I was riding home when I noticed the speed limit sign said '55 MPH', but the van clock only said 4:33. 'We should accelerate 11.7MPH.


Oh...wait...'

Remember how I added a CRT to my laptop? Well, though I said 19" on that post, it was actually a 17". (I guess. It's smaller than my new monitor, which I'm fairly certain is a 19" and is certianly smaller than my broken 21") However, since I had two unused 19" CRTs sitting around, I just upgraded again. I still can't get to 1600*1200 on the big one, but things are bigger now, which is nice. Probably uses more power, too. Bummer.

Oh, how I wish I could add a third monitor. I have three or four monitors sitting in my closet, two unused downstairs, and one taking up space on the floor of my room.

Anyone want a spare CRT?

UPDATE: It was all blurry--bad dot pitch maybe? I dunno--so I switched to the other 19" CRT and this one can go up to 1792*1344. Wicked! Of course, now I'll have the annoyance of the top monitor being wider (pixel-wise) than the LCD. But I can live with that.

UPDATE MORE: It was all black, so I did run cmd alt+enter alt+enter and it was fixed, but with the scrolling desktop. Apparently it can now only go up to 1600*1200. :-(

Bank of America. Oh oh oh!

Logging in to their online banking system is a pain. Why? Because I know my SSN (used as the username) and I know my password, but they've decided that's not good enough, no. I enter my SSN and then they ask me 'What's your maternal grandmother's maiden name?' Now, I know the answer to this. You could probably figure it out too. Sadly, Bank of America doesn't have a clue, and I don't recall telling them anything but the truth.

So how do I log in? I try answering a few times, and finally it asks my father's middle name. This one I know. This one I know you can find in a matter of minutes using Google. My father goes by his middle name. And Bank of American knows the correct answer to this one. So finally I manage to get in.

By 'in' I mean I'm to the point where I can enter my password.

By the way, if you ever want to be annoying, all you need to do is get to this point and then enter the wrong password a few times.They'll shut down online access to my account until I dig up some silly information and fill it in. Could be worse. My brother had to call them with his account number and a recent transaction--and he was in Germany at the time, meaning he couldn't unless he wished to spend lots of money.

So long as I'm explaining how Bank of America's security sucks, I should mention SiteKey. SiteKey is an image you choose that they show you after you supply your SSN and the answer to the security question. If you see the SiteKey image that you chose when setting up your account, you know it's really Bank of America and you can safely enter your password.

Either that or it's a phishing site that took your SSN and security question answers soon as you provided them, showed them to the real Bank of America, got your SiteKey image, and then showed it to you, defeating this brillant security measure in a matter of seconds.

Okay, so maybe they'll notice if a single phishing site is sending these requests to BoA for every person they fool, but how many of you think this isn't easy to hide sufficiently well to avoid any automatic detection BoA may have set up? Yet another example of fake security. it makes you feel safe, unless you're competent and actually think it through.

I used to tell people to not write down their passwords.

Then I started helping out at a website that only stores hashes of user's passwords, and no password-resetting mechanism. If someone loses their password, I can reset it manually, given proof that they're the actual owner, but I hate doing that, in part because my idea of proof is that you have the password to the account. A site where 0.469980026% of all accounts have the password 'password' and 0.403889085% have the password '1'. A site where there are 34179 passwords among 68088 accounts. Okay, really, these statistics are better than I expected. In fact, I cannot believe I got those queries right. Must be all those people who register and then never log on. They have strong, distinct passwords. The active users don't.

Anyway, they use weak passwords and still they forget their passwords a lot. So now I tell them to write their password down. There are betters ways of doing it. Personally, I want a secure hash I can calculate in my head--and there are some good ideas on how to do something along those lines--but most of these people are youngish kids.

Anyway, this person presented a good argument that struck me. In my pocket, I have 43.19 USD (often over 100USD) and 0.11 Euroes, 47.11 USD on a Barnes and Noble gift card, three credit cards with a total credit line of over 10 000 USD, and keys to my house, van, and truck. Most people probably have much more than that.

If my pocket is secure enough for all that, it's secure enough for my password. Not my GPG passphrase, perhaps, but most passwords aren't worth more than the rest of my wallet. You don't even need to write it down in plaintext. A shift cypher will stop casual thieves. Or a different font (I sometimes take notes in Tolkien's Elvish Tengwar script. I also know most of the Greek alphabet. Studied Russian? Arabic? Mix a couple alphabets together. Use a shorthand of your own. (I have quite a few symbols I made up for taking notes. Surely you have some too?)

If you're really paranoid, encrypt your password with a one-time pad and store the password list somewhere secure and the one-time pad somewhere independently secure. (IE, finding a way to access one will not help me access the other.) Yeah, you still have to memorise your passwords to use them, but the cost of not remembering is now that you only temporarily lose access--just until you go to these two secure areas and combine them--freeing you to use a stronger password than if memorisation was your only recourse. But what I'm mostly concerned with here are the non-security-minded users. Most people don't consider how long it takes the bad guy to guessing their password using a computer. They just think about whether they can remember the password and whether typing it in each time takes too long. Security means keeping unauthorised users out and letting authorised users in. If the security-minded ignore the second half, we miss the priority of the average user, so they ignore our advice.

I see this topic on my laptop LCD.


I hear the chair wobble as I sit on it.


I taste the empty mouth of someone who needs to brush his teeth.


I feel the plastic beneath my foot.

I smell nothing.

The ISS is nice, I suppose. But what do they even do up there on it? Do you know? I don't know. It's probably useful stuff. Learning more about long-term space habitation is always good.

The Hubble Space Telescope (image from NASA)

But what I do know is what the Hubble Telescope does: it gives us enormous amounts of information about the universe by showing us detailed visuals we otherwise wouldn't have. It helped is measure the Hubble constant much better, it taught us about black holes, galaxies, the early universe, future universal expansion, extrasolar planets, nearby planets and what happens when a comet crashes into a planet... Hundreds of important papers have been published based on images from Hubble Space Telescope.

Second to going to the Moon, this thing is probably NASA's greatest success, and that's pretty darn good. Did we go to the Moon once and then say 'Okay, that's all'? No, we went back again and again, because we were still learning new stuff. Eventually we stopped. The budget was shrinking, probably because it got to be old hat in the eyes of many Americans. The alternative would have been to kick it up a notch: build a base, head on to Mars, or, oh!, how about putting a big telescope on the surface of the Moon? No atmosphere there, eh? But, no. We let that die for the time being. Moved on to other things. Such as the Hubble Space Telescope.

That they want to let the telescope die isn't what bothers me. I can't even grok that bit of news. What irks me is that they haven't sent up an entire array of more powerful orbital telescopes appals me. It's time to kick the Hubble Space Telescope up a notch. It's still giving us good information, but it can only point in one direction at once, and there's a lot of stuff out there for us to study. Let's build some more telescopes and start looking around. (Can't afford it? We could stop so many things like the B-2 Spirit [2 100 000 000USD a pop])

There's a train that runs behind our house. Well, behind the woods behind the huge lot behind our house. You can hear it when it drives by. Plus, it likes to toot its horn.

Anyway, it always goes by at 1am. Only I've been wondering lately whether it does any more. I tune it out, and I'm usually asleep at that time.

But I hear it now. It's there. And tooty.

I don't mind trains. Trains come by and then are gone. Cars on the highway, however, are intermittent and just don't stop coming.

(Hello, train. I said you come by and then are gone. You can stop tooting now. Jeez.)

The mission: investigate the claim that the Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly 146 meters tall.
The method: In the famous Mythbusters tradition, I will attempt to replicate the feat myself. If I don't succeed within ten minutes, the myth will be busted.

Step one: I'll take the blocks from there and pile them over here.

After roughly fifteen minutes of non-stop construction, my pyramid is as big as it's going to get. The time limit has been reached.

I've never visited Egypt, but I imagine it must be something like this.

Alas, after fifteen minutes of construction, the pyramid is not even two meters tall. This proves conclusively that if the Great Pyramid of Giza exists, it's a lot shorter than people claim. Probably just a lie the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism likes to spread.

Wikipedia claims that the Great Pyramid of Giza stood 146.6 meters tall when the Egyptians built it in 2570bce.

Convinced this was a myth, I headed outside and attempted to construct such a pyramid of my own. After over ten minutes of trying, however, my attempt at a perfect replica was still under two meters heigh. Thus, we now have scientific proof that the Great Pyramid of Giza does not exist, or that if it does, it's a lot shorter than they claim.

Another myth busted. Now where's my tv series?

 

Okay, so I took over a hundred photos at the recent FLT gathering (homeschooling group). Lots of kids. I should be able to post those without anyone getting upset (though I know people who would be upset if I posted photos of them). How about labelling who each person is? With their full name? And address?

Okay, I'm not including the addresses, and usually I only know the first name. Surely /that/ much is fine, right?

These people are mostly sensible. They won't care, I suspect.

Gah.

So, they got a new Dell Inspiring (Windows Vista)¹ and a Netgear WNR834B at the office. I'm to downgrade to XP, and set up the new Netgear router.

My expectations:
* Downgrading can be a pain. Vista prevents such things somehow. Like, the XP CD has a forward-compatible check for newer versions of Windows or something. So I brought a Knapp Live CD in order to wipe the hard disk if necessary.
* Installing a router is trivial: you just plug it in, and then do some configuring if you want encryption.

Turns out they forgot to provide an XP CD, so all I have to do today is install the router. I don't mind. I wanted to do that before downgrading to XP, anyway. This way I go home early. (Wrong.)

Anyway, their original setup was:

 Five ethernetted computers
            |
      Linksys Switch
            |
 Sprint 645 DSL modem.

I'm not replacing the Linksys switch. Sadly, the Netgear software /really/ wants me to. I hate software that thinks it knows anything. So I just go ahead without their lame software.

Netgear WNR834B has five plugs: four ethernet plugs and one last ethernet plug labelled 'Internet'. I believe what I did initially was:

 Netgear's Internet plug
           |
     Linksys Switch ---- Sprint 645 DSL modem
           |
 Five ethernetted computers

Now the laptop can detect and connect to the wifi network, but no Internet. http://192.168.1.1/ works for the web configuration on Netgear. I do this and that and so on. Eventually, with Martin's help, I get Internet access via wifi, I believe mostly thanks to changing LAN IP Setup->LAN TCP/IP Setup>IP Address from 192.168.1.1 (which is also the default gateway used by the Linksys switch) to 192.168.1.2 (which is unused). I also changed from the Internet ethernet port to just an ordinary one.

So! Now the laptop has a very slow, port 80-only wifi connection. But it can no longer connect to the web configuration for Netgear. I tried http://192.168.1.2/ (what it should be), http://192.168.1.1/ (what it used to be), https://192.168.1.2/ (what my home Linksys router uses), https://192.168.1.1/ (combine first and third), http://192.168.0.2/ (I needed for stuff to try), http://192.168.0.1 (I tried everything else already). Nothing works. I can ping 192.168.1.1, but that's set as the Default Gateway, so of course I can. Probably not the Netgear router I've just pinged, but the Linksys switch.

Botheration. So you know what I go ahead and do? Slow Internet access is all very nice, but I want configurability, so I go in there and reset the router. Stick a pin in that little red hole.

Takes the entire network down. Sorry, guys, were you using that? I mess around with the cords and it gets back up pretty quickly.

But this did fix the problem somewhat for a few seconds. I connected to the Netgear web configuration thing over wifi (but could not connect to the Internet over wifi, unless I'm misremembering) and it's all 'Wanna check for firmware updates?' I say 'Sure.' Then my wifi connection drops. (Oh, yeah, it says not to do that over wifi.) Cannot even /find/ the wifi network. The router has power. It has blinkenlights. But Vista can't see any such network. So I reset the stupid thing again. Taking down the network again, this time in part thanks to my bumping a power cord.

Once the network is back up, I try around for the wifi. Vista can't find it. Not even when I hold the laptop right next to the Netgear router. So I plug the laptop into the Netgear ethernet, and I can connect. I can check the status (and be told that the wifi has such and such uptime (not much yet, but climbing about five seconds per five seconds). So why can't I detect this fabulous network? This is not a problem with Vista. There are other networks around. They're secure, faint, and vanish all together by 5pm, but I saw them. They were around for longer than our Netgear's.

I try messing around with cords. Plug the laptop directly into the Linksys switch. Plug the Netgear router into the Linksys Switch and into the laptop. Two problems: 1. it's not helping and 2. doing things like this tends to take down the entire network.

FINAL STATUS: Unresolved.

I'm stumped for now. Your mission is to reply to this with a simple, effective solution. Simple, effective, /cheap/ solution. Next time I go (when the XP CD arrives from the main office), I'll probably go ahead and bring my laptop (a second opinion on wifi detection), and possibly my Linksys router.

There are only five computers in addition to the laptop, so if I have to switch around the Netgear router and the Linksys switch so the router is the one connected to the modem, that could be feasible, but I think my main issue is:
* Linksys and Netgear both want 192.168.1.1 and changing that caused problems.
* Netgear has decided to stop broadcasting.
(Using JUST the Netgear router seems infeasible, since it only has five plugs total, and we have five ethernetted computers. One plug needs to go to the modem.)

¹ By the way, the Dell Inspiron:
* Monitor seems kind of meh.
* Battery life looks to be under three hours, as I recall. It wasn't great, anyway.
* Quiet. Very quiet. Dead silent, most of the time. My old Compaq Presario has been known to wake me up at night with its crummy fan (though it was pretty good when new). This Dell, though...if my laptop became this quiet, I'd go into a panic whenever I entered the room because 'OH, NO! It's off! What happened?'
* Close lid=hibernate/suspend. Open lid=nothing. Press power button=nothing. Unplug and remove battery, put battery back in, and then press power button=ah, good. Later discovering holding down the power button for several seconds is the way to unhibernate/unsuspend=engineers are vile abominations who should never have a thing to do with UIs. or maybe the UI designers did this. Anyway, whoever came up with the idea of my having to hold down the power button to turn the computer back ON is the devil.