Tag: geek

Running Windows Vista

I think i am, seeing how slow i am to boot up after i wake up. First, i hardly ever react correctly to wake up signals, which means that even if i acknowledge the signal, i hardly get to boot up. And even when hours after the last signal i boot up, getting the system to an usable speed takes ages. Usually at least an hour, sometimes even more. By that time i usually feel like i need a quick virus check and defragmenting, which takes another roughly two hours. By that time the hardly achieved speed runs out as the swapfile somehow drops in size. When i manage to get it back normally, it starts to feel like i need a reboot, but i can usually handle that and get to work just how i want. And once i start, it’s not easy to stop, resulting in late night overloads, because of which i need some time offline, usually more than how much the wake up signals would allow.

Vicious circle.


Topsites

My most visited sites, as per the dropdown list from Chrome. I’m being honest here so don’t laugh if possible.


Oh finally

My computer tricked me. I couldn’t connect to the net since i got back to Japan and i had no idea why. Actually i had plenty of ideas, but none that i could fix. For example my university messaged us of a scheduled downtime last friday, maybe they forgot to switch the router back on? No, my neighbours can still use their net. Is it a cable problem? None that i could see. I even called the provider’s support for some info on what could i do, but they only suggested testing with other computers and stuff. (This was today, since i couldn’t get through to any human on the support line for three days, #hellyeah super-r net.)

Since i couldn’t borrow another pc right away (everyone either used theirs or they weren’t home), i just took the modem and checked if it could get in touch with the tv in the common room (which had a lan port for unknown purposes), and it could. This started to raise my suspicions, but i couldn’t really think of any problem my computer could have except for the failure of the network chip on the motherboard.


By the way…

… i tried to say, i’d be there…

Red Hot Chili Peppers – By the way

(By the way, i can play By the way on the bass, hard as hell, but i can.)

By the way, in case anyone realized there’s a blogpost missing, it’s not really missing, it’s just on an other server. In mid-december me and Glend moved on a VPS, and i wrote it there, but nowadays there are minor (major?) problems around, so i decided to stick with my old and stable space (where i only miss ssh) until it’s all sorted out (and doesn’t shift out of existence for half days randomly).

Actually i pretty much hope i’ll get some details soon, because if it’s not going to get normal before mid-january, i’ll have to extend my current space for another year, otherwise of course i’d move over there completely (and try fixing a mail server, which i couldn’t yet get to work sadly).

We’ll see. Until then, i’m doing just a few things over there: working on the mail server, playing bastet and ninvaders and ftping up stuff that i want to have when i get back to Japan.


Bootolnék ha tudnék

Azt terveztem, hogy Wendy-re telepítek egy hordozhatónak szánt, titkosított Ubuntut (elvileg az alternatív telepítője tud ilyet), a laptopot pedig legyalulom és átküldök rajta egy TrueCryptet. Aztán bemásztam a laptop biosába, és láttam hogy lehet jelszót beállítani a bootoláshoz és a biosba belépéshez is. Beállítottam hát mindkettőnek, mindkettőnek ugyanazt (mivel csak egy olyan jelszavam van, ami nyolc karakterbe belefér és még használom is).

Elmentettem a beállításokat és újraindítottam. Amikor csipogott, beírtam a jelszót. Aztán néztem. Ugyanis ott virított egy szép “X”, jelezvén hogy hibás. Mondom mi a szösz. Beírtam újra, ismét. Aztán próbáltam lehetséges elgépeléseket is (bár nem hinném, hogy egymás után kétszer ugyanúgy elgépeltem volna, amikor meg kellett adni), változatlanul semmi.

Gondoltam oké, akkor üssük ki a fenébe. Belépnék a biosba, de ugyanúgy kérdezi a jelszót (mintha bootolni akarna). Természetesen a következő lépés az internet volt, utánanéztem, mi lehet alapértelmezett jelszó egy ilyen gépben, de amiket találtam, azok közül se illeszkedett egyik se.

Ha lenne egy megfelelő méretű csavarhúzóm, már persze szétszedtem volna és kikaptam volna a cmos elemét, de nincs csavarhúzóm, úgyhogy most nem igazán tudok vele mit csinálni.

Hogy teljes legyen az örömem, az Ubuntu telepítője se akarta azt csinálni, amit mondtam neki, úgyhogy feladtam.


Vuze (Azureus) vs. Transmission

Back in the old days, i was using mostly Azureus (back then it was really called Azureus) for torrents. But it was using Java, and my computer was getting slower and weaker, and with many torrents Azureus was as insane resource hog, so i switched to uTorrent. I used uTorrent all the time while i was using Windows, but there’s still no version for linux i’d want to try (a pre-alpha isn’t all about usability and stability), so i was using Vuze again. That meant that when i installed Ubuntu, my first job was to remove the default applications for chatting (i’ve been using Pidgin for years and i don’t plan to change that) and torrents.

But Vuze had problems with my connection. I’m behind an university router, so it could use NAT only occasionally, meaning that either all the torrents seared with mighty 1MB/s speeds or there was no traffic at all. And lately the latter became regular, which was especially troublesome as i had to seed certain torrents.

Then Glend mentioned that Transmission is praised as a seeder client, so i gave it a try, and indeed: where Vuze couldn’t produce any upload, Transmission was seeding without problem. And not only that: downloads work perfectly, without a glitch as well, even where Vuze was complaining about connection problems. So i decided to start using Transmission as my primary torrent client. I’ll only add a few older torrents i want to seed and start a fresh leaf.


Machine a-trollin

Out of curiosity, i watched the first Boxxy video, which is by chance up on youtube in the original version, not some music remix. And this video reminded me of Gaia online, a name i knew i knew, and indeed: i vaguely recall having registered there back in the “good old” AN days (around when this blog started, alongside MapleStory, which, unlike Gaia, i played for a nice while), and today during english class i confirmed it. The valerauko username was taken, and i’m positive that no one else uses that, so i checked and i was registered with my old freemail.hu email. Which is problematic, because i had a random password for that, and i didn’t know that even when i was using that mailbox. So i tried and tried and retried, and finally i hit the right password for the Gaia user. Lucky my set of passwords is a finite set…

I logged in, and after a few minutes (and changing my password) i ended up in the forums’ Panty and Stocking thread. After making a few posts, my computer turned off. Just like that. There was no burnt smell, it wouldn’t turn on again and electricity was on. After checking everything else i checked the most troublesome: i moved the desk to see that the power chord of the computer has somehow fallen out of the plug. Apparently my computer learnt some trolling lately.


Wikileaks

Now either there’s a website there, that mysteriously acquires secret documents an dumps them for the public. In this case, the chase after the site makes complete sense, considering how a canadian presidential advisor suggested Julian Assange (from now on, the Wikileaks guy) should be assassinated, considering how Wikileaks had to move to the Amazon cloud to handle the immense ddos attacks (and yet, it’s not accessible for me right now – either Japan’s censoring me, or the site’s down) and how some swedish court issued an Interpol arrest notice for the poor guy (on basis of some apparently made-up sexual harassment charges).

Or, the whole Wikileaks thing is created by CIA. This would explain how a website could so mysteriously obtain such documents. Also, in this case too, the persecution against Wikileaks would make sense, just that’d mean that the whole world is being trolled by the CIA.

Reading the articles (mostly at Ars Technica), i really laughed out loud at parts… like where american congressmen labeled Wikileaks terrorism in a white-hot rage. This just reinforces what Cory Doctorow writes in Little Brother.


Infringed

Today when i got back from school an email was waiting for me from Youtube, stating that the little more then one minute long hungarian subbed scene from Star Driver i uploaded the other day is an infringement to Sony Music’s copyrights. I seriously wonder in what way.

Right, i’m no lawyer here, so i have no problems accepting that my upload of that video was a copyright infringement. Nevertheless i find it crazy that in one day all Star Driver fan videos were wiped from Youtube. First of all, it’s pointless. Even if they remove it from there, there are countless other sites that the great Sony won’t think of to check for their so protected content.

Do these people realise at all what insane potential the internet has for their media? Do they seriously think that without these “copyright infringing materials” anyone would ever hear about their anime outside Japan? Oh come on. The people who want to watch such videos on Youtube are the ones who will watch the series once it’s on tv and buy dvds and other merchandise, watch the related movies-ovas-whatever and spend the big money.


Cenzúrázzuk a netet!

A kínai Arany Pajzs projekt hivatalos célja, hogy a kínai népet megvédje az internet és az imperialista média káros hatásaitól. Gyakorlatilag ez cenzúrát jelent. Pedig milyen szépen is hangzik! Megvédeni a gyerekeket, hogy véletlenül se találjanak lovaspornót a neten, elkapni a neten szervezkedő terroristákat, még mielőtt tényleg bajt tudnának okozni…

Nemrég olvastam a Little Brothert, úgyhogy egy kicsit megijesztett, amikor Szalai főpapnő bejelenti, hogy korlátozni akarják az internetet. Óvatosan fogalmazva azt válaszolnám erre, hogy korlátozd anyádat, de ennél talán sikerül kulturáltabbat is kihoznom magamból.

Azt mondja, hogy “az internetet mindenhol szabályozzák”? Lehet. De nem arról van szó, hogy az internetszolgáltatókkal letiltatják a Kurucz.infót, mert az csúnyát mondott Viktor atyánkra, hanem a generált forgalom szerint próbálják megakadályozni a ddos és hasonló támadásokat. Elvileg. Bár a Little Brother óta a “nyugati példát” se feltétlen érzem halálbiztosnak…