happy monthiversary

After more than half a year of tweaking + trial and error, I think I have finally pinpointed the cause of my server crashes. Nope, nothing to do with kernel stability, nothing to do with crond or any other service. Probable cause is hardware related, the pcb for the barrel connector power input ...

EFI

Just when I thought I have got everything sorted out nice, out comes a surprise. Turns out the industry has been stealthily moving away from BIOS towards EFI while I was happily using my old laptop. Result : All my bootable USB drives are no longer supported. Hooray! There goes all my bootable ...

rainmeter

I would like to share a software which I have been using over the last year or so. rainmeter is a desktop customization software. It is somewhat similar to the gadgets we are familiar with in windows 7 but rainmeter allows greater customization so you can theme all of them in a similar style. ...

Default printer settings

I have never paid much attention to setting default printer, normally setting it to the most commonly used printer for convenience sake. However, a reason episode made me think twice on whether it is wise. Recently, while using my hybrid laptop in school, a dialog popped up and disappeared ...

Problems with FTP

1) No copy feature. There is no way to duplicate the file the file on the server for backup, testing or any other purposes. You have to download the file and upload it to another location, which is quite a hassle especially for large number of files. One would think that this is a common ...

Hiding compressed files in images

Have been doing this for quite some time, just wanted to share the method. The following code should work on Linux/Mac. Step 1. Zip/Rar/7z your secret file zip hideme.zip s3cr3t Step 2. Append the zip file to a random image file cat hideme.zip > randompic.jpg Thats all. When you open the jpg, ...

Hijacking QR codes

Just finished printing my poster for a school project in which contained a QR code for users to download an android app. It was my first time printing out 300dpi@A1 size and thankfully it turned out well (A reprint would have cost $12). Anyway, that is beside the point. More importantly, the QR ...

Interesting bluetooth experiment

Earlier on, I paired my bluetooth keyboard to both my android and windows OS dual boot configuration. It is a hassle to keep re-pairing the keyboard whenever I switch OSes. This was done by pairing it with the android and extracting the link key, which is a 32bit binary code and then replacing ...