Author: Rick

How To: Check OS X Disk Usage

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Command Line, Technology How To's 3 Comments

How To: Check OS X Disk Usage

In OS X there are two ways to do everything. Via the GUI, or Via the command line. Frequently the GUI method does fine for most uses. But sometimes a bit more information is needed.

In the GUI, getting Disc Usage is simple. Open Finder, click on the drive and look at the bottom of the finder window. The number of files selected and the space available is displayed. But, this only shows the current directory and includes ALL sub folders under it.

But with a little use of the command line we can get a lot more information. Opening terminal defaults to the active user’s home directory.

At this point type du -sh * We’re adding the s for “Display an entry for each specified file,” and h for “Human-readable” output.

This will give a readout like this:
28G Desktop
41G Documents
13G Downloads
3.9G Library
0B Movies
5.1G Music
42G Pictures
121M Public
374M Sites

As can be seen this then gives a readout of each directory in the current one and provides the total space it takes up. In cases of low hard drive space this gives a good way to quickly find folders that may be too big. It could also be run in the /Users folder on multi-user machines to find out who it using all the hard drive space.

How To: Clean “Your internet access is going to get suspended” Virus

Posted by Rick on in Microsoft, Technology How To's, virus 0 Comment

How To: Clean “Your internet access is going to get suspended” Virus

I was recently sent a copy of the “Your internet access is going to get suspended” virus. Which is really annoying since my Bit Torrent and P2P use is limited to Magnatune and downloading ISOs of Linux/BSD systems.

So, seeing a lack of responses from the big companies on how to remove it, I sacrificed my one Windows machine to it in an attempt to figure out how to fix it. This is a down and dirty fix, but it worked.

Installing the Virus is easy, download the ZIP file, open it, then run the .EXE file inside.

The Virus installed a new winlogin.exe file. Unluckily this can’t just be removed. After pulling the network cable to keep the machine from reinfecting itself, boot into safe mode. At the command prompt, delete the Winlogin.exe file, along with krnlcab.sys, cabpck.dll, and k86.bin from the System folder.

At this point follow these directions to extract a new winlogin.exe from the original install CD. Remove tmp/msi_setup/* then reboot the computer and double check that the three files above are still gone, and the winlogin.exe has the new date.

Plugin the network cable and immediately do a software update. I found that SP3 had to be reinstalled, but it worked fine.

This is down and dirty, only worked on XP, and is potentially system breaking. If you are not confident in the directions above, wait for the Anti-Virus vendors to create an official fix.

How To: Edit MAC Address on Linux

Posted by Rick on in Linux, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Edit MAC Address on Linux

Your network card in your linux box just got replaced. Or the onboard one on the mother board went bad and now you need to get it up. But Linux is not automatically recognizing the new card correctly.

Get to a terminal prompt. Type ifconfig to get the current mac address. Keep in mind that you may need to watch the boot up process to find out what your network card’s device name really is. It’s usually eth0, but em0 or even en0 are common. Also it may not be the first or ‘0’ device, so eth1 is entirely valid. Out put will look something like this:

eth0: flags=8863 mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::21f:5bff:fee8:b40d%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4
inet 127.1.1.1 netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 127.1.1.255
ether 00:1f:5b:72:b4:aa
media: autoselect (1000baseT ) status: active
supported media: autoselect 10baseT/UTP 10baseT/UTP 10baseT/UTP 10baseT/UTP 100baseTX 100baseTX 100baseTX 100baseTX 1000baseT 1000baseT 1000baseT none

The MAC address is the 6 hexadecimal numbers on the line that says “ether” so 00:1f:5b:72:b4:aa is the MAC address. This number is also written on a sticker on almost every device with a network device these days. It’s even included on the outside box of many new computers as it’s a very distinctive number.

Next is to edit the file this info is kept in. Go to:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-

Edit (or totally remove if you’re using DHCP boot) the MAC address line. Save the file and reboot!

How To: Create a Chart in Neo Office

Posted by Rick on in Technology How To's 1 Comment

How To: Create a Chart in Neo Office

NeoOffice is one of my most favorite free applications. Unluckily, like other Office programs it is starting to suffer from feature bloat. Apparently there are a million other things people want from a full fledged office program other then basic writing of documents.

One of these is apparently charts. Pie Charts, graphs, bar charts, etc. Anything to make a presentation look good and soften the blow of impending bankruptcy.

Step one is to create (or simply open) a spread sheet of the data to be displayed in Chart format.

Then click on the rows or columns that need to present in the chart.

At the top of the screen, choose insert then go down to Chart (near the bottom)

Double Check that the desired fields are listed in the range section. If either the Row or Columns is a label field, be sure to check the boxes on the left. Also put the chart on a different sheet (which is probably most desired,) by changing the “Chart Results in Worksheet” field. This will allow copy and pasting of the chart into another document, or even being linked to from a different document.

Hit Next the choose the chart design. Make sure Row or Columns is checked as the primary data source, then hit next again. It may be desirable to choose an off set pie chart for instance, this can be done on this screen.

Otherwise click on “create” and NeoOffice will work it’s magic. In a few second a brand new chart will be inserted on the worksheet specified. The edges of the chart can be grabbed with the mouse to expand the size of the chart. And it can be copy and pasted into a document, or even exported to a .gif file for posting on a web page.

How to: Use the web to check copyright

Posted by Rick on in DRM, Internet, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How to: Use the web to check copyright

With the size of the Internet a lot a files, thoughts, musings, writings, paintings, pictures, etc, get “accidently” made available for those who have not paid for them. Students copy and paste whole sections of documents for their own papers, and less scrupulous individuals copy for their own reasons. A lot of companies have gotten around this by instigating DRM protection schemes, despite protests by consumers. The worst part though is that for those of us who provide content on the web, it’s actually pretty hard to keep that information secure.

Plagiarized text files are one of the easiest to find. Tools like Google are actually very useful here, but have the potential to come up with way too many hits. There are a lot of pay-per-use or subscription tools available on the market that will search for plagiarism, but Reprint Writers has put a great tool online that searches better then Google does. Unfortunately it only searches Yahoo so it may miss some hits.

On the other hand there are times when one does need to publish materials online and may not be the original author, or the original author may not be readily apparent or available. The Library Copyright Digital Slider tool could be very useful. Geared towards Librarians, it is extremely useful in identifying works that may have become public domain.

If the publication in question is a book it should be copyrighted via the Library of Congress. Some of that information is online via this link . Unfortunately, a good portion of this information is still offline, but it is being added slowly but surely. The provided link also has information about how to contribute to this project.

More recently web photography has really taken off. A lot of people with cheap digital cameras are posting pictures left and right, and just as quickly those pictures are being pulled from services such as Flickr and used by others.

Idee, Inc has a new tool that is in beta called Tineye. It actually goes out on the web and searches for pictures. Pictures that it’s seen before (and it’s constantly searching,) are given a unique identifier based on pixels in the graphic. Tineye scours the web for any picture that comes close, including those that were photoshopped or other wise altered.

In this day age copyright is an important concern for everyone involved. Using the above tools will make it easier to identify such cases and take appropriate action. Doing so will also help keep the unintentional infringements from happening.