Categories
Uncategorized

Home router vulnerability

This one’s going to be a little dry, but it’s actually a bit of a public service announcement for friends. For anyone who has a home router appliance (from Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, etc.) on their incoming cable modem/DSL service, double check and make sure you have changed the administrator password on the box to something other than the default.

Some folks have come up with a successful attack that they term “drive-by pharming” where they trick your web browser into logging into your router and changing settings to allow external attacks on your computers. Most SOHO routers come set by default to not allow connections from the outside Internet. However, this attack makes use of your browser so that the attack comes from inside your network (by way of your computer’s browser). The good news is that the attack is completely dependent on you leaving your router set to its default IP address and password. If you change the administrator password, you’re safe.

Categories
Uncategorized

The countdown begins

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to be released in July. (archived copy on archive.org)

Categories
Uncategorized

Wondered if it would happen

Remember how I said in my previous post on the subject that there was a pretty good chance the alopecia would manifest in another spot? *sigh* Found it tonight. It’s pretty small so far, but it will probably get bigger.

Categories
Uncategorized

Technobabble Stream of Consciousness

Thanks to Thomas (link defunct) for the cool link that got me started on this one.

First, anyone who watches Mythbusters must see this Flash animation. (link defunct)

Seen it? Okay. Jamie’s technobabble over the big diagram reminded me of an old electrical engineering in-joke: the turbo encabulator. I have known for a long time about a video incarnation of this joke apparently made by some folks at Rockwell: The Rockwell Automation Retro Encabulator.

However, what I didn’t realize is that Chrysler took a shot at this old joke even earlier: The Chrysler Turbo Encabulator. Keep listening. There are some screw-the-customer jokes at the end.

I love how this old joke just keeps coming back.

Bonus for the Mythbusters fans
Do pretty girls fart?
I hope they pay the poor girl well.

Categories
Uncategorized

60’s References

One of my very favorite movies is That Thing You Do. I’m not exactly sure why, but I never get tired of watching it. I could go into a whole other post about why I like it, but I suspect that it just put together exactly the right mix of fun music, (mostly) clever dialogue, compelling story line, and well-chosen actors to hook me.

Categories
Uncategorized

Six (?) questions (?)

As requested by Geof, here are my responses to a set of questions/challenges that mostly resemble the ones he got from his friend. I say mostly, because I decided to mess with a couple of them and downright refused to answer one or two. *shrug* It’s my site. 🙂 I’ll tentatively tag Amy, with the understanding that her brain is totally involved in organizing PHE right now.

Categories
Uncategorized

Video Picks – Funny Faces

I don’t think I’m up for writing anything particularly deep tonight, and I just tonight figured out the perfect pair of videos for my mood. So much of video making is about poses and art and such. It’s really cool every once in a while to see someone having fun in a video. Tonight’s pair are all about people that look like they’re having a lot of fun. Pretty much the only reason I love watching these two videos is for the facial expressions. Prince: Kiss (1986) The woman on the stool playing guitar is named Wendy Melvoin, and she looks like she’s just having a blast laughing at Prince’s posturing in the video. I think it’s a perfect counterbalance for him. By the way, you should click her linked name. She has done and is still doing some interesting stuff.

Swing Out Sister: Break Out (1987) Nothing much to say here except that I just always get a smile on my face watching the weird faces that Corrine Drewery is making in the video. It’s a feel-good video for me. 🙂

Categories
Uncategorized

The current obsession

Acknowledging that I get mildly obsessed about things from time to time and that it often gets in the way of social interaction with friends, I thought I should at least share some details. I’ll warn you now that there will be details in here that will fail to interest most of my site readers, but this is where my head is right now. 🙂

Categories
Uncategorized

A Minor Detail

post edited on July 28, 2022:
Starting at about 4:48 in this video, the detail I mentioned below gets pointed out!

21 years and who knows how many viewings later, I just now realized something new about Back to the Future with the help of the TiVo. I never noticed before that one of the consequences of Marty’s first trip back to 1955 was that Twin Pines Mall became Lone Pine Mall (as a result of Marty knocking down one of old man Peabody’s pine trees with the DeLorean). 🙂

Categories
Uncategorized

Lots to catch up on

Though it may seem so, I have not dropped off the face of the earth since last Thursday. I had a near data disaster with the house server that morning: the system drive decided it wanted to die. Fortunately, the SMART diagnostics caught it before it went under (yay smartmontools and nightly automated testing!), so I was able to get backups. I had a replacement drive that day, but I’m just tonight getting the system back to about 90% running. Part of what went away while that was happening was my feed reader. It’s back up now, but I see I have a LOT of catching up to do (especially since I just added a couple of friends’ feeds).

So, bear with me as I catch up. 🙂