The Home of Tom & Morven

Whilst I’m waiting to board, I might as well take the time to blog to the world how impressed I am with the Spamato Ad-on for Thunderbird. I have not had any much success with the Thunderbird adaptive junk email filter system, nor with the uncustomisable Trend Micro Internet Security Pro 2008 anti-spam solution. So I sought greener pastures and tried Spamato. It doesn’t take much effort to setup, but you do have to manually specify your Java binaries directory. Once setup, you’re laughing! It uses seven types of anti-spam filters which means you can use them all with low thresholds, and set it to require two filters to classify as spam (i.e. default settings) which means chances of false detection are slim to none.

If I didn’t use the gmail web interfaces (for mobile browser as well as normal browser) and still used Thunderbird, I would defintely go the Spamato solution.

I do find Gmail to have an outstanding spam filter built in anyway, which has never falsely detected any spam, and only let less than 0.1% of spam get to my inbox.

You may or may not have noticed that this blog has been dead for a couple weeks. This is firstly because due to a recent price drop in Intel Quad Core CPU’s (specifically, the Q6600) I decided it was a good time to upgrade (even though I just got my first Core 2 Duo CPU this year). I also upgraded the graphics card to a Gainward 8800GTS Golden Sample.

An hour after getting the beast home, and pushing electrons through the thing, it started to die a horrible death of blue screens and random reboots. A logical conclusion (I thought at the time) was that the new CPU that got put in, was a dud. It turns out that the new brand of RAM I had been using (GeIL DDRII 667MHz Dual Channel 2×1GB CAS 3-4-4-8 passively cooled RAM) was not a very good product, and there has been a relatively high percentage of this RAM not working in particular configurations of machines! The store swapped me over to Corsair CAS 4 RAM, and now all is sweet again. It’s possibly slightly slower, but at least it works!

I also just happened by chance to discover a major security loophole with my webserver that delayed me putting it back online. I haven’t got around to fixing it for a couple weeks until now, and it only took about 10 minutes to fix, I just didn’t get around to it.

Recently a friend Nick asked me to join him as a duo in the foxy1000 mountain bike race at Fox Creek, which is a total of a 100km race, 25km per lap, and each lap involves 1000m of vertical ascending. The idea is we would do 50km each, i.e. 2000m ascending each in total. Since I’ve done stuff all riding this year, I went out to Fox Creek on Sunday to get in some training with Nick. As I was putting my bike back together (I have a small boot to fit it in) I put the front wheel on the wrong way around. I then squeezed the front brake and realised instantly the error of my way. With hydraulic disc brakes, if you squeeze the lever with no disc in, the pads get stuck closed together. I tried prying the two pads apart, to no avail. I then tried calling half a dozen bike stores for help, but being a Sunday, none seemed to be open. I also tried phoning a friend to see if they could quickly look up on the internet what to do. Getting really frustrated, and flat phone battery, I gave a screwdriver one last good hard push through the brake pads and voila!! Fixed like new. I think the problem was I wasn’t prying them open from both sides, which would have wedged the two pistons back on an angle and created too much friction due to the angle of force.

Very excitedly, I span the wheel. For some reason, I stuck my finger dangerously close to the rotor. I didn’t realise at the time just quite how sharp all the machined holes are in these disc rotors. My finger nail brushed up against the rotor, and the rotor cut into the middle of my finger nail, grabbing the tip of my finger and wedging it into the brake pad. This cut a third of the way across my finger nail, all the way through. At the time I just grabbed my finger and compressed it to numb the pain, and it didn’t seem to hurt that much. After walking around in circles a little bit trying to distract myself from the pain, I opened up my hand to find it covered in tomato sauce. For some reason I absolutely panicked, possibly because I haven’t actually seen any blood for a few years. Worried what was going to happen to my finger, I drove straight home, and then to a GP clinic where I waited almost 2 hours to get a tetanus shot. By the time I got home, I had wasted 6 hours of my Sunday - most unhappy!!

I just found a cool tutorial on looking up peoples IP addresses on the internet:
http://www.arin.net/education/WHOIS_CBT/whois.htm

Mostly just putting that here for my future reference.

I recommend that if you’re going to pay for an anti-virus software, use Trend Micro. If not, use AVG and Windows Firewall (instead of Trend Micro’s firewall - which is outstanding!). Use Spybot Search & Destroy to prevent spyware using the preventative measures, and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy together to cleanup spyware on the occasion it gets through. Make sure all your automatic updates are working and working frequently, windows is updating automatically and frequently, and your anti-virus software and spyware scanners are scanning frequently (once a week or so) and you’ll never have any problems. Oh yeah, and use Firefox and Thunderbird for internet and email, which will prevent 90% of spyware infections in the first place.

Trend Micro PC-Cillin Internet Security 2006

Trend Micro is my preferred masterpiece solution to all things virus related (prevention and cleanup) and firewall related (to stop hackers, and network worm viruses). It does not do anything for preventing spyware however, and so if you use it make sure you use Ad-Aware and Spybot as I’ve explained (above and below). It costs money which succs, so a good compromise I’ve found is to buy it anyway for one year to own the firewall, and when your virus updates run out after a year just once a week, manually download the virus pattern packs. (I tried doing this for a while once but then just ended up paying the money again because life is too short!) Trend Micro has also released spyware software but this also costs more money, and is pointless to buy when Spybot uses the same engine (I think I read somewhere - Trend bought their spyware engine from another company) as Spybot.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Personal

Ad-Aware is the first thing I’d recommend doing when you suspect you have some internet filth floating around. Firstly, do it on the quick ‘intelligent’ system scan setting. Reboot, and if you really had troubles with your computer, scan again and make sure it searched your entire drive(s). Scanning once a week or so (and making sure you update before you do) on the system scan setting is highly desirable. This program is very user friendly to use and gets my thumbs up.

Spybot Search & Destroy

Spybot Search & Destroy not quite as user-friendly as Ad-Aware, although it’s also free and is the perfect compliment for cleaning spyware to Ad-Aware. Spybot S&D far exceeds Ad-Aware’s ability to prevent the internet crap from getting on (the technical term they use in the software is immunize - so be sure to explore clicking on that button!). The Tea-Timer in Spybot (under the advanced options) that when you install, will not allow any changes to the Windows registry unless your permission is granted. It would be interesting to install this Tea-Timer and then install Norton, and see how many hundred times you’d have to click accept! There is other stuff in Spybot that you can do to block spyware from the registry (if you don’t wish to use Tea-Timer). Basically, I’d recommend installing all the preventative features that this software offers, and none of Ad-Aware, to ensure they don’t overlap. Scan with this program after using Ad-Aware to guarantee you’ve got rid of everything - it will pick some stuff up that Ad-Aware doesn’t.

For years I’ve been having issues trying to keep track of my passwords. Everything we do these days involves passwords. Technology is evolving quicker than the human mind is evolving with its capacity to be able to memorise all these passwords.

Solution? Keep all your passwords in a centrally managed database.

This creates a problem - what happens when someone discovers your little diary, or that piece of paper stuck under the desk, with all your passwords on. Assuming the diary that you keep in your purse or European carry-all isn’t SSL encrypted, you are totally exposing yourself to the potential of identity fraud.

Solution? KeePass Password Safe.

KeePass Password Safe is the ultimate tool for storing passwords. It’s intuitive and easy to integrate for copying and pasting stuff into forms, and highly secure. I use a floppy disk to store the key file to open up my passwords database, which I can hide around the house. I make it so you also need to know my master password, just in case the disk falls into the wrong hands! Mind you they’d need to use my computer as well, which being password protected with my “other” master password would make life incredibly difficult for any intruder… unless they just want to sell my computer for parts. That’d succ!

You can sort passwords into categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub categories if you are that way inclined. You can store all sorts of details with each password, such as other account information or whatever. If you make yourself a key-disk I highly recommend creating a backup copy and stashing that at a friends house, away from where you keep your backed up data (which I’m hoping you store at a different friends house ).