Robbing a Bank as Part of a Penetration Test

(found via Bruce Schneier’s blog)

Farewell Facebook (Short film about Digital Suicide)

Nice short movie by Joep van Osch and Casper Eskes.

For the Birds

The Butterfly Circus

And: part two

Mac OS X: Set default auto-rotate and scale in preview’s print dialog

To permanently switch off the anoying auto-rotate and auto-scale feature of the Preview App of Mac OS execute the follwoing two commands in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode 0
defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingAutoRotate 0

(tested on 10.6; found on Mac OS X Hints)

Stupid Injunction (by Dan Bull)

I like that song about the current British super-injunction controversy:

Another good experience bying used IT

There are certain companies which make excellent computing hardware with long time value. IBM (or nowadays Lenovo) is one when it comes to laptops. For laser printers I rely on HP.

When I was in England I bought 3 years ago an HP LaserJet 2300dn (duplex unit, network card) for cheap and till now I am a happy owner of it. During the time I have owned it so far I gave it an additional 500 pages paper tray and more memory (the memory is maxed with 306MB right now). All for cheap and all works like a charm!

In Germany I have just bought myself a used HP LaserJet 4300dtn (duplex unit, network card, additional 2nd paper tray) on eBay and made very good experience with both, the printer and with the FeComp, the company which sold the refurbished machine. The printer was very cheap (even for a used one, just 160€ including free shipping. The printer came quickly and exactly as described.

However the printer had a few small glitches. But then this can always happen with used hardware, regardless how well they are checked, things just can slip occasionally the attention. In my case it turned out that there has been a tiny bit of dirt on the transfer roller which caused the printing to have a small dot printed every 3.8 cm along a vertical line. The other problem is a strange noise of the left fan which is occuring in regular intervals (not too often, but always again). Both problems do not affect the use of the printer very much, but still I would prefer them to be fixed sooner or later.

So now the good news: First of all, it is easily fixable. The service manual for the HP LaserJet 4300 can be found online (it is a whopping 442 pages document) and there is hardly anything which you cannot fix with an #2 Phillips screwdriver. Also a lot of replacement parts can be found online. That is why I love HP LaserJet printers! :-)

The other good news is that FeComp did a very good job in providing me the replacement parts for free. Of course I could have sent the printer back, but who wants to send a 20kg printer forth and back for some small replacement which can be done nicely by oneself? I don’t, would not make sense (and I love fiddling around with a screwdriver and fix things for myself). I had a good e-mail exchange with the responsible person at FeComp and I am glad about the professional way the small problem was handeled. Glitches can always occur regardless how much one tries to avoid them. The improtant thing is how such things are then handled. And in my case FeComp has done a great job here! :-)

UCF Professor Richard Quinn accuses class of cheating

Finally Done!

4 copies of 3 years of work waiting to be bound and to be submitted tomorrow! Oh yeah! :-)

Die Beauty

Another independent movie from Sweeden: Die Beauty. Released on 17th of September, 2010 on the PirateBay, similar to Nasty Old People.