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Watching the distance between posts increase exponentially.
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Seth Godin’s BlogAugust 29th, 2007I can’t remember how I found this, but if you fancy some sort, thought-provoking blog entries to pass the time, go visit Seth Godin’s Blog. Seth blogs about business and marketing using clear and precise metaphors, as well as other stuff web- and world-related. Good stuff. Acer Travelmate 250 Overheating ProblemAugust 28th, 2007My brother had recently aquired an old, slightly battered Acer Travelmate 250 and was experiencing problems with it shutting down whenever he did anything remotely CPU-intensive. A quick examination showed a lot of dust around the vent ports and a lot of crapware running on the machine – a recipe for hot CPU action if ever there was one. First step was to disassemble the machine to get at the cooling system. The disassembly procedure was fairly straightforward:
The cooling fan, heat transfer pipes and heatsink are now all exposed. These are held in place with four spring-loaded screws on the body of the cooler, and a small metal bracket at the left hand side with three small screws. Once all these are removed, you can wiggle the cooler back and forth until it comes away from the CPU. It was immediately obvious that the heatsink and fan were caked in dust and grime. Not only that, but there was far too much thermal transfer compound between the CPU and the heatsink which was having the opposite of the desired effect and actually acted as an insulator, preventing the cooler from doing it’s job. K set about the heatsink with the Dyson while I cleaned up the CPU. Once both pieces were spotless I put a tiny, rice grain sized blob of Arctic Silver thermal transfer compound on the top of the processor and worked it over the entire surface using my finger. I gave the copper block of the cooler a final polish and reseated it, wiggling it back and forth a few times to ensure the closest, flattest contact between the two surfaces. After that it was a simple case of reassembling the machine, reformatting and reinstalling Windows and – voila! A quiet, cool machine that hasn’t shut down once since the operation. The fan is now a lot quieter and the case of the machine is a lot cooler. Not only that, but the removal of all the cycle-hogging crapware has sped the machine up noticably, giving it a new lease of life. Nigerian 419 Lotto Scammers use Fake Lottery WebsiteAugust 24th, 2007It began, as so many adventures do, with a chance tip from a concerned netizen. A lady on the Internet had received an email saying she had won the Lottery and had been in communication with the offenders when she decided she didn’t like the way things were going. She emailed us, and things happened. Many moons ago I wrote a Lottery Results website. The lady emailed us with an alternate address, revealing that the scammers had copied the entire website – including the list of Lottery Scam Emails – in order to give their 419 Email Scams that added air of legitimacy. The original site is at: www.the-lottery.info The cloned site is at: uknlotteries.com/nationallottery/ There were several changes, all geared towards getting an unsuspecting user to type in a username and password (supplied in the scammers’ original email) and then enter their legitimate bank account details. No doubt the scammers would plunder the account, leaving the scammee high and dry. The WHOIS for uknlotteries.com showed it was on a free hosting company, Freehostia, and that the domain was purchased through ns.com / tucows.com on 14th August – just a week before we were told about it. Pinging the domain gave 64.72.119.253 – an IP handled by AlphaRed.com. All of these companies were sent a copy of our 14-Page report. Next up, we noticed that the ‘Contact Us’ page still contained the IP and Host Name of the person who downloaded the first copy of the site – ironically this was a security thing: 80.178.248.142.satcom-systems.net / 80.178.248.142 This was an IP address in Israel. A quick search of the server logs showed that users from Satcom Systems had been visiting at least as early as October 2006. Examination of the source code revealed other domains in use by the spammers: CTBPLC.co.uk (Not working) and GCBOFLONDON.com (A holding page on a Microsoft Office service). Another free hosting company, Multiververs.com, was used for the latter. The /secured/ folder did not contain an index file and so we were able to examine the other files in that directory. We found IP activity mini-logs from Web2FTP.com for the following IP addresses: IP: 82.206.163.11 Time: 15.08.2007|00:44:50 Uploaded 42 files IP: 213.185.118.207 Time: 16.08.2007|18:57:22 Editted 1 file IP: 41.220.75.3 Time: 17.08.2007|10:11:12 Editted 1 file IP: 63.109.248.30 Time: 17.08.2007|13:06:56 Editted 1 file IP: 213.185.118.227 Time: 21.08.2007|10:42:37 Editted 1 file Further examination of other know file paths that were cloned revealed that 82.206.163.11 was the IP of the user who had uploaded the files to the fake domain. IP WHOIS Info for 82.206.163.11? Yep… inetnum: 82.206.163.0 - 82.206.163.255 netname: CUST-SUBURBANTELE descr: Reassignment to Suburban Telecom country: NG admin-c: BA771-ripe tech-c: BA771-ripe status: ASSIGNED PA remarks: ************************************************************* remarks: * * remarks: * For issues of abuse related to this IP address block, * remarks: * including spam, please send email to at: * remarks: * * remarks: * s.ayonote@suburbantelecom.com * remarks: * * remarks: ************************************************************* mnt-by: AS22351-MNT mnt-lower: AS22351-MNT changed: TAC.OPS@Intelsat.com 20060623 source: RIPE person: Bruce Ayonote address: Plot 1105 Durban Street Wuse II address: Abuja, Nigeria phone: +234 80 3313 7201 e-mail: bruceayonote@hotmail.com nic-hdl: BA771-ripe mnt-by: AS22351-MNT changed: tac.ops@intelsat.com 20030611 source: ripe A quick IP WHOIS on the other IP addresses confirmed it – a classic Nigerian 419 Scam. A copy of everything we’d found was sent to all concerned parties and the website was gone 10 hours later, with Freehostia being first to pull the plug. As of right now, we don’t know if the scammers can still access the domain, so it’s possible that the site will reappear on another hosting company. We’ll have to keep an eye out for that one. Updated 6th June: It appears the scammers have created more than one site – this one actually made it into Google’s listings. I’ve tipped off the hosting company, as before, as we’ll see what happens. Updated September 12th: Finally got rid of it. The hosting company in this case was a little less willing to help and had to be reminded, and even then asked for proof that it was a cloned and phishing site. Kanzen Maid Sengen videoAugust 20th, 2007Thanks a bunch, B3ta. This song is doing my bloody head in, now. Sossies, Burgers and Beer, oh my!August 20th, 2007Through a string of coincidences, I had come into the possession of a George Foreman Electric BBQ Grill complete with trolley, 36 quarter pounders and a dozen bottles of Budweiser. There was only one thing to do – have a barbie! Given the UK weather’s propensity to chuck it down every chance it gets, I decided to move my car out of the garage, just in case. It seems I had displayed remarkable foresight in doing so, since the heavens opened as soon as I set things up. Either I was lucky, or the switch on the socket in my garage is linked to that great shower system in the sky. K was over, as well as my mum, sister and wee niece. I set up the folding chairs in the garage, opened a beer and pretty soon the aroma of burning cow filled the space that would normally smell of diesel and wet grass clippings. It was heavenly, and the grill worked a treat. We did some pasta and salad, and K and I had nipped to Asda for buns, peppers and sauce, and the whole lot went down just great. There was much chatter and laughter even though it rained all the way through, and a bit of shouting and more laughs when the dog escaped, pausing only to wolf down the pieces of burger that my neice had so carelessly left unguarded. Might do it all again next weekend! Ditching Thunderbird for OutlookAugust 15th, 2007With the recent demise of my Sony Ericsson k610i I happened to notice that I was nearing the end of my current mobile phone contract and, handset whore that I am, I cast around for my next mobile phone over on Mobile Shop. I’ve been on the SE bandwagon for a while now but I am considering swallowing my pride and heading back to camp Nokia in the near future. While this was all going on, I was getting more and more frustrated with Thunderbird’s bizarre approach to sending email attachments. I don’t know why, and I can’t be bothered to look, but when I start a new email and hit the ‘Attach File’ button I get a dead window. Thunderbird just hangs on me and the resets are those ugly ‘Report-to-Microsoft’ things that indicate something fundamental has gone wrong. A combination of the two made me realise that I had no easy way to get all my mobile numbers back. Since Nokias all seem to sync with Outlook, and Outlook didn’t crash at the drop of a hat (AND has all the Calendar stuff built in and working) I made a decision and dug out the Outlook 2002 CD that came all those years ago with my Dell Axim. It was duly installed, updated and my email accounts added. I spent a few more minutes adding mail rules to delete the tsunami of crap that comes with having an admin@ address and I’m now snug as a bug, back in Microsoft land. Around the same time I installed the free version of PostCast Server to allow me to send email on the move without having to reconfigure the server for new IP addresses. This in itself took a bit of doing because the damned thing really doesn’t like Windows XP SP2, but what can you do – it’s not like I paid anything for it. All that remains now is to move all my email from Thunderbird to Outlook. I know there are programs to help do this but they all seem to depend on converting the mbox files to .eml format and dropping them into Outlook Express, then importing the whole mail structure into Outlook from there. I’m sure that’s going to be a lot of fun. As such, I can’t actually bring myself to try it just yet. I’ll hunt around the Internet for a simple converter to do the job in one step, but for now my messages can sit in Thunderbird, so I’ll at least know where they are. Update: Mail now in Outlook In the end I figured it was going to be more of a hassle firing up Firefox every time I needed to reference a recent message, so I went ahead and – following these instructions – just moved all the messages over. Job done.Perseid Meteor Shower 2007August 13th, 2007Last night and early this morning saw the annual Perseid Meteorite Shower visiting Earth as it passes through the trail of dust left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet. Tiny grains of dust enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and blaze briefly across the sky before dying out. This year we elected to watch the shower from the back garden and set the alarm for 2AM accordingly. Armed with a cup of tea and a sleeping bags we lay in the reclining lawn chairs, and despite our limited view of the sky (the garden being high-fenced and fairly small) we still saw enough to make it worthwhile. It was perhaps inevitable that I should fall asleep where I was, and I awoke at 7AM, quite refreshed and in good spirits. Something about the blue sky above and the green grass, damp with dew, below makes it worthwhile. Fort William, Mull and Berwick upon TweedAugust 11th, 2007We have just returned from a week-long trip tootling around Scotland. With the holiday closing in I wasn’t in the mood to do any updates, hence the lack of new stuff to read and wotnot. Here’s what happened, anyway: Saturday – We’re Off! Sunday – Driving Fun Monday – Free Food! Tuesday – Ferry to Mull Wednesday – Balamory and Calgary Bay Thursday – Berwick-upon-Tweed Friday – Coldingham Bay and Eyemouth Harbour Saturday – Home, James! |
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