Boycott All SOPA and PIPA supporters

Calling for a boycott of all companies that support these poorly written bills (SOPA and PIPA) if you don’t believe me read for yourselfs SOPA: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261 or http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261 and PIPA: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s968 or http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968

Other ways to boycott: If you use Chrome there are a few extensions that will alert you to SOPA support websites https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/sopa or if you have a android phone there is an app https://market.android.com/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android and for firefox you can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/desopa/?src=search

The governments official list is here http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/List%20of%20SOPA%20Supporters.pdf (also a copy of this list as of 1.18.12 is here https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=458679e134793465&resid=458679E134793465!407&parid=458679E134793465!105&authkey=!AI8wPA74MxrTvE4) Most of these companies are all about force and control, they are openly supporting censorship and removal of your rights with in the constitution. Well if they like censorship so much they should like boycotts of there companies and products as well.

Don’t get me wrong I think knockoffs and stealing is wrong and something should be done. But this two bills are wrong, if the war on drugs took this same stance it would be a removal of street signs and streets from maps and GPS to stop drug houses, instead of busting them and shutting them down. The bills does not do anything but cover up a problem and does nothing to stop it. This leaves it open to hundreds of backdoors that can’t be tracked by law enforcement. As is what will happen anytime you remove just the middle of a problem and do nothing with the start or end.

Other ways you can fight these bills https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/ or http://blacklist.eff.org/ or http://stopcensorship.org/ or VoteForTheNet.com If we do nothing we are going to end up like china and only get to see what the government or big business wants us to see. As lots of people are getting paid off now in the government by companies that have tons of money, these bill are not going to change government corruption or greedy big business.

Note: that GoDaddy.com was a supporter that officially removed there name from the public list after a boycott

Also here is some more information http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/sopa

The list of supporters of the bills in congress http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398998,00.asp Want to stop the bills? If you live in there districts or states DON’T vote for them.

Microsoft Backup and VHD oh my

This is a multi part post, it has 3 how to’s inclued.

The main problem that started this was how do you get Backup and restore to backup your file incase you over write one of them and you only have one hdd. Well by default you can’t you are SOL. But you can fool backup and restore to thinking there is a second drive in your system. In windows 7 you can create a VHD (Virtual Drive) and have it mounted as a drive letter. But after a reboot they are not mounted again so we need to automate this as well so backup and restore will not fail.

So first we will create the VHD that we will us for backup and restore. For mine I created a expanding VHD so it would grow as need be for the backup. You can also find a more detailed howto here http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5291/how-to-create-a-virtual-hard-drive-in-windows-7/

Then after created we need to attach the VHD and format the drive as you want it.

Then we need to go to Backup and Restore and configure it to use this new VHD, I skipped the creation of the image to save space as if the harddrive fails its gone as well.

Then we need to create the automation to attach the VHD at startup. You can get a howto here http://angler.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/windows-7-auto-mount-vhds-at-startup/ the comments also have away to do it with powershell.

We will create a batch file the uses diskpart with the script command

Then we will create a scheduled task to run this batch file. NOTE: if you use the howto link the bat file has “” around the path this could cause you to get a error 0×1 in scheduled tasks and no mounted VHD, you can remove the ‘”" or look here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951246

scheduled task to run Microsoft Security Essentials

Problem: wanted to automate Microsoft security essentials to run a full scan monthly along with the weekly quick that it has by default.

Fix: We can create a scheduled task to run the command line version of MSE. This will keep the scheduled that is in the client plus you will get a second scheduled scan, you can do much more with the command line version of MSE if your needs are different, like file, full or quick.

Pick the SYSTEM account. This is a admin account and needs no password for scheduled tasks.

This is for it to run monthly

For the action this exe is located in your program files and scan 2 is a full scan.

SOPA vote tomorrow – the internet could look like this

I’ve censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet–a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/10546/uncensor

████ is ████ it █████ ████ ████ if ████ ███████ ████ ████ ████ big ████████ █████ to ████ in █████ to █████ us.

Facebook Syndication Error

The Error: Facebook Syndication Error (Note: that this error will show up differently depending on your RSS tool you are using)

The Problem: Facebook changed your key code that is listed in your RSS feed url so it is causing this error.

The Fix: this is to fix your status updates feed (the status feed seems to be hidden), or this will give you the new link for the notifications

Note: this fix only seems to work for some people not all.

1. login to facebook
2. go to notifications (http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php)
3. at the top you will see  subscribe and click the link next to it that has “via rss”
4. in the rss url locate the key=[your new key] and copy this new key
5. open your RSS tool and and edit your old url and add the new key
   You can go to “Links” to get your new friends rss links, there will be a RSS option on the Left side

OS X 10.7 Boot disk options

On all the Options below you will need to hold down “option” at boot up to use them.

Option 1: buy the install usb key apple has for sale

Option 2: Use the recovery partition

Option 2.5: Install the same recovery partition on a remote harddrive

1. You can download the Lion recovery disk assistant from apple “http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433″

Option 3: Create your own boot usb key

1. get the installESD.dmg
2. put in a blank usb drive at least 4GB in size
3. open disk utility>click on your usb drive>partition>partition layout>1 partition
4. partition information>mac os extended (journaled)
5. partition table>options>guid partition table (this options will make your usb drive bootable to your mac) then click apply and it will format your drive ereasing all your data on it.
6. after the format pick restore and pick the dmg as the source and your usb drive as the destination and pick restore at the bottom

Option 4: create your own boot cd

1. get the installESD.dmg
2. put in a blank dvd
3. open “disk utility” and drag the dmg file in to it
4. click on the dmg and click burn

Note: Option 3 & 4 you will need the dmg file from the Lion install app that you got from the app store. You can get it before you install Lion or after.

To do it before you will need to quit the lion installer after it downloads, don’t worry it does not start to install until you click all the options. Then locate /Applications/Install Mac OS X Lion/ then shift click the app and select show package contents the look in SharedSupport and copy the “InstallESD.dmg”

To do it after you have installed lion (“Install Mac OS X Lion” will no longer be in applications after the install), open up app store and then hold down option and click on purchased and then download again. Then get the InstallESD.dmg as the first step

Tweaks for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

1. Missing ~/Library?

You can run this command from terminal

“chflags nohidden ~/Library”

2. Finder sidebar icon size?

You can go to System Preferences>General>Sidebar icon size

3. Launchpad have junk or duplicate entries?

Give this free app “launchpadcleaner” a try at “http://zoltanb.co.uk/launchpadcleaner/”

Or try this System Preference Pane at “http://chaosspace.de/launchpad-control/”

Option two is to do it from terminal and you can find the steps at “http://gnuu.org/2011/07/21/clearing-launchpad-and-other-osx-lion-tips/”

4. Changing the scrollbar

You can change the way the scrollbar works in System Preferences>General>Show Scroll Bars

5. Fixing your inverted mouse scrolling

If you have a normal mouse I am guessing you will not like the default scrolling in lion. Just go to System Preferences>Scroll & Zoom>Scroll direction: natural and disable this option

6. Missing key repeat for some applications?

You can follow the steps at this site “http://gnuu.org/2011/07/21/clearing-launchpad-and-other-osx-lion-tips/”

Google Chrome for Mac error update server not available (error: 12)

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Google Chrome 12

The Problem:

Update Server not Available (error: 12)

This error will pop up after you get a update and then click on update now then you get error 12

The Fix:

There are lots of posts to fix this problem but all are poor or don’t work. But this one does and is hard to track down as this is the second time this has happened to me.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=7190d11c3f1a192e&hl=en 

 

 

OVF Tool error converting a OVA hardware version 4 VM

Trying to convert a OVA file that created a vmware hardware version 4 vm was giving the error below with OVF Tool 2.0.1

Error:

- Virtual machine has 8,194 megabytes of memory, which is outside the range of 4 to 3,600 megabytes supported on the host.  This may be a general limitation of the host software, or specific to the guest OS selected for the virtual machine.

The Fix

Locate the correct hardware version xml file default location is “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool\env\ovftool-hw4-config-option.xml” in the xml file you will find two memmax values (you can do a search for 3600 to locate them, just increase them to the number that the error is stating your VM has to get it to work.

BOMC iso error

Problem: Using IBM’s ToolCenter Bootable media creator (BOMC) to make a updatexpress cd keep failing with an error on the ISO creation step.

Error: Error(s) occurs while creating the bootable media! Error message: Media creation error: The mkisofs utility failed to create ISO file

Solution: come to find out that the iso creation step conflicts with cygwin or cygwin.dlls, So in my case I had cygwin installed on the system that the BOMC was running on and creating this error, I stopped the cygwin process and the BOMC ran with out problems.