Install Chrome without admin rights

At my agency we actively encourage users to switch to a browser other than IE. Unfortunately I understand there are many IT departments in the world who still maintain a draconian insistence on IE. Without administrator privileges it's not possible to install Firefox, but luckily Google has built Chrome to install without them! Take that tyrannical IT overlords! Faster and safer browsing without your permission! I understand there may be some GP or something somewhere that disables this but for the most part it seems to work. Another downside is that the default Chrome installer only makes the application available for a single user. Google has thoughtfully provided an alternate installer which addresses this issue as well (alternate installer DOES need admin though).

Bit.ly ads sneaking past Adblock Plus?

I can't stand ads. I don't like them on TV, I don't read magazines due to the rampant advertising, and I definitely don't like them on the web. I've been using Adblock Plus for several years on Firefox and more recently on Chrome. I even run AdFree on my rooted android phone for system wide adblocking. Today I saw an ad, though. While blocking it I noticed something very unusual - the URL of the banner was on bit.ly. As this type of URL shortening service creates essentially pseudorandom URLs this seems like the perfect ploy to defeat Adblock.

I worriedly searched Google but I haven't found any information. I sure hope that one lone ad wasn't a canary in the coalmine of obnoxious banners returning to my web viewing experience.

Backup a VirtualBox VM

I just installed FreeBSD 8.2 in VirtualBox 3.2.10_OSE under CrunchBang linux. After getting everything configured in terms of guest additions, and display setup I wanted to take a snapshot. Turns out there's a nifty one step command to facilitate this process that I found on here. Simply run

VBoxManage clonevdi ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/image.vdi ~/image_Backup.vdi

That's all there is to it! Easy as pi.

Remove Intel sticker adhesive

I unbox a lot of laptops in the course of my work. One of the first steps after opening the lid is to remove all of those annoying stickers OEMs seem determined to plaster all over everything. For the most part these come off very nicely, but there's one sticker which causes more problems than any other. Intel. For some reason they've chosen to use an adhesive that never comes off completely leaving a sticky unsightly mess on the body of a brand new laptop. Luckily for me (and now you!) I've found the solution. First after removing the inevitable Windows sticker don't discard it. After removing the Intel sticker stick the Windows sticker onto the remaining adhesive. It may take a couple passes to pull it all up, but I've used this trick dozens of times now and it's saved me a fair bit of aggravation. I bet the energy star, or Lenovo, or whatever other sticker you have will work just as well as the Windows sticker.

No more unsightly adhesive residue and no wasted time! Now if only it was this quick to remove the bloatware...

Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 14 display problem

I was recently brought one of these units with a peculiar problem. The display would power off, seemingly at random. After some basic testing I discovered that I could reproduce the problem by pressing the enter or backslash keys though other combinations of circumstances seemed to cause this glitch to resurface as well.

I initially chalked this up to a damaged display connector that was coming loose but after disassembly I found there was nothing wrong with the connector or display cable. This led me to some other wild and ultimately fruitless theories so I turned to Google. A few hits in I found this thread which seemed to describe the problem, at least superficially. I think a lot of unrelated problems have ended up in this thread, but there was enough commonality that I kept on pressing. On page 3 of the thread I found this little gem by a user named jimtristate:

"I experimented with holding a (fairly weak) magnet in various positions next to the power button and figured out how to turn on and off the display. I'm now going to wait until the mystical black screen appears and see if I can turn the screen back on just with the magnet. This, I feel, will demonstrate that the magnetic switch is probably getting triggered."

I opted for a strong magnet (from a stripped HDD). Sure enough placing the magnet near the power button caused the display to power off and removing it brought it back. Then I turned the display off with the enter button, and again placed the magnet. When I removed it the second time the display came back!

Well, jimtristate was right: this appears to be a problem with the magnetic sensor. My theory is that some aspect of the physical geometry or wiring of the keyboard is causing an errant magnetic field to be generated or perhaps simply directed towards the sensor. I've disabled the lid sensor in Windows and removed the Lenovo Power Manager with no effect. I'm unsure if this can be fixed short of removing the hall effect sensor / reed switch which controls this functionality.

**UPDATE** The aformentioned jimtristate at the Lenovo support forum updated the thread with the fix he discovered. He said he simply placed about 5 layers of electrical tape below the keyboard approximately where the P key would be and this seemed to solve the problem. I gave it a go:

and sure enough it works! Problem solved. This lends further credence to my theory that a magnetic field is leaking up from somewhere below, perhaps the HDD?

Remotely enable RDP

This morning I was stuck in what seemed to be a precarious catch22. I needed to make a remote desktop connection to a computer, but RDP was disabled. My first search of the web turned up a remote registry solution. Unfortunately remote administration of the registry was disabled by policy. Luckily it is possible to remotely enable "terminal services" without remote registry hacking as I learned in this blog post. You'll need a copy of psexec which you can download here, and you need to be logged in with an account which has local admin (at least) on the target. Then run the following command:

psexec \\machinename reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server" /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Then fire up mstsc and you're in.

Also This.

I feel this comic is part of my inspiration for starting this blog.

Silvertone Tube Amp

I'm in the process of attempting to take a stab at rehabbing an old tube amp from a sears brand blower organ from the 60s.  Here are the "before" pics.  I'll update with progress when achieved.

Tor + Android = Orbot

I'm a pretty big fan of Tor, the anonymizing network known as an onion router. For this reason I was recently delighted to learn of Orbot which is a tor + local proxy implementation for Android! If you're not familiar with tor unfortunately an explanation is outside the scope of this article.

My android phone is rooted so I'm enjoying full transparent tor proxying. I read that on non-rooted phones Orbot will still provide some functionality with specific browsers so it's probably worth a download even if you don't have those magical superuser privileges.

RIP Whisper Systems, we hardly knew ye

Crypto-punks the 'net around are in mourning after yesterday's announcement that Whisper Systems was being purchased by Twitter. For those of you who haven't heard: Whisper Systems was the fledgling company of Moxie Marlinspike a hacker most recently in the news for his work with Wikileaks. His company produced many very interesting cryptographic tools for Android including WhisperCore - a full encryption and security system for Android, WhisperMonitor - a software firewall tightly integrated with WhisperCore, and FlashBack - an encrypted cloud backup system. Though the software will reportedly be available again soon it is the loss of the RedPhone service which will be mourned by geeks and activists alike.

RedPhone was an end-to-end encrypted VoIP platform combined with anonymous routing. This service was one of the most exciting technological developments I have ever encountered. The potential for such a service should not be understated. It would strike fear in the heart of tyrants and make authorities of all stripes tremble in their jackboots.

And so the app is already pulled from the market and the servers are down. What will Twitter do with their newly acquired technology? We'll have to wait and see. One thing's for certain, though, this couldn't have happened at a more inopportune time.

On a related note: another one of Moxie's controversial services WPA Cracker is still online. WPA Cracker does not appear to be affiliated with Whisper Systems which probably explains how it narrowly escaped the fate of the other services.

Missing .exe file association in Windows XP

I recently encountered an XP machine that seemed unable to execute anything. When opening an executable I'd be met with either "Application Not Found" or else the Open With... dialog box. Obviously this made the computer pretty well unusable. Though I'm not entirely certain how this occurred (virus?) I was able to correct the missing file association which enabled me to run the virus scanner. This page has a number of .reg files with the correct XP file associations for lots of different formats, notably .exe. There's some instructions at the top for getting these keys imported to the registry without being able to run regedit, but I found explorer correctly handled the .reg file without any tinkering. Once those keys were in place everything worked as it should. Easy as pi!

"The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found."

I recently ran across an iPhone that failed to sync in iTunes with this rather cryptic error message. It wouldn't allow me to sync any of the data quite properly and at one point even refused to allow me to delete music from the device. After a quick google search I came across this post on the Apple forums. Apparently this error can be caused by a number of different circumstances, but in my case it was in fact caused by a faulty USB port. The computer recognized the device and iTunes could even correctly identify the data on it, but that was as far as we could go. After plugging the USB cable into a different port everything worked as it should.

Octothorpe Grid Delivery Enhancehent

While attempting to watch the debate on CNN Live I was prompted to install the "octothorpe grid delivery enhancement".  Unsure of whether to proceed I checked google.  Turns out it's not only unnecessary to install this in order to watch the feed, this flash player "enhancement"  is essentially malware. 

Just click no to octothorpe!

Free Android Virus Scanner

The world of mobile computing is becoming increasingly risky. Viruses and other malware have been identified in both the Android and iOS marketplaces. As an Android user I've seen quite a number of different antivirus options on the market but until recently they were either a) from a developer I'd never heard of or b) expensive. Luckily I recently came across ESET Mobile Security RC.

I've used ESET Nod32 for desktop virus protection in my professional work and found it to be decently secure without requiring the obscene overhead of some other products. This product appears to be similarly light on resource usage while providing a complete suite of mobile security.

What do you get in the package? Well, real-time virus protection for one. ESET also provides call/sms spam protection with white and black list functionality. The security audit function scans installed applications and settings for anything untoward which could potentially leave you open for problems. The program also includes the ability to password protect any or all of these functions with a master password.

I've saved the best for last, though. ESET Mobile Security RC includes anti-theft functionality. With this program installed you can issue commands to your phone via SMS. Available commands are 'wipe' which clears your personal data, 'lock' which prevents use without your password, and 'find' which returns your phone's location data. In addition you can specify trusted contacts which are other phones (friends or family) from whose phones you could reset your password remotely if necessary.

True, it's only a release candidate and will likely cost a bundle when finally released, but this seems to be an awesome product. Grab it while it's free and give it a spin!

Toll-free ANAC

Have you ever needed to figure out the number of a phone line that you're dialing from? In my IT support work I regularly find myself without the necessary documentation regarding what lines are available where. Or even when I know what lines are in a particular location I may not know specifically which pair of wires corresponds to which number.

Enter ANAC, or automatic number announcement circuit. Generally these are special phone lines which read back the caller's number. The wikipedia article contains a rather extensive list of such numbers but contains no mention of what may be the most popular number at this time. Operated by Sprint, 1-800-444-4444 is toll free, easy to remember, and reliably gets you the information you need in a hurry. Tuck this tip away in your memory banks, it's sure to come in handy eventually.

Enable telnet on ShoreTel SG90

I needed to telnet into our ShoreTel switch this morning. This information is not listed in the manual but I was able to piece it together from a couple of other sources. First, navigate to C:\Program Files\Shoreline Communications\ShoreWare Server\. Next issue the command:

ipbxctl.exe -telneton <switch IP address>

You should then be prompted for a password. This default password on this model switch is "ShoreTel". You should then see the message "telnet access enabled". That's all there is to it. I understand the V version of the switches require ssh, but the plain jane SG90 still uses telnet.

Convert .ova to .ovf in Linux

I just spent the better part of 20 minutes searching for a method to convert a .ova file downloaded from the web to the .ovf format required by my version of VirtualBox-ose. VMWare has a program called OVFTool that may do this conversion but requires registering to download and may only be available as a windows binary. After hitting several dead ends I found the simple answer. As it turns out the .ova file format is a tar image!

tar xvf SomeVMImage.ova

will dump the .ovf and related files. Easy as pi!

New G-Mail Layout

Google recently began rolling out the new layout for G-Mail. Initially I was annoyed at the popup window offering me the "new look" but I figured I better dive in since it was going to be forced on everyone eventually. These are my initial impressions.

I was surprised and disappointed that they didn't port over the old themes, but after a week now I've been very happy with the new Basic Black theme. In addition I've found the new button layout to be absolutely fantastic. I think my favorite aspect is that I can now mark all as read with two clicks rather than the four it took me previously.

I did find the default display density of comfortable to be a massive waste of my screen real estate, but luckily this is easily changed with two clicks of the inbox settings button. The compact display density shows many more messages per page which is a much more efficient method of displaying the inbox.

I've heard some grumbling about the fact that the labels in the navigation pane to the left are hidden unless there are new messages. Sure, the rollover effect may be slow on some older machines or browsers, but in any modern environment this is a great improvement. I can now keep all of my 15+ labels neatly hidden away unless they require my attention.

Overall I think this was a step in the right direction. The interface is simplified and cleaned up and the other improvements Google made have pushed this product in a good direction.

Stuttering x264 720p in vlc

There are various tips and tricks floating around for how to fix this problem, but the only one that worked for me was to switch to Media Player Classic - Home Cinema.  I was initially resistant because I thought this was some kind of hacked version of the old windows media player.  Much to my surprise and delight it's just an open source project with a similar name and interface.  Support for hd content seems to be way better than vlc.  Give it a try if you're having trouble with vlc.

Can't login to Joomla! after JoomlaPack/Akeeba restore?

I recently moved a Joomla! 1.5.14 site to a different server for testing. I ran JoomlaPack to create a backup, moved the backup file, and ran kickstart to restore it. This seemed to work fine but when attempting to login to the admin backend the login page would simply reset after I entered my credentials.

As it turns out there appears to be some incompatibility with MySQL 5.5.16 that was preventing me from logging in, but providing no error that I could find. I downgraded to MySQL 5.5.8 and everything appears to be back in order.

Install gmote on 64 bit linux

It appears that gmote and vlc may not play nicely together on 64 bit systems (specifically Ubuntu 11.10). Gmote consistently complained that it was unable to load libvlc.so even though vlc was correctly installed and working. I found this tip here to issue the following command to fix the problem:

sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev

One command, and 20 seconds of patience, and now gmote works like a charm.

Rationale

I work in IT, at least in theory, for a medium sized nonprofit agency. I spend a lot of my day using google to find obscure answers to annoying problems. Once in a while I have to come up with those answers myself. My rationale for this blog is to post my problems and solutions so that they may be indexed by google and help any other poor souls who find themselves in the same predicament. Ready, set, GO!