They provide a bit more isolation for the sound and in my experience tend to be of slightly better in quality.

Suggestions
Shure SE215 ($100) - Shure is a pretty popular manufacturer for music equipment, and back when I used to play in a band we always thought of Shure microphones being some of the best for our price range. Sennheiser PMX 680 Sport ($60) - These are a bit cheaper but they are supposedly good for listening when moving around alot, for instance during workout.

LH's Budget pick: Grado Labs SR60i ($80) and Sennheiser PX 200-II ($90)

Midrange: Etymotic Research HF5 ($150)

Highrange: JH Audio JH13 Pro ($1100) or Westone ES5 ($950)

Closed Full-sized Circumaural - These are the big ones that are fairly popular nowadays. They are full-sized if they basically cover your entire but circumaural means that they sit around your ear rather than on top of them. These are generally not very portable and I wouldn't necessarily walk around the street with them, although people do. The Closed part just means that they separate your ears from the surrounding sounds, meaning they isolate the sound so that they prevent your music from coming out of your ear but also prevent outside sounds from coming in. This is not the same as sound cancelling, that's a whole other technology, all it is is that they are closed and will provide some cancellation.

Open Full-sized Circumaural - These are very similar to our previous category of course, but instead of being closed to the outside they are open. Some of you may ask, why would that be good? Well I think there is a level of personal preference, but I think in general most people would say that these will generally provide a better and more realistic experince. While you will annoy more people in the bus with these and you will hear your neighbour cut the grass through them, they sound better. The closed earphones will bounce sound inside and around your ear while you listen to them, which can sound almost as if the music is coming from inside your head sometimes. They kind of give you this feel that you are listening to music in a studio, but to me that isn't how I think things should sound. I like my music and sounds to sound normal as if they were happening around me. So the open headphone allow the sound to dissipate around you which makes it sounds a lot more like you are seeing a live band. The sound just feels more alive and true to me. Of course that's why I ended up chosing the HD555 when I did. That is an example of a open circumaural headphone.


Suggestions
Low: Shure SRH440 ($100 - closed)

Mid: Audio-Technica ATH-M50 ($160 - closed) This is a very trusted brand from audiophiles and I certainly considered buying something similar when I was shopping around. It's a popular pick at this price range. Alternatively, the Sennheiser HD558 is the modern version of my headphone and tends to sell around $200 (open). This is probably what I would buy at this price range just because of my 3 year experience with the previous generation. They are superbly confortable and sound amazing. If there is one complaint I have is that they can get a bit warm if you are wearing them for a long time in the summer. The velvet pads are great when the temperature is nice, but not so great at 40ºC.


Expensive: Sennheiser HD800 ($1500 - open) Of course the top end I would suggest would be an open piece.

Full-sized Supra-aural - These are quite popular for people that have earphones hanging around their neck on the street. They can be seen as the portable version of the circumaural as they are smaller and only sit on top of the ear, meaning they don't have to cover your entire ear. This of course affects how natural they can sound if you aren't even using your full ear to add to the experience. I've tested a few of these but never bought one becuase I just don't have a need for it.

Suggestions
Low: JVC HAS400B ($35)

Mid-High: Sennheiser HD 25-1 II ($200) and Beyerdynamic DT 1350 ($300)

Noice Cancelling Headphones

I've tested a few but to be honest I have never found myself needing something like this. I don't fly very much and would have no other reason to buy them, meaning I don't know as much about these types of pieces. What I do know, is that they often require a battery because they have a tiny microphone on the outside that picks up ambient noises, with these they are able to produce changes to the soundwaves coming out into your ears so that they remove the annoying sounds from the outside. Some people don't even use them for music, they can be great for just removing ambient sounds. This technology is very cool, but will also make so that you will pay a pretty penny for these. They are not cheap and generally you won't get the best sound quality even if you spend $300 dollars for them. Not saying they are bad, I'm just saying you are paying for them to cancel noise, and not produce quality sounds. I tend to think that way about anything, I always try to buy products that fit my precise need and not pay for a bunch of technology I have no use for. I think that's a good piece of advice to anyone. Technology costs money and you end up paying for it even if you don't use it. That is money you could be spending on some other aspect of the product, in this case quality of the sound. Another piece of advice, don't ever think that spending more money garantees you a better product. Just look at Beets, Bose and Apple, you pay more for their stuff and that's it, you are not necessarily getting the best bang for your buck, and with these 3 I can garantee you that you are not. Unless having the most popular product is your bang and not the actual quality, than ignore what I'm saying.

For further literature check out that subreddit I linked above and Head-Fi.org. 

Shopping for a tablet

My wife came up with the idea of getting me a tablet for Xmas. I never really pushed to buy one before because of price and I thought I wouldn't really get my money's worth out of it. But as it is Xmas and the idea was planted in my head I decided to do a bit of research on it. After some research and consideration of my price range I was looking at:

• Google (ASUS) Nexus 7 -  This was the smallest one I considered, only 7 inches, but the reviews everywhere just praise this machine. It has great hardware, boasting 1920 x 1200 native resolution, 32Gb of storage but no SD compatibility. 2Gb of RAM and is the only one with Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) out of the box. The machine is beautiful and it sounds like it has early access to apps via Google Play, although I'm still not sure what that means. I think if I could get the Nexus 10 I would have considered the google tablets a bit more seriously, however 7 inches was a tad too small for me. I really wanted something a bit more substantial.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10" - One of my top contenders since it's a 10 inch tablet at a fairly reasonable price point. It uses Android 4.2, which is not the newest but it's close. It has 16Gb of storage which is upgradeable through MicroSD to 64Gb. It has 1Gb of RAM which is actually not very much and is the reason I didn't pick it. It weights 510g with a 1280x800 resolution. I considered the 8 inch one as well, which seems a bit better in terms of hardware, but the screen was too small for my needs.
• Microsoft Surface 32Gb Windows RT - The weekend I was looking at tablets, this one was hugely on sale for only C$199. In terms of hardware I actually thing it was easily the best option available. As you may or may not know, the windows tablets also come with virtually full featured office suite, which is great if you want a tablet for browsing and work. I was very close to buying this model, but I'm glad I didn't now. The keyboard doesnt come with the RT tablets, and it is sold separately for pretty much the same price as any other keyboard for Androids. The RT OS is actually pretty restricting, only allowing you to use RT software you get from the microsoft app store. This is unlike the Surface 2, which can pretty much run like a laptop, but those things are very expensive. As I said, in terms of harware, it's great. Resolution of 1366x768, 32 Gb of storage, 2Gb of RAM. It's a bit heavier, weighing 680g. But in the end, I realized I'm likely not going to be doing too too much work on this thing so I shouldn't buy something so restrictive. Apple and Androids just have so much more option in terms of apps.
• Sony Xperia Tablet Z 10" - It hast only 16Gb of storage although that can be upgraded with a SD card. It's 10 inches which I think is important to me. It's one of the lightest machines around and has the added bonus of being waterproof. It uses Android 4.1, which is a more dated OS but it is an Android still.

Anyway, I ended up decided on the Sony Xperia Z tablet. Despite not seeing it appear on a lot of review websites, I absolutely love the machine and now I can't believe I never had one before and that it doesn't receive more praise around. It is simply a perfect extension from my PC in the home. I love using it to connect me to all my devices and just have easy access to everything I need anywhere without needing my 5kg laptop. It also happens to be the only waterproof tablet around and it even has remote control capabilities, so I can use it to work my TV and whatnot. It's just perfect.

 

In terms of apps I actually use on it right now, I have evernote and dropbox for my cloud needs. I have Lemon SSH to connect to my home/media server. I use a reddit app and I downloaded Dungeaon Crawl Stone Soup for android which is availabe on Google play. It's actually not a terrible port to be honest. This tablet also has great integration with all my google accounts, including my schedule, my emails, my contacts. I'm still exploring what apps there are, but I'm very impressed with my Android so far.

As a last comment, I didn't really consider an iPad for 2 main reasons. First, it is fairly expensive for what you get compared to the Androids. More importantly, I hate Apple. I think they make good products and they have the best marketing team in the world as far as I'm concerned. However I hate what Apple stands for. They produce great products that unfortunately restrict their users to a lot of the software they want their users to use, instead of trying to open up so that users can have freedom if they chose so. How many times have I been stuck with a problem on one of my iDevices that I simply would not be able to resolve without a huge amount of headache if it wasn't for Linux. I can always just acces my apple machines with the help of my Linux and that usually allows me to have the freedom that Apple seems to always want to take away. A lot of people claim this is solely to protect users from making mistakes, but I think often it is to prevent users that are already paying a premium on their products from steering away from other products they will be happy to charge their customers for. It's just like Burton snowboards, that force you to buy the bindings from them and then the snowboard boots from them as well. People get tricked into buying their product, just to be stuck using all their other products in the end. I refuse to fund a corporation that uses these types of tactics to make money.

update error on Ubuntu Server 12.04

Recently I came across an annoying error on my headless Ubuntu Server. Nothing really had happened as far as I'm concerned in my home LAN, and all of a sudden only this distro could no longer run an OS update. I did upgrade my internet service recently but I'm not sure if that could be related. Anyway, the error I kept getting for days was:

 

"  temporary failure resolving 'us.archive.ubuntu.com'  "

Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com precise Release.gpg

Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/Release.gpg

Temporary failure resolving 'us.archive.ubuntu.com'

Anyway, after a bit of googling, I came across a helpful comment by fossfreedom from the UK, which can be found here. The solution was simple for me:

1. Test to see if the problem is your DNS setting or an ISP issue. To do this type on the console: ping -n 8.8.8.8
2. If produces replies you can stop it with Ctrl + C. This indicates that it is not an ISP problem so there is no point in calling them.
3. Therefore, for me it was a DNS problem, which I have been having a lot of lately (likely due to my VPN usage). So I checked /etc/resolv.conf to see if I could find my DNS servers there. That's when I knew what my problem was. The file was empty, so I added the google DNS server.
4. This was done through: echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" | sudo tee /etc/resolv.conf > /dev/null
5. After that, I just had to run the update via: sudo apt-get update

Media Server install on Headless Ubuntu Server 12.04

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been playing around with Ubuntu Server 12.04 on an old laptop of mine. One of the purposes of putting it together is to stream media over my home network. As I mentioned earlier, I'm running this server headless using Putty. So here is a set of instructions I found to work very well with my install. Credit goes to folks at UbuntuForums.org and damo12 for putting this post together. Another potentially useful link in case there are still questions after this post can be found HERE.

 ----------------------------

Guide to Installing and Running MiniDLNA on an Ubuntu Server

I have recently been experimenting with running MiniDLNA on a headless Ubuntu Server and have hit a few snags. After a lot of search and a few pointers from this and other forums I have finally managed to get it running fine. In case anyone else has this problem I have written this guide to hopefully take some of the pain out of installing and configuring an amazing program.


The Hardware

My server is a headless HP Microserver running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS 64 bit edition accessed through Putty and Webmin (www.webmin.com). I have also tried this using a virtual setup using Virtual Box and that also worked fine.

As a receiver, I am using an LG HX806SH Blu-ray player connected to my LAN by a Homeplug adapter. I have also tried using Windows Media Player and they both work fine. I would like to try this with VLC to test it on a Linux desktop but configuring VLC to receive streaming media from a server is beyond me right now.


The Server Setup

The server has a standard headless setup including Samba installed (a combination of Windows and Linux machines share files stored on it). If you need any help installing and using Webmin, I suggest you have a look at the excellent guide at http://www.kelvinwong.ca/2010/05/22/...-04-lts-lucid/.


Installing and Configuring MiniDLNA

For some reason, when I tried to install MiniDLNA, through Putty I received error messages. From reading around, it turns out that this is a common problem as some repositories are missing.

In the end, these commands installed the package:

Code:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python-software-properties && sudo dpkg-reconfigure python-software-properties

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stedy6/stedy-minidna
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install minidlna

I would also recommend installing the Webmin MiniDLNA module from https://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlnawebmin/

If you are accessing the server through Webmin and are not sure how to install the module, save it to a local location (such as your desktop on your computer). Select the "Webmin Configuration" module which is under the "Webmin" tab. Select the "Webmin Modules" and choose to load the module “From uploaded file". Once the module has been installed it will be automatically be configured and it will be available under the "Servers" tab.

Once this is installed, you need to configure the MiniDLNA conf file located at /etc/minidlna.conf.

You can use your favourite text editor or if you are accessing this through Webmin, you can use the "Edit" option in "File Manager". If you have installed the Webmin module, you can also change all of the settings from there.

My minidlna.conf file reads as follows:

 [refer to link for the full text, but the only changes I had to made were adding the following]

# set this to the directory you want scanned.
# * if have multiple directories, you can have multiple media_dir= lines
# * if you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you
#   can prepend the type, followed by a comma, to the directory:
#   + "A" for audio  (eg. media_dir=A,/home/jmaggard/Music)
#   + "V" for video  (eg. media_dir=V,/home/jmaggard/Videos)
#   + "P" for images (eg. media_dir=P,/home/jmaggard/Pictures)

media_dir=V,/media/server/server/Media/Films
media_dir=V,/media/server/server/Media/TV
media_dir=V,/media/server/server/Media/Commedy
media_dir=V,/media/server/server/Music/Videos
media_dir=A,/media/server/server/Music/Music
media_dir=P,/media/server/server/Stuff/Pictures

# set this if you want to customize the name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=MiniDLNA Server

[Basically you need to add the path to the appropriate folders you want to share, and where it says "friendly_name" you can change to something you can easily identify in your network.]

As you can see, I've made a few changes to the standard file:

• I have added various sources of videos
• I have changed the name of the server so I can recognise it easily on the network
• I have moved the location of the database to a location that I backup each day and is shared by Samba (this is for my personal benefit only)
• I have added extra filenames to the "AlbulmArt" section as I usually call the front cover of an album "Front"

Despite the line “# default presentation url is http address on port 80” MiniDLNA does not have a webpage that it can be controlled from. From what I can gather, this was going to be a future feature that was not completed for whatever reason. However, the Webmin module takes care of everything that you need.

From the "Command Shell" in Webmin or through an SSH session using Putty, you can control MiniDLNA using the commands:

Code:

sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna stop
sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna start

At first run, MiniDLNA will scan all of the folders (and their sub-folders) it has been pointed at and make all of these files available. The scan is extremely quick (less than 10 minutes to scan about 12,000 files).

The Webmin module has a "Restart" button but for some reason (on my set-ups) it does not work properly. It will stop MiniDLNA but when it tries to restart it, it fails. Trying to manually start it using the command "sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna start" after using this "Restart" does not seem to work and the only way I have found to resolve this is to restart the whole server.


Adding or Removing Files of Folders from the Database

In my experience, MiniDLNA tends not to notice if a file has been added or removed from the folders so the database does not update and new files are not shown on your device and old files are still shown even though they have been removed. This seems to be a problem with MiniDLNA and not the receiving soft/hardware. If you change the name of the server, the soft/hardware picks that up fine.

Some people have had success with the command:

Code:

minidlna -R

or by removing the file /tmp/minidlna/files.db and restarting the server using the command:

Code:

rm -rf /tmp/minidlna

Someone else suggested using the command:

Code:

minidlna -R -f /tmp/minidlna.conf

However, I have found the easiest and most successful method is to use the "Rescan" button in the Webmin interface. This button deletes the MiniDLNA database and rescans from scratch. On my system, this new scan took less than 10 minutes to scan about 12,000 files. After the scan, any new files appear in the database and any deleted files are removed.


Outstanding Problems

The only thing I have not been able to get MiniDLNA to do so far is display my photos properly on the Blu-ray player even though they display fine on Windows Media Player. On the Blu-ray, it shows all of the folders where my pictures are stored and even gives me the option to search by camera but when I try to view the pictures or look into the folders, the folders are all empty. This suggests it is something to do with the Blu-ray player and not MiniDLNA however, to be honest this is not an issue for me as my main aim was to stream videos and music and it works perfectly for that.

If anyone can point me to a walkthrough of how to receive streamed videos and music on VLC I would be grateful so I can test this set-up on that and add it to this guide.

I hope you find this guide useful and it takes away some of the headaches I've had with setting up this excellent program.

After installing Ubuntu Server 12.04 (a noob's perspective)

Hello everyone, I just finished installing Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS on my spare laptop. I basically am looking to put together a home server for fun. I think this post may be useful to people that are absolute noobs to this stuff since I'm an absolute amateur and I think I may bring up some difficulties that other new users may experience as well...

Anyway, I went through the installation of the OS to my laptop. For this I followed fairly simple instructions from "The Official Ubuntu Server Book, 2nd ed." as well as this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SgX15CpT64) video found on YouTube. There are other videos as well if needed, but honestly the process of installing the OS is fairly straight forward if you have ever installed Ubuntu before. There is one thing I would say though, when you are installing the server to your machine, I recommend you plug your machine to your router directly before you start. I started off trying to use the wifi, and that just wasn't going to happen, I only later realized that my original challenges were due to this simple fact.

Once you finish installing Ubuntu Server on your machine, reboot it and I would recommend running an update. In order to accomplish this you need to type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

This is of course all done after you have logged in with you username and password. By the way, make sure you don't forget any of the passwords you have for your server since I'm pretty sure you can't get them back later. Also if you are really new to Linux, sudo is the command you use to gain root access, which is sort of like having administrator privileges. Anytime you use "sudo" you need to use your password.

I also added vim to my server by typing

sudo apt-get install vim

I think that if you are completely new to linux commands, another important one to learn is

sudo shutdown -h now

which turns off your server, as well the command to restart your machine:

sudo shutdown -r now

The last thing I would like to mention, which is what you will need if you want to run the server headless (ie. without a keyboard or monitor directly connected to the machine), is that you need some kind of software that allows you access to your server. For that, one of the more popular options is the use of putty.exe which can be obtained at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Once you download putty.exe, run it. There you will type your Host Name or IP address. The hostname is the machine's name you types during the installation of your OS. Make sure SSH is selected in the connection type. This will obviously only work if you have the SSH stuff installed on your server. Save a name for your session, I'm just using the server's name for reference. At this point you can select your session and click "open".

Click yes to the pop up box that will show up (PuTTY Security Alert). At this point you will get a command prompt box, where you can operate your server as if you were typing directly into it. Quite cool really for anyone like me who has never done this before.

You are a pirate

Recently it dawned on me that my needs for pirating have changed greatly since I started doing it, back in the Napster years. Pirating was something that began as a bit of a desire to have digital content such as music, videos, games and general software. As a teenager and eventually a university student, I just wouldn't be able to afford all these things. Once I got a job, and began my career I started to be able to afford things and I also started to feel the need to support things I cared about. I had heard the opinions of some many publishers and musicians that despite losing money from this practice, still supported it.

The first one I can remember, actually came from Fred Durst who always supported music sharing because it is how a lot of his music and the music of his peers even began to gain popularity. At the time I was a musician myself, and I voluntarily placed my music on Napster and similar services, in the hopes that if my music was linked to other popular artists I would be able to get it out. Obviously that didn't work for me in the end. The industry's attitude towards piracy has always been negative, of course because they make less money, however this is clearly an attitude of self interest, and of capitalist greed rather than a true desire to expand the reaches of the art. Also, what's even the point of trying to fight a war that has already been lost. All this pointless effort does is cost millions of dollars, affects greatly the few that actually get sued by these companies and in the end gets them nowhere.

Another great example from the industry for me was Notch, the Swedish game developer responsible for Minecraft. He basically said that he doesn't mind pirating. He made this game that eventually became very successful and the main reason for his success was efficient sharing of his content. Notch said that he prefers that people play an enjoy his game even if it is pirated. Obviously he prefers if people pay for it, but in the end, he would prefer someone playing the game for free than not playing it at all. It obviously gives him great personal satisfaction. Now, to be completely honest, when I first heard of Minecraft I thought "I don't get why this game is good". I was still intriged by it's sudden popularity during the beta days. So I downloaded it in torrent form. I played it for a week or so and decided it was good, so I purchased a license of the beta game. That wasn't the last time I did that either.



In the end, fighting against piracy is futile. Instead intelligent folks like Gaben and the guys behind Netflix decided to use the change in the industry to make money. They have been extremely successful and I gladly pay for their services. I have no problem paying money to support services trying to improve customer experience during a time where so many others are losing money.

Another big change in my downloading practices is that I started to pay money to pirate things. I dislike the idea of anti piracy efforts so much, and the anti privacy policies involved so much, that I rather pay for a third party to provide me with annonymity, than to pay for the media I'm wanting to use, just not enough to pay for it. This has an upside and a downside. On the downside, these anti piracy moves threaten the very essence of the internet. It threatens the greatest advancement in humanity of the last century, which is now the core that moves information, disseminating it over our ever shrinking world. Which means we have to continue to fight to maintain our cybernetic freedom. On the upside, I think this fear produced causes people to be more careful and make them attempt to protect themselves as well as educated themselves. Me, I learned all about networks like Usenet, which is a history lesson as well. I learned about VPNs, and how to hide behind proxies. All very useful information in this age where we are quickly becoming more vulnerable.

++

Anyone, just to wrap this post up here is a relevant video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEBbu-wkKrs

Anonymous exposing presidential election vulnerabilities

I just found this neat artile on Tom's Hardware and figured it was interesting enogh to share:

Earlier this month, hactivist group Anonymous announced (PDF) that it helped put President Barack Obama back into office for another 4-year term by preventing Republican activist and Fox News anchor Karl Rove from electronically stealing votes from Obama supporters. The group claims that Rove somehow laid tunnels through voter tracking software that would have switched votes from Obama over to Romney in at least three states.

"We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule Of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way," the group said. "After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl's operation and even that of his ORCA."

Anonymous said that Rove "left the barn doors wide open", meaning the digital tunnels the Fox News anchor had supposedly established were left unsecured, granting any hacker easy access into the voter tracking system. Thus the group created what it called The Great Oz, a targeted password protected firewall to keep additional hackers, including Karl Rove, out.

"We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destinations that Karl's not-so-smart worker bees planned to use on election night," they wrote. "We noticed that these tunnels were strategically placed to allow for tunnel rats to race to the server sewers from three different states. Ah yes, Karl tried to make it appear that there were more than three but we quickly saw the folly of his ploy."

Anonymous said that once the firewall was established, Karl's "speared ORCA whale was beached", as his team of supposed hackers, obviously hired to alter voting in Romney's favor, tried to penetrate the firewall and failed exactly 105 times.

"We have a warning for Karl," the group said. "Sail again at your peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London."

The announcement claims that Rove's ORCA was discovered at 10am EST on November 6, and then speared by The Great Oz later on at 8pm EST. The group also hints to previously stolen elections which "resulted in terrible destruction across the globe", thus provoking the group into following Rove's data trail. The Examiner also points out that Ohio suffered server problems on November 6 at around 11pm, mirroring an identical situation in Ohio that took place in 2004.

While we won't jump into politics, the claim made by Anonymous poses a good question: can the system used to track votes be fully trusted in an age where servers and firewalls are breached seemingly every week, exposing sensitive data owned by companies and individuals? And if the Anonymous story is true, then how did Rove get into the system and install his pipeline? Did someone give him access or was this an actual hack?
Something tells us that we'll find out soon enough.

--
Here is the original article for anyone interested 

First Assange, then Pirate Bay

Just saw a story about a co-founder of Pirate Bay getting arrested in Cambodia to be brought back to Sweden.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/09/03/tech-ap-pirate-bay-arrest.html

 I'm not sure how to interpret this, especially since he's only being charge for 1 year in prison in Sweden. That does seem like a relatively light sentence, but seeing this after what they did to Assange does seem to suggest Sweden is no longer as independent from North American influence. That's a bit sad, as Sweden has always been such a progressive nation when I comes to the distribution of information online.

Reinstalling Ubuntu while keeping the home partition intact

I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop alongside Windows 7 for a little while. I started with 11.04 and since then I have been simply upgrading it using the update manager. It worked well enough up until 12.04, I have since experienced a few problems. For instance, my sound all of a sudden stopped working on my Linux, I have had a lot of issues managing my ipod with rythmbox or banshee (which I don't tend to use since it's so buggy), my Conky now looks a bit funky and I often get errors when I try to update my distro using the software manager.

Anyway, lot's of problems. So I decided to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.04 from a disk, and my main problem is that I would like to keep my /home partition intact and of course keep my Windows partitions the way they are. So this is what I have done:

1. Using a GParted live CD, I formatted my \ partition (root partition) but I left the partition as it was
2. Rebooted the machine with the Ubuntu live disk and selected the install Ubuntu option
3. Chose to do "somthing else" on the installation. There I selected my original root partition to and "changed" it to be an active partition and be used as root. You have to make sure all the Linux partitions are in Ext4.
4. Chose the original /home partition and select it as active and as the "/home" partition.
5. Chose the original /swap partition and keep it as /swap, although for this I didn't seem to need to do anything about it.

This method seems to work in terms of getting my distro installed fresh, however it did not seem to fix my sound problem, probably because the configuration information is probably located on my /home. Regardless of that, at least I have a fresh install of ubuntu now. So my next course of action will be to see if I can fix the sound issue without having to install the OS again. If that doesn't work maybe I'll install Ubuntu again and create a new /home partition. From there I could just keep my old /home partition and move the files later.

Settled on Astrill as my VPN service

For a while I have been looking into different ways to gain a bit more privacy while online. I love the internet, and I do think it is the greatest invention of the 20th century, however, political parties and their archaic outlook on new technologies, slows down the natural progress of it. One of the main problems with the internet is privacy. Laws have not been evolving as quickly as the community, so a lot of them are outdated and infringe on basic freedoms already achieved in the real world. For that reason, I have decided that investing a little bit on a VPN service would be worthwhile.

I did a fair bit of research, and ended up settling on Astrill. I looked at a lot of different services, and as a package I think Astrill's service really suited my needs. One of the other contenders was "Hide my ass", which seems to be one of the most popular services out there. Indeed it was one of the ones I was most interested in. However, HMA made big news at one point when the folks from lulzSec got caught. Apparently HMA did provide authorities with logs that gave away a lot of vital information about its members. So entirely due to principles, in this case being that it makes no sense to pay a fee for privacy, if privacy is not really garanteed. It's not like LulzSec killed anyone.

The other big contender was Strong VPN, which I almost signed up with before I had done more reading. Their prices seem fair, and they do have a lot of options in terms of where their servers are, however, I really was looking for a service that included servers in different countries, freedom to switch servers frequently, the ability to connect via PPTP or OpenVPN. At Strong VPN, the ability to have all those things would cost me quite a lot, so I decided to go with Astrill. They offered pretty much all I wanted for a decent price if you do at least a 3 month contract.

The installation in Ubuntu as well as Windows 7 was easy. On Ubuntu you may need to download OpneVPN through apt-get, but after that you just click to download a small client. Windows just requires the client. I'll use it during the next few months, and I'll post if I encounter any problems.

PPTP, OpenVPN, IPSec and L2TP - What's the difference?

I have recently started to look into VPN services to enhance my privacy while using the interwebs. One thing that started to confuse me pretty quickly was the variety of different servers available, and honestly it took me a while to start to understand what the differences are. Well to make this process simpler for other people, here is a nice short summary from zzing123, which was posed at "perfect-privacy.com forum.

On a general level, PPTP was invented by Microsoft as a VPN that could be used with dialup, and is far older than OpenVPN, and as such is practically available from any device that supports a VPN of some description. That and the fact it's easy to use are really the only reasons it's used. In terms of security it's basically crap: at best it uses 128 bit encryption with an RC4 handshake (Handshake is the authentication/login process for setting up the VPN). At worst, 64 bit encryption and a plain-text handshake (so it wouldn't even take 2 weeks: just read the packet!). Naturally, PP uses the better sort.

OpenVPN is - in this league - very new technology. It's basically the amalgamation of several technologies, like SSH, Stunnel, OpenSSL's encryption libraries all of which provide unix with best of breed power and together form OVPN, a best of breed VPN. OVPN allows you to choose the method and algorithm for handshaking as well as for data encryption, plus uses SSL certificates, PSK's or User/Pass (or a combination of) to authenticate clients on top of that. With hardware acceleration, OVPN is easily faster than PPTP. Without acceleration, it's entirely dependent on the algorithms chosen - Blowfish is designed to be the fastest software-only algorithm, so OVPN would be a lot faster than PPTP. Encumbered with a software AES-256 implementation, and PPTP's 128 bit encryption is faster. This ultimate configurability is also OVPN's downfall: it's pretty complicated to set up.

With PP's OVPN service, ideally they should provide a client.crt and client.key unique to every customer, instead of using the auth-user-pass directive for ultimate security, but management of these keys becomes a nightmare. That said PP uses RSA 4096-bit encryption for the handshake and AES-256 for data, which are probably the two most secure algorithms you can use currently in OVPN.

There is also a third technology: L2TP / IPSec. L2TP provides the layer 2 tunnel, and IPSec the encryption, and was invented by Cisco to bridge 2 networks together. IPSec uses either RSA or a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) for the handshake, which uses Diffie-Hellman hashing over and above that. For data, it can use 3DES, DES, Blowfish, AES and CAST-128. IPSec does have pretty good support in clients and is widely regarded as being PPTP sorted out. Because Cisco developed it to sell more routers, a lot of expensive network gear has IPSec support built in, meaning that if you have very expensive network kit using IPSec, your VPN's will be so fast there's practically no latency overhead. Software implementations are as fast as PPTP.

So in summary:
- Choose PPTP: If you want an albeit crusty VPN technology available everywhere
- Choose OVPN: If you want the most powerful, secure and modern VPN
- Choose IPSec/L2TP: If you want high performance between two sites

Easiest printer install EVER !!! & update on my media manager choice

I had been using my printer only on Windows before, just because it was already installed and I figured why bother. Well today I booted my machine on Linux and by mistake I had left my printer on last time I used it. So once I logged into Ubuntu something prompted asking me for root rights and I read that it was my HP printer asking to be installed. Well, I figured there would be no harm in typing my password so I did. The process took a solid 3 minutes and I just had to type a "proceed" type command when prompted and voilà. My HP LaserJet 1020 printer was ready to print, I did a print test and it worked. I have to say I'm very impressed with this aspect of my Ubuntu 11.10, that was by far the simplest printer installation I have ever seen.

On a different note, I have tried Rhythmbox Music Player as an alternative to my recent move to Banshee. My first impression is that Rhythmbox is a bit of a plain thing to look at, however, the functionality is a different story. This wonderfully light media manager has been working wonders for me. I now have all my podcasts being subscribed properly on it, and transferring them to my ipod is no longer an issue. Not only that, but my podcasts are now going to their appropriate menus, just like I had on my iTunes. The syncing is very similar to Banshee, where you kind of drag and drop. I think I still prefer iTunes in that respect, but being able to manage my music on Linux and do virtually everything just as well without relying on proprietary iTunes is great. Therefore, I would certainly recommend Rhythmbox to anyone interested in the switch.

Finally my new PC specs

So as I've been saying, I got myself a new machine, or at least most of my machine is new.

MOBO: ASUS P8Z68-V LX Z68 L1155 GLAN DDR3
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz 8MB L1155
RAM: DDR3 8GB (2x 4GB) KVR1333D3N9K2
HDD: SATA II Seagate 1Tb 7200RPM 32M
Case: ATX Coolmaster 922HAF
PSU: Antec Truepower 650W
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium :(

The whole thing cost me C$950 which is a pretty competitive price. I got it at Sonnam Computer at College and Spadina in Toronto. I looked for these part at various shops around that area and online so I know the price isn't too bad. I picked this particular shop because of the service, the sales people were quite helpful and willing to give me a discount as well. I do however have a complaint. While picking my part I specifically asked them to not install any OS on the machine. I wanted them to put some of the parts together, but since I was going to dual boot it, I preferred to take it home and partition the HDD myself and start from there. Well even though I asked them that in more than one occasion they still installed my OS and did the authentication online which was very annoying. Overall though, the experience wasn't bad.

Sonnam Computer (457 Spadina Ave.)

Sharing media on Ubuntu (to PS3 and probably Wii and XBox as well)

Last week my PC blew up, this ended up a big excuse for me to attempt to change most of my computing to Linux. Anyone that has switched to Linux knows that it needs to be a gradual process, unfortunately I had to spend C$100 on a Windows 7 license because I still need it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but paying for my OS actually hurts me. Anyway, today I want to share some of my videos and music on my network, the idea is to play my files on my PS3 and I'm wondering how to do that outside of Windows (which was not all that great via Windows Vista anyway).

I started by downloading an app from the repositories called Mediatomb which you can also get via the terminal by typing:

$ sudo apt-get install mediatomb

First thing you have to do is enable sharing to your system, which in my case is a PS3. This is done via the command:

$ sudo gedit ~/.mediatomb/config.xml

There you will want to find a line with:

<protocolInfo extend="no"/>

...now change that "no" to a "yes"... now look for a line saying

<mappings> <extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">

and add these two lines into the section below it, there will be a suggestion to just uncomment it but you can just add them:

<map from="avi" to="video/x-divx"/>

<map from="divx" to="video/x-divx"/>

Then you actually need to run it from the terminal by typing:

$ sudo mediatomb

This should give you an ip address with a port number (like http://192.168.1.101:49155/), so copy this and access it through your browser. Now you can navigate through your files and folders (filessystem), and anything you would like to share with your PS3, simply click on the + sign. Once you have done that to all the files you want to share you may go back to the "database" option and see what you are sharing over you LAN.

For some reason I get 2 options for Mediatomb on my PS3, and the second one tends to have a "Directories" folder that I can access and use my media. I hope this helps.

TeamViewer - remote access application

Listening to a podcast I enjoy, I discovered a great little program for accessing computers remotely over the interwebs. This is TeamViewer I'm talking about. After installing a copy on your machine (client) and on the machine you are trying to access (server), it allows you to access one computer from the other without having to bother with port forwarding or anything else like that. It is still fairly safe, as you have the option of giving out a randomly generated numbers every time you want to allow access to your computer. There is an option of a permanent number as well, however that does come with a bit less security of course. If you go that route, just make sure to make a complex password for it.

You may download this gem here: http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx

It worked well with my Windows Vista and Ubuntu 11.04, but it is supposed to work on Macs are well.

Canadians for net neutrality

Here is a message from a group fighting for something I feel quite strongly about, Net Neutrality. If you are not sure what net neutrality is, here is a definition:

"Network neutrality is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the internet. Specifically, network neutrality would prevent restrictions on content, sites, platforms, types of equipment that may be attached, and modes of communication."

They have a facebook group as well where you can get more information, but here is a message from the OpenMedia.ca team:

Big Telecom has decided to fight their customers instead of working to make the Internet more open and affordable, but together we can turn Canada from a digital laggard to a leader in connectivity and innovation.


Big phone and cable companies are losing control but they are not giving up without a fight—in fact they’re doubling down on greed. These companies are raising prices across the board while they still can, and trying to cozy up to policymakers: Bell has just appointed former Industry Minister Jim Prentice as a board member, and Telus has done the same with former Conservative MP Stockwell Day.


The Internet impacts every aspect of our lives, and we all deserve a say in its future. Take a moment to provide OpenMedia.ca with key input here: http://openmedia.ca/engage


Thanks to you, our petitions saw viral growth this year, and we gained national media coverage and caught the the attention of the Prime Minister’s office. You forced a CRTC review on Internet metering, and OpenMedia.ca testified at the subsequent public hearing this summer. The stakes were high and the pressure was on at the CRTC’s landmark hearing, but we held our own against the Big Telecom lobby. By the end of the two-week proceeding, nearly everyone was shunning usage-based pricing schemes, but we’re not done yet. Now, more than ever, we have to keep up the pressure so that the decision makers know Canadians want an open, affordable Internet.


We’ve gained momentum and Ottawa is starting to listen. Let’s keep up the charge.


Here are a few easy ways you can help right now:


1. If you haven’t already, fill out our pro-Internet survey: http://openmedia.ca/engage


2. Make a donation (http://openmedia.ca/donate, or help us continue to bring your voice to Ottawa by becoming a monthly donor (http://openmedia.ca/sustainer).


Your support has allowed us to get this far. Thank you so much for your ongoing efforts to champion the open and affordable Internet.


Onward,


Lindsey, Steve, Reilly, and the OpenMedia.ca Team

Prey - stolen laptop story

I was just browsing around when I found this pretty neat story about someone that had their laptop stolen, and using a software called "prey", were able to recover it. Here is a link to it:

Lifehacker - How I Got My Stolen Laptop Back Within 24 Hours Using Prey

Tor project - protecting privacy while browsing

I just discovered a nice little tool to help protect me from the dangers of browsing. This tool is called Tor. This is a free software that helps you protect yourself from network surveillance and traffic analysis. If you care about anonymity online, this may be a good option. In order to get it running you can do some reading and get the app here:

Ubuntu instructions
Ubuntu installation
More Ubuntu network privacy info
Windows instructions

Tor also has a plugin for Firefox, and since I'm a Firefox user I will also need Torbutton

Just a note, Tor will help you with anonymity, but in no way it is perfect, there are still risks. Not only that but be aware that using Tor will probably slow down your internet, so use it as you see needed. If you have the firefox plugin you can enable and disable it whenever you want, which adds a bit of flexibility depending on your needs.

Ubuntu - I'm a convert

I've been contemplating the idea of trying Linux out for years. Back in high school I even bought a book on Red Hat and tried to install it to my second HDD. It worked, sort of, I got it running but couldn't figure out how to configure anything. That led me to some significant frustration and I eventually put away linux, thinking that was that. Well recently I've been fooling around with some NetSec stuff and I came by this very cool linux distro which I found out I could run off of a USB drive. I read a bit more and found out that installing this distro (BackTrack) on a USB stick was actually pretty easy. So I did that and just out of my adventures into NetSec topics I was exposed to some Linux. I felt that it wasn't that difficult to figure things out in BT, and I didn't mind the terminal stuff since anything I didn't know I could just google. One thing led to another and a few months later I started to read more about this really cool distro called Ubuntu which apparently seemed to be very popular. I figured the popularity of the distro is probably a sign that it is actually accessible to linux noobies, and I was right. Last Friday I decided to partition my laptop so that I could try out ubuntu on it.

It has been almost a week later and I have to say I love it. Ubuntu is very stable, pretty lean, which makes my laptop much more usable now compared to my winXP boot. I absolutely love repo and how easy it is to navigate it. For those that don't know what repo is, it is basically like the iTunes app store. It is a compilation of servers where people that develop open source (FREE) software posts all their goodies, so you can just browse thousands of applications and install whatever you need, all for free. It's quite amazing and they have a wonderful selection of programs that really makes windows for me just half necessary. I think because I am into gaming I will still use windows for that. Linux has Wine which allows you to play win games, but I don't mind running a windows machine. Also, MS Office still a must for me, open office just doesn't cut it. Repo works off of the terminal as well, and installing software on linux is even easier than it is on Windows. I have to say, for anyone still intimidated to get into using this amazing free resource, don't be... There are quite a few Linux distros available that will make your transition super easy. I've been reading a lot and listening to some great podcasts about linux, so if anyone has questions about Linux and whether or not you should try it out, please msg me.

How to properly defrag my drives with Windows Vista (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ ರ_ರ

I might sounds like a noob here, but I didn't know how to do a proper defragmentation of my disks so that I can actually see what's going on. As most of you Vista users out there know, this version of Windows doesn't have a nice visual defragger like good old windows 2000 or even XP had, and if you are like me you like to see the progress and have a sense of what's happening when you are defragging your machine. Well in order to do that on Vista you have to open the command prompt as administrator (by right clicking on the icon and "running it as administrator").

Once it's open the command to defrag is:

This does a full defrag of your hard drive
defrag c: -w

you may add "-v" to the command for a verbose option where you get more info on what's happening.

The other nifty command is 

defrag c: -a

which does an analysis of the drive to tell you how much fragmentation there is in the first place.