Tin Foil Hat Show - Episode 001

Well to answer popular demands I am proud to announce my debut podcast episode on the Fuzion Podcast Network. This is my podcast where I will soap-box about digital human rights, personal security and the online age.

The intro show is the only one posted at the moment, and I won't say too much except to ask you all to be patient and give me a few shows to let it settle out.

I look forward to your feedback, you can send feedback for the show to tinfoilhatshow@gmail.com or you can contact me by any of the other methods listed here on this blog.

In the show I mention that there would be a couple of commands shared on this post. So in closing, I just want to say to use the following commands to get at the show notes. The number on the text file should change with each episodes, but it will be the only mystery text file in the directory after the other two commands.


eyeD3 --write-image=./ $Filename.mp3
steghide extract -sf FRONT_COVER.jpeg
less tfh-00X.txt

Enjoy and please do send me feedback and corrections, it can only make the show better. A permanent link to the show's rss feed is listed on the right side of the blog.


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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

-----------------------UPDATE----------------------------

It seems that the mp3 file has ID3 tags processed during the workflow to get it in the feed. During these steps the original image becomes corrupted. Here is the original JPEG and I'll work with the production folks to make sure the original mp3 file gets fixed. Sorry for the problems with the commands, I hope that will work correctly in future episodes.

Apple App store - Best news

Well, there was an Apple event and the "Master -o- Disaster" opened that hole under his nose to my own personal delight.

While others rant on about the 2nd usb port on the new Air or the "Jobs Reality Distortion Field"™ I was resting, non-plussed.  Then came my bombshell.

In the next iteration of the Mac OS X operating system they are going to include a lot of IOS4 features including an app store.  Really?!?!?! An app store?!?!?  I think only two things, both I mentally scream at the top of my lungs:  1.) No greater validation of an idea that was birthed in Ubuntu 9.10 (to much ridicule) and 2.) fantastic, they will just give me another avenue to speak to and convert mac-heads.  I can already imagine the pitch line of "An app store, we have had one in Ubuntu for years!" only to see their eyes light up and beg me to install Ubuntu on their old Mac hardware.

Apple, if the best you can do with OS 10.7 is make an app store and copy Ubuntu, BRING IT ON!  I truly used to hold Apple in high regard for their design and user interface features, but this single action has pushed them to the modest position of "even" with Ubuntu and truthfully, a step behind since they had to copy it and there is "prior art".

Long Live Ubuntu.  Thanks Mac.  You are no longer my hero, just my pimp.

--
CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fun CLI uses

So if nothing we have learned that command line interfaces are not for novice users, very efficient, loved by CafeNinja and usually very boring and never any fun.

Well that isn't quite true.  I follow one my my favorite sites commandlinefu.com and have in the last few weeks seen some great fun uses of commands that can make anyone look to be a command line ninja with no further training.

The first command that I noticed makes use of a ncurses dialog box.  The command reads like this:

"dialog --gauge "Processing..." 6 40 36"  This defines a progress par that has reached 36 percent with the other numbers being the measure of the progress box.  This doesn't "do" anything, it is stuck in this way and uses no resources, but can make you look quite busy "processing" something.  It looks like the image I've put here.  You make it go away by just pressing Ctrl+C.


The next one make the screen just spew gibberish from the random number generator.  The only "problem" with this one is that it can drive even new processors to spike 100%, even worse than a run away flash page.  I added the "timelimit" command portion to prevent this running on a system that I'm not watching closely.  The command itself is 'cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -d |grep "25"', and will run crazy on your cpu.  My version is : 'timelimit -t120 cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -d |grep "25"'  This looks like this:


There are other commands that can actually make the progress bar count up like "for i in `seq 0 100`;do timeout 6 dialog --gauge "Install..." 6 40 "$i";done"  which like the first command is only making a dialog box that ins't really doing anything besides counting.  Look for your favorite and post them back here.  I bet we can make a small collection that if launched and run in an individual Terminator tab could always make you look diligent and beat the crap outta any "Boss key".

--
CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Distro Review: Crunchbang 9.04 + 10 Alpha 2

My review of Crunchbang Linux (herefore referred to as "#!" for ease of typing).  I did manage in the same 48 hour period try and use #! 9.04, 9.04-lite and 10-Alpha2.

The story begins with looking for a smaller footprint distro to put on my son's Asus eeepc 700 which has a dead SSD and is using a 4gb class 4 SD card as a hard drive.

Looked at a few and recalled "Crucheee" (I remembered the name being funny) so I went to look at the Crunchbang website.  Where I read that the old CrunchEEE distro was based on 8.10 (following the Ubuntu numbering scheme for which the distro was based) and that the current #! 9.04 had all the support for the EEE built in.  As I arrived at the download page I noticed the "lite" version and saw it was a smaller iso file.  So I grabbed that, put it on a usb key and installed it.

It runs great.  With the low memory footprint and smaller app selection the bottle neck of read/write speed to the SD card is not a huge issue once applications are open.  So the verdict:

✔ #! 9.04 Lite on eeepc 700 = Awesome, Fantastic and more.

Then I saw there was a "full" version and though, hey, I have VM space.  Let's take that for a spin.
I put it in, same experience with the wonder and grace of the full graphical install of Ubuntu, the software repo's available and a wonderful default configuration for Openbox I was very impressed.   So the verdict was:

✔ #! 9.04 Full in VirtualBox = Way Cool. Great Interface, a real treat.



So, I'm realizing that these versions are based on a distro nearly a year old and I think to myself, what would be better would be a newer version, with more current repo's and all the other updates.  So I return to the #! website to discover there is a "unstable" version.   Enter #! 10 Alpha 2 "Statler".  So I just did the sane thing and installed this over top of the #! 9.04 Full Vbox install.  Of great importance is to know that the new version of #1 (10) is based on Debian Testing (Squeezy).  This changed the rules for the installer (text and blah, but not impossible) and the first impression was the same as with #! 9.04, in fact the conky impression the menu's and most other things didn't change (in the Openbox version) from #! 9.04 -> 10.  The #! team has done well to make that experience so similar that the difference is almost unnoticeable.   Until you go to install chromium-browser from the repos which was removed 1 month ago from the "testing" branch of Debian.  If you can't tell by the tone, that's a fail.  There were 3 deb packages that I tried to install from the net (binary blob stuff) all failed on Debian that installed just fine under the Ubuntu 10.10 install I have right next to it.  Verdict of #! 10 Alpha 2:

× #! 10 Alpha 2 in VirtualBox = meh.

Total Summary,  I'm on a personal quest to install Ubuntu 10.10 add Openbox and "borrow" the default Openbox config files from a #! 9.04 Full install.  That way I get the awesome interface on the software/distro platform that offers me a large software repo, comfort zone (used since 2006) and keeps me on the distro that I recommend to folks (eating my own dog food).

--
CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Ubuntu Countdown to 10.10

With the impending release of the next version of Ubuntu come the normal countdown banners.  I'm no exception to the long list of folks who eagerly await each new release.

While at the moment I am not aware of any must have feature, I have been quite happy with the incremental improvements from version to version.  I must confess though that the 10.10.10 countdown to so many things commercial is starting to wear on my nerves, but this is one countdown that I think is worth watching out for.

While I won't do a pre-release distro review of Ubuntu 10.10, I will be doing a post release since I have to upgrade all the systems in my home at the same time, so please come back for the full write-up.

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

App Review (Update) : tty-clock - working on Ubuntu

Previously I mentioned an app called tty-clock.  I really do like it, but on Ubuntu it didn't quite compile nice so I thought I would give the quick "howto" get it working.

1.) Grab source code and unpack
2.) install the dependencies with "sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev ncurses-runtime ncurses-term"
3**.) Optional--Open the Makefile in the source code folder and change the $INSTALLPATH=/usr/bin/
4.) Terminal in the source code directory and do "make" (should have no errors) and then "sudo make install".

After that the tty-clock should be accessible.   For your information I use the flags to display seconds, center the time and set the color to blue.   Looks like "tty-clock -s -c -C 6" and I hope that might help you get it working on your Ubuntu system.   I've added a screen grab of my clock so you can see what the command does output.

--
CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Podcast: Guest appearance on Kernel Panic Oggcast eps. 14

I have been honored this last weekend to participate on the Kernel Panic Oggcast Episode 14.  This podcast is one of the forked oggcasts from the former Linux Cranks Oggcast which I have reviewed previously.  On the panel were Azimuth, threethirty, jlindsay, Dann, and the notorious Peter64.

The new Kernel Panic Oggcast keeps in a very similar vein as the old Linux Cranks Podcast by topics and discussions.  It has been and still remains safe for work.  I have to say that I have quite a bit of respect for everyone who was on the panel and I had a great time.

With most topics on the news and issues of the day there is good friendly banter with the nice mix of inter-cultural vocabulary and references to things being upside down in Australia.  All taken in good fun it is always a relaxing conversation with this crew and on more than one occasion they have caused me to open a browser and download and try some new software package.

The panel was in good form, we had some great discussions on there and I really do hope to visit with the guys again in the future, even though it meant I had to be up at 04:00 on a Sunday morning.  Tune in and listen for the hint of things to come. 

Listen, enjoy, tell me what you thought of the show or the podcast overall.

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CafeNinja

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.