automaticable

Recently, one of my roommates bought an external network drive, so everyone in the house can upload their music and movies. It’s hooked right into the network through the router so it’s easy for anyone to access– pretty cool stuff. It was pretty simple to setup in Windows, but it took a little bit of research for Ubuntu. Specifically, we have Maxtor “Shared Storage II” hard-drive, and I wanted it to auto-mount each time I reboot my computer. I figured it out using the tutorial here, but the basics are below.

1. First you will need to install the “smbfs” package. This is what we will use to mount the drive.
   

   sudo aptitude install smbfs

2. We will also need a folder to mount the drive in. I used /media/public.
   

   sudo mkdir /media/public

3. Then, we need to edit /etc/fstab. This is where we add all the information needed to find and mount the drive. Open /etc/fstab using the command:
   

   gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

   At the end of the file add the following lines:

   # Mount our network drive
   //SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs guest 0 0

   Where “SERVER” is the name of your drive on the network. This can be either a name or IP address. For example, mine was “MAXTOR”. Replace “SHARE” with the folder in the drive you’d like to mount– mine was “Public”. “MOUNT-POINT” is the directory we created earlier, such as “/media/public”. The rest of the parameters have to do with permissions, and also where you can add advanced options. For more information on the advanced preferences, see

   man mount.smbfs

4. The final step is to tell the system to reload /etc/fstab and mount our drive. Do this with the command:
   

   sudo mount -a

   Then, you’re done! At this point you should be able to see the files in your drive with the command

   ls /MOUNT-POINT

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From the makers of Ubuntu, there now exists an official Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course. This really shows the strength of the open source community; the Ubuntu team really goes full-circle with their support. The course is completely free (in both senses of the word), and available for download here. There is a student version, as well as a professor version.

Although it’s obviously intended to be taught in a mentoring or classroom environment, this would be a good read for anyone interested in moving to Linux. The read would probably be pretty rudimentary for somebody with a background Linux. However, it would be an excellent overview for somebody not only interested in using Ubuntu, but actually understanding what’s going on.

As every power-user does, I enjoy working on my own computer because everything is tweaked and customized just how I like it. I use the programs and preferences that work best for me. I organize my data in a way that fits my lifestyle. Everything is perfect for me on my personal computer. But, there is always a question of how to access your setup when on the road and away from home. I’ll describe a few different syncing techniques below. Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages, and finding the right one depends on what’s important to you.

1. Use a Laptop
Of course, probably the simplest solution is to use a laptop as your primary workspace. Then, whenever you’re on the go, you can simply bring it with you. No setup, no hassle– everything is there for you when you need it.

2. Sync with an external device
Similarly, you can take what’s important with you on a separate piece of hardware. This could range from syncing your email and music on a smartphone or iPod, to carrying important data and programs on an external hard drive or flash drive. If you go the USB drive route, you might consider PortableApps Suite– a system for loading many common programs from a flash drive, as well as organizing your documents.

3. Use online syncing services
Another approach is to upload your data to web services, so you have everything you need as long as there’s an internet connection. This could mean sticking to using purely webapps, such as Google Documents, and storing your documents there. Or, you could simply backup your documents on one of the many online backup services. There is a useful post here detailing the best online backup solutions.

4. Remote Access to files
The solution I prefer is to setup remote access to your computer. Then there is no need to sync documents or upload them online– you’ll have access to everything you had on your main computer. It’s probably also the most complicated, as you’ll need to open some ports on your router as part of the setup. I won’t go into the specifics, but there are many different options for remote access. For Windows, Remote Desktop is probably the easiest, and will give you access to your entire desktop. For any platform, VNC accomplishes the same thing, and supports multiple connections to the same desktop. Also, particularly useful in Linux, you can setup an SSH server. This gives you access to your computer through a terminal, but is very fast for small tasks, and you can even run programs from your home computer remotely.

So, as you can see, there are a variety of options, and perhaps even a combination of a few is the best choice. Each has its own setup requirements, so plan on spending some time getting things running. But once you do, it becomes a great resource next time you need to remember a phone number in an email, or find a webpage you bookmarked but can’t remember.

So it’s not often that I find anything good on Digg anymore, but I happened upon this little beauty today. It’s a whole site dedicated to things that look like ducks– a peanut, a tomato, even a fetus! This seems like a treasure from internet-past, but I like it. Check it out!

Using secure passwords is often overlooked by users because of the hassle involved with it. Generally, secure passwords need to include numbers, upper and lower case, and possibly even punctuation marks. Also, they should be reasonably long, and contain no dictionary words.

These stipulations make these passwords very hard to memorize. Also, it’s generally a good idea to have a unique password for every website or service, which makes things even harder.

There are many solutions that exist to create and help remember strong passwords. Some recommend creating some sort of acronym for something that you’ll remember, and insert numbers and punctuation. This helps, but it’s still tedious to remember lots of these. Also, there are password managers that will create pseudo-random passwords and remember them. This is another step, but requires that you have access to your password manager wherever you are.

Another solution, which I am fond of, is called PwdHash. Started as a research project at Stanford, it basically creates a strong password that is a md5 hash of your unique “master password,” and the domain name of the site you’re creating a password for. The result is a strong, unique password for each website that is reproducible only with both parts– master password and domain. The convenience is that you only need to ever remember one strong “master password,” and the same hash can be regenerated every time.

What really sells PwdHash is that it has also been implemented as a Firefox extension. Once installed, you can press F2 in any password field, enter your master password, and then PwdHash will replace it with your generated strong password. Works wherever Firefox does.

To cover those instances where the Firefox extension isn’t available– on a public computer, in Internet Explorer, or in a standalone application– there is still a way to retrieve your passwords. Navigate to pwdhash.com, enter the domain and your master password and press Generate. Simple as that.

In summary, PwdHash is a good way to start using strong passwords. You only need to ever remember one password, and strong passwords are generated uniquely for each domain you visit. It is very well integrated in Firefox, and also available in situations where the extension isn’t an option.

I just read an article via TipNut with some tips to make drinking water more appealing, rather than soda. I’m a pretty strong believer in this for a few different reasons:

• It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to just drink water. And convenient!
• Soda makes your teeth feel pretty gross, which annoys me.
• Every article you’ll ever read about dieting tells you that drinking your calories is a waste. It doesn’t fill you up, and there’s no nutritional value to soda.

In the article they emphasize ways to make water more appealing, such as refrigerating water, or adding some lemon juice. I also like to keep the house stocked with Crystal Light, which is sugar free and packs around 20 calories to the liter.

I would also like to emphasize a similar mind trick– make soda seem less appealing. When buying soda, buy the two-liter bottles. They already mention that this saves you the mental obligation to drink the whole thing. But also, the two-liter bottles tend to go flat after opening, so it’ll be less apealing. Also, it’s cheaper.

I just watched about 5 minutes of the TV show “MXC,” which, if you’re not familiar, is pretty funny. The premise is that they take footage of a Japanese game-show where they compete in ridiculous stunts. Then, we add American commentary spoofing whatever is really going on, reminiscent of Mystery Science Theater 2000.

What brings me to post, though, is the underlying irony of it all. If you look at the Japanese economy, industry, and entertainment, you’ll notice that they are in fact emulating the American market. Because of their growing free market, the Japanese are in an era where the middle-class have more money, and so their lifestyles are influenced by that of America. You can see it in their clothing, their technology, and even the vacations they take. Most specifically, you can see it in their television programming.

So what strikes me as funny here, is that the Japanese make television programming that mirrors Hollywood, but we dub it over and it becomes a comedy in the States. I think if we put the same cheesy dubbing on some of our own shows, they might be equally popular. Moral of the story: the reality TV content put out today is garbage.

Related Rant: How there exists an Americanized version of the “Planet Earth” series, because the United States as a whole just wouldn’t understand a British narrator.

In my opinion, the best part of the open source community, is that it really is a community. There is all sorts of knowledge to be gained through the many freely-available resources for Ubuntu, and all open-source alike.

This evening, I found another little gem, called the “Tutorial of the Week,” hosted on the Ubuntu forums. Each week a new tutorial is posted. Some more useful than others, but they are all high-quality. You can subscribe to the weekly tutorials by subscribing to the RSS feed for this forum topic. This week’s tutorial is about Magic SysReq keys, which are helpful when your Linux computer freezes up.

For the most part, I’ve been unaffected by the writer’s strike. I don’t have a lot of time for TV during the semester, save The Office on Thursdays. Losing The Office was a major blow, but I didn’t realize how bad things really were until I got home for the holidays.

My parents have Tivo at home, and it’s generally chock-full of mindless programming to keep you entertained (read: comatose) for hours. But the only programs still recorded are movies, reality TV, and the news. It’s pretty sad.

So what does this mean for the entertainment industry as a whole? Well foremost, it’s unfortunate for all of the people striking, and also those that lost their jobs because there’s no more work. But people just haven’t been watching as much live TV as a result. It’s an opportunity for people to catch up on all those old movies, previous seasons of sitcoms, and even blogs and video blogs.

With the downplay of traditional TV, I think this is a great time for amateur-based video blogs, and content of all sorts. This is a big opportunity for applications like Miro that aggregate alternative content. Although a few shows are coming back, there’s still no end in sight for this strike. This could be the beginning of a major shift in how we get our media entertainment.

Have you noticed consistent spikes in your CPU usage, even when you have no programs running? Moreover, are the spikes all in one CPU core (as shown in the Task Manager), rather than distributed between cores? It could be the case that you have a rogue background process eating up precious CPU cycles. To see if its the case, follow these simple steps:

1. Open up the task manager by right clicking on the taskbar and selecting “Task Manager.”
2. Then, click on the “Perforance” tab, to confirm you’re having this issue. (It should look similar to the above screenshot.)
3. Next, select the “Processes” tab. Sort by CPU by clicking on the CPU column. The entries should have CPU entries in descending order.
4. The process at the top of the list is your culprit. You can do a Google search on the process name to find out what it is, and if it safe and easy to disable it.

In my particular experience, the rogue process was “bigfix.exe”. According to AuditMyPC.com,

BigFix.exe is a tool used to download support information from hardware manufacturers and software vendors. It will also perform checks over your system and try to locate configuration errors and security vulnerabilities. If you find that this process causes problems for your system, it should be terminated.

bigfix.exe is an application that does NOT appear to be a security risk

The Process Server database currently registers bigfix.exe to Bigfix.

So, it came down to a program that was installed with Windows, and running at startup. It was non-essential, so a simple uninstall of BigFix solved the problem.