windowsnerd.com

For those who complain about the ads, here is the breakdown-

Google adsense revenue last February-  $16.81             (didn’t break 100 so I didn’t get a check, continues below)

Google adsense revenue today – $35.71                                (i won’t get a check till it hits $100)

I have not received a penny for running this web page. Or any other page I have. I spend a few hundred dollars a year on domain names and hosting. I think it is fair to say I share my ideas for free, I am very far from recovering the thousands I have spent over the years in hosting fees. So far I have a promise from google to give me $35 if I make it to $100 before it expires. After 6 years I might make a little money back. Anyhow I caught some crap a little while back for putting ads up. Does it really bother you that much? Go get a hosts file from mvps.org and block it.

I’m not going to ask anyone for money, just like to give a small amount back. I get a lot of my answers off the web. Hopefully I come up with something that helps someone else out.

Lol check out the tag- easy money making. nothing easy about building a web page full of semi specialized junk and trying to break even.

OOOPS. I meant this one-

How did I miss that there was that new charlie the unicorn video AND one they got paid to do for Hot Topic?

Ok so this one is out there. Apple is on top of its game. Macland has to know that Chrome will destroy the teeny userbase OSx has within the next 2 years. Most people use the web. Thats it. Web apps. My mom, my cousin, most of my employees. They all use the web. At the university we tracked applications across 1400 lab computers. Even 3-7 years ago it was 99% web browser. More netbooks will be sold at the ATT/Verizon store. They will become disposable.

Why is it taking so long for the Apple tablet to come out? It is getting beat over and over again. The Nvidia tablet, Dell slate, old school dell xt, oqo gear. Apple does things for good reasons.They are waiting for a a perfect storm of ideas. Small light touchscreen tech is maturing this year. Battery life is better with atoms and SSDs. And-

I’m guessing the Apple tablet is running a thinned down OSX. Probably named OS 11. It will be super lightweight, just some wireless drivers, graphics, small fast storage. Exactly what the standard cookie cutter Chrome OS machine will be later this year. All the manufacturers are ramping up on the touch screen slate. Apple will be fashionably late as usual (like on the current lack of security patches,) and dazzle us with some overpriced gadget. As always, I won’t buy one because I can’t afford the lack of bang for bucks. But if someone gives me a toy that cool I’ll be ever so happy.

Where does this leave me? Errr ummmm… Yipes. MS has been working on their own cloud for a long time. I wonder if it will arrive in time before the google hurricane.

So there is my crazy prediction for 2010. Apple iSlate or whatever is running a ChromeOS style OS, on near netbook hardware, and sold at Verizon with cell service. If they don’t have a light OS, goodbye Apple, and welcome google vs MS for the next cold war.

Eve really sucks. It looks ok, I wouldn’t say the graphics are better or as impressive as standing in the middle of Dalaran in WoW. There were a few things that caught my attention right away:

1. There is a chat channel for newbies. Clear sign the game isn’t very self explanatory. Big red flag. That chat channel is a steady flood of confused, lost and bewildered new people. BIG red flag.

2. Rude people in chat. Very condescending comments to newbs about reading directions and only intellectuals are capable of playing Eve online. If you don’t get it, apparently you are stupid.

3. The directions you are provided with don’t make much sense. It gives me some blueprint to build some afterburner thing. At first I thought I was going to make the part myself. After some reading using the ingame browser (very cool) people said I should just buy it. Even though I had a bunch of extra mining stuff I had just sold, I didn’t have enough to buy the parts for my quest.  According to my training schedule, it was going to be 4 hours until my prereq skill was done cooking. I can’t build it without some manufacturing skill that gets done about 2 hours from now. So I’m stuck. Can’t build it, can’t buy it.

Why on earth would they make me wait 4 hours to complete my 3rd quest? Unbelievable. So I asked in the chat. I got bitched out and cursed at for being stupid and making the game less fun because I’m obviously trolling the chat to piss people off??? Very odd.I wonder if Eve put the newbie channel there just to deter new users. One more hurdle to keep the new people out, by constant ridicule.

4. The interface starts off too cluttered. That sure is nice that you can do all this amazing stuff later in the game. Eve needs to learn from WoW and start with a bunch of the buttons missing. Focus players on core skills that must be complete in order to get past say level 10.

5. mouse look. I looked around for a while in the menu, couldn’t figure out mouselook inversion options.

6. The ingame browser is really cool because you don’t have to tab out or stay in windowed mode. The idea behind it though bites. The game sucks so bad that you have to be able to google how to play it every other minute. Eve online doesn’t feel like a game. It is more like a writing a research paper.

After 3 hours of wandering around, reading too much online and in game, and getting blasted by other users for asking polite questions I gave up. I got in to general chat and said I didn’t think this game is for me, I hope you all have fun with it, I’m going back to WoW. I got a few “fuck yous”  right away and then logged out and uninstalled.

Eve online is a game for people who can only see black and white. For the few percent of the world that sees only in black and white it is great. But for the rest of us who see in color, the game makes as much sense as a newspaper that has been through a crosscut shredder. I would have quit after about an hour, but decided I better give it a chance. I will never get that 3-4 hours back. what a waste.

So now the count is World of Warcraft 2, Eve online 0, WW2 online 0. Evony still undecided.

If you are setting up an Untangle firewall and want to use it at your house or business but might not know common ports to allow, here is a list. I have things a bit tighter at work but at the house I like to have instant messengers etc working.

Skype TCP ports 13861, 34954, 42045

Apple remote admin stuff – tcp 5354

typical email – tcp  25, 143, 465, 587, 993, 995 (use these at your own risk. Some you need for gmail etc, but if you open 25 outbound you may be spamming if a machine is owned)

 web – tcp 80, 443

openvpn – tcp 1194

ssh – tcp  22

ftp -tcp 21

Instant messengers - tcp 1863, 5050, 5190, 5222, 5223

Remote desktop – do some port forwarding so it comes in on like 10020 and goes in to 3389. Dont open 3389 to the outside.

How do you find more?

Open a command prompt

type in netstat -no and hit enter

you will see a list of the open source and destination addresses. Compare this list to the auto refresh block list in your untangle firewall. Look for the PID. Compare that to a task manager PID and see what process is using it. Make sure you know what you are allowing when it is blocked.

I got my openvpn clients to map to machine names. I was running into a problem with dfs roots. Had to be able to map to \\domain\root  instead of \\serverip\share through my untangle firewall and nat using openvpn.

Open your network connections and look for the TAP adapter. Mine is v9 from the upgrade a few days ago.

Open TCP v4 settings

Advanced button

I added my AD server as the first DNS entry, untangle dns is second

WINS tab – enter your wins server addy, if you don’t have wins, put it on, it is useful still for things like OWA and exchange 2003. Several other MS things don’t work properly without it 9 years after it was supposed to die

Netbios over TCP- enable that

Back on the DNS tab, i told it to append my domain.com name. It was trying to append my .is-a-geek.com domain name from my house a few times in troubleshooting. I have vpn working without this setting at a warehouse client of mine. So don’t worry if you dont have a domain to add.

That should be it. I’ll post the bat file I wrote for restarting the openvpn service and pinging when I have a few more minutes to post.

Don’t forget you can go into services and start openvpn as a service. It won’t connect inside your network by default. So it automatically knows when to enable. This is great for doing remote maintenance when users are online. This gets you around user complaints about the openvpn gui having to run as adminstrator on vista and 7 because it is happy as a service.

For the search engines-

Untangle openvpn won’t map a drive using name DNS

Openvpn dns mapping windows vista

My main laptop is an M6300 running Vista Ultimate dual booting to Fedora. It currently has a fried power supply that crackles and a dead battery. Until it gets fixed I’m running on the Ubuntu laptop. Problems keep on keeping on but a few things have worked well:

Keepassx – I was able to download my mozy backup of my keepass file in about a minute from the mozy site. I installed keepassx and opened up my keepass file. Worked great.

Openoffice – For simple and I mean simple tasks openoffice is ok. I was able to grab a few excel sheets off my sharepoint server, edit then put back. I am very annoyed that if openoffice opens an .xlsx file it tries to save as its own .oxx documents. Linux people just don’t get it.Normal users can’t handle that.

Logmein – Big fail in Ubuntu. The logmein browser plugin flashes every time you input a click or keystroke in firefox. The solution is that firefox doesn’t work. Use Opera. Sounds a lot like in Windows getting away from IE and using Firefox. So much irony, hypocrisy and fun.

My first try is Equifax 3 in 1 monitoring along with  score watch for $25/month. The Equifax solution started off cool, it gave me my score, each account in my history and ok explanations. After 6 months of paying $25/month I will tell you it has $0 in value. The only things that worked are available from my annual free credit report or other free sources like my credit card page. The ‘features’ that were supposed to work do not, but function fine for free services like mint.com. It took a little digging, but you can find all this information elsewhere and get mobile monitoring free.

Equifax=fail (did I just ask to have my credit struck by lightning?)

Hopefully this is a bug report for Equifax. I’ll go tab by tab on why I feel I threw away $150 on credit reporting to test them out.

Starting on the tabs – Credit watch – alerts

Repeated attempts to set my phone up to recieve alerts fail. Screenshot:

I have resent the message more than 5 times in the last 24 hours. It isn’t that hard to automate SMS to ATT. Mint does it. Pingdom does it. It works. I’m using those services today. The main point of monitoring credit is to be able to take immediate action to fight some idiot in Nigeria who got my card number.

More information in Credit watch – It shows Open accounts

Mortgage, installment, revolving, other, total. I have 4. Not hard to track.

For each it tells you a very inaccurate Balance, Available, Credit Limit, Debt to credit ratio, Monthly Payment Amount, Accounts with a balance.

Ok so if I go on to my American Express, Visa and MC sites I have accurate information. The Equifax information for Balance, Available, Credit limit. Ratio, Monthly payment amount = WRONG. I updated last night and it is still wrong. I updated this morning, -it says today’s date on the “equifax credit report as of 9/26/2009 banner.  If I go in to the details, more data that is either really old or just pulled out of thier e-butt. THis just doesn’t match up at all with what is going on in my banking world.

Then we move on to the score watch tab. This is what had me hooked at the beginning. #1 feature!! A chart that shows the change in my score over time. It starts in Feb, Ends today. There are 5 data points all in Feb-May. Now I know there has been activity in my credit that should generate some June, July, August, September data points. Nothing. This thing has been useless except to show me that getting a new credit card does indeed drop your credit score quite a bit for several months. That is with 5 dots. Not much help. Remember – a credit card addition = drop in your credit score.

If this thing showed me more data points, if it didn’t feel like Equifax was intentionally hiding credit information from me, I would pay for this stupid chart. Hell I would pay for an app to keep it as my blackberry background. But they don’t update it for you out of their own database. Something is diabolically wrong. Does Lex Luther run the big 3?

Credit Report Tab

Inaccurate information about the balance I am carrying. It has a lame ass chart for Balance Vs Available credit. Free www.mint.com kills them on any useful/accurate information.  The interesting stuff is Length of Credit History, and Average Account age, but you can get that in your free credit report or on your credit card site. LAME!

Credit Score

This tab is priceless. It shows my credit report from 2/19/2009 when I signed up. The coders are too stupid to pull the data from the score watch tab in July. So the whole $150 worth of monitoring has been to tell me in 6 months my 2/19 score is the same as when I checked it on 2/19. Neat. It goes on to tell me my lender risk % from 2/19. It is 9/26 so that isn’t so helpful as I have eliminated any traces of debt (using mint.) BTW, my mortgage brokers across the hall at my office say this is complete bullshit. I don’t know who to believe there.

In my report manager tabs, you can see that I have 1 “score power” report remaining for the year. Well that sucks because I should just do 1 free credit report a year and pay 1 time to get one 6 months later. Paying $300 a year to “protect my credit” was a bad idea. The unlimited Equifax credit report is useless and inaccurate. None  of the numbers have ever matched my credit card statements.

My goals with credit protection and monitoring:

1. Monitoring alerts to my phone

2. Many data points per month to help figure out exactly what I did to change my score

3. Lowest cost possible.

So far Mint.com is the winner for managing finance. I have custom alerts set up for all accounts. It won’t watch for a new card being opened in my name. But the data it does provide is accurate because it is drawn directly from my cards/banks web pages.

Next try will be Experian or freecreditreport.com. If I can figure out how to cancel the Equifax account. I hate calling people. Anyhow last screenshot is the cancel subscription/change subscription/show i’ve been billed every month for 6 months FAIL. I can’t cancel my account. No options on any menu that I can find allow me to discontinue automatic billing. What a scam. I should report them to my credit bureau.

If the credit bureaus really operate this poorly when you go to buy a house, well crap. Not like we can do much.

chat is broken for my users in multiple states. It has been down since we started work around 8am MST

On multiple networks we have confirmed issues with Gmail corporate contacts and chat. Mail is also loading very slowly. Maybe it is time to start paying instead of complaining when the free corporate version has problems.