My wife’s computer (running Win7 64-bit) has had for quite some time the weirdest issue, the built-in calculator (calc.exe) was royally screwed up. As if the numbers didn’t fit in the display and to top it off half the time parts of it would turn transparent showing the desktop background.

Long story short (and quite a few searches on Google) turns out it was “FastPictureViewer Codec” which caused the issue. I uninstalled it and all was peachy again.

Weird thing is, that codec has been installed for ages on the computer without any of the issues. The really good thing is that Nikon released a 64-bit version of their NEF codec some time ago, so there’s really no need to keep FPVC installed anymore.

There’s a really neat little game from Fingersoft available via Google Play, which in it’s simplicity is quite addictive.

I used to have it installed on both my Android phones (Galaxy S2 and S3), but since I wiped (and rooted) the S2, I lost all progress in the games I had on it. Today I figured out how to at least remedy a part of that in Hill Climb Racing. The goal is to a) collect coins, so that you can b) upgrade your vehicles in order to c) get further on the different levels. Here’s where the “BUT” comes in, if you wiped/reinstalled/whatever… you need to collect all those millions of coins again to unlock the levels, vehicles and max out their upgrades.

No way I’m doing that all over again, so…
Since my S2 is rooted, I figured I should be able to find where HCR saves all the progress… I was thinking maybe I could root the S3 and move everything over.

Turns out it was simpler than that. There’s a file in /data/data/com.fingersoft.hillclimb/shared_prefs/ called hillclimbprefs.xml which holds all the interesting stuff, in plain XML!

NOTE: I don’t take any responsibility in any way whatsoever if you try any of the things below on your own device and screw it up.

So on (about) line 40 there’s something like:
<int name=”coins” value=”XXX” />

Where XXX is the amount of coins you currently have. Now you can probably guess where this is going, so fire up a text editor and edit that line… add a few zeroes if you want a quick-upgrade for your vehicles and get all the levels. Save and start HCR again. Spend the next minute or two getting your favorite car/truck/tank/motorcycle maxed out and your ready to take on the long distances again.

Figured I’d note this one down, so I don’t forget it the next time I need it.

I found a nice little program for bulk/batch renaming files under pretty much all Windows versions. It can be found here.

It’s definitely not pretty, but it gets the job done and it supports regular character replacement and regex!

Since I’m writing for once, here are a few pointers for using fail2ban.

Installation (on my Ubuntu 12.04):

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Configuration:

sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

A few lines to add/change:

[DEFAULT]
 maxretry = 3 # change to what you like, I prefer 2
 ignoreip = 127.0.0.1 192.168.0.0/24 # you can add several ignored ranges, use cidr-format
 bantime = 3600 # default 600, change to 86400 for 24h

[ssh]
 enabled = true
 port = ssh
 filter = sshd
 logpath = /var/log/auth.log
 maxretry = 2

Restart the service

sudo service fail2ban restart

Checking in on how fail2ban is doing a few days later:

#!/bin/bash
zgrep -h Ban /var/log/fail2ban.log* | grep ssh | awk '{print $(NF)}' | sort | uniq -c

Save it as a file and give it a name you’ll remember, like analyze-fail2ban.sh,
then run chmod +x analyze-fail2ban.sh.
Finally run it with ./analyze-fail2ban.sh
…this will output a list of IP’s which have been banned by fail2ban (and how many times).

      1 115.249.171.19
      1 119.36.186.44
      1 166.111.230.4
      1 180.168.208.2

Now if we want to take this one step further we can run a whois -lookup on the IP’s to find out which network and which part of the world they’re from.
You can run whois from your terminal or use an online service like http://whois.arin.net/ or http://www.whoisip.se/. A quick search on Google for “whois ip” gives a ton of more or less crappy results on the subject.

For instance, if we check a few of the above:
(this is just the first few lines from the whois record)

inetnum:	115.249.0.0 - 115.249.255.255
netname:	RCOM-Static-DIA
country:	IN

inetnum:        119.36.0.0 - 119.36.255.255
netname:        UNICOM-HB
descr:          China Unicom HuBei Province Network
country:        CN

inetnum:        166.111.0.0 - 166.111.255.255
netname:        TUNET
descr:          imported inetnum object for IIINT
country:        CN

Amazing, isn’t it?

“What next?” you might ask, and well, there’s a few things you could try. For one, you usually find an abuse e-mail address, but who knows how often (if ever) anyone checks that account. Another thing could be to add firewall rules to block them… sure, they’ll probably be using a new IP the next time, but you could also block that whole network since you know the range they’re in.

Oh, The Art of Web has a nice and easy calculator for getting the “1.2.3.4 – 5.6.7.8″ range into the cidr-format which can be used with iptables and a lot of other systems. They also have really good additional information on fail2ban, see here.

No, I’m not dead yet.

I realize it’s been ages since the last time I wrote on my blog. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about, I regularly have lots of ideas of what I should write, but I cannot seem to find the necessary time to do so.

Let me quickly sum up the half-year or so which has passed:

• Working in Windows 8 and Office 2013 sucks for the most part, Excel 2013 has a few nice new features though
• Still developing stuff mostly in PHP and JavaScript with a little C# on the side
• Upgraded my little gaming rig at home to use 2x Intel SSDs in raid-0 as the system disk + two regular drives for storage
• Upgraded the same rig with a new graphics card (HD7970 from Gigabyte), maxed out the graphics in every single game I’ve tried so far
• Got an old mid-2010 13″ MacBook running Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.3) as my 2nd work laptop and testing rig
• Did an inventory of my DVD collection: turns out I own about 650 movies and TV-series
• Bought an Apple TV (3rd generation) just to watch Netflix…
• A whole bunch of other interesting stuff I’m working on and might reveal at some point in the future

As I’m typing this I’m waiting for the copying of a Windows installation .iso to a USB drive to finish. Turns out there’s several nice choices for getting the job done… and very easily I might add. (Have a look here.)
It’s really nice that someone else in the world has come to the conclusion that doing the diskpart-rumba manually is a pain in the ass.

I gave XBoot a try first, the idea is very nice and I’ll probably use it later to make a USB-key with a few different Linux distros, but for getting the Windows .iso on a USB, WiNTobootic, turns out to be a small godsend.
Download. Run. Select your USB-drive on the left side, drag & drop  the .iso-file on the right side, click “Do it!”. Wait. Done.

Now I just need to locate a few drivers and I’m ready to go.

12/12/12 12:12:12. Been there. Done that.

Create a css-file called nosticky.css and  add the following into it:
table.sticky-header { display: none !important; }

Now when you are using theme_table() to output your data and you want to disable the header, include this line in the function:
drupal_add_css(drupal_get_path(‘module’, ‘myexamplemodule’).’/nosticky.css’);

Apply, refresh and voilá!

Well now, I actually added something new to the blog and it’s not just a post. My bookmarklet section, and it’s even a sub-section to the “Tools” page I added for other future projects. :)

In short, it’s a collection of useful (more or less) scripts which are designed to run from a bookmark in the browser. They can pretty much anything the browser can do and range from the mildly amusing to actually useful.

Have a look! If you want to try one out you should be able to just drag it into your own bookmarks and then click on the bookmark to run the script. Most of them are tailored towards a specific site/service/function. I usually have some small idea of some functionality I miss on sites I browse, and so if it’s a site I tend to visit more often I might write a short script to achieve what I want to do.

That’s it for now.

Hooray! It’s finally here!

Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean

Samsung Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean)

I’ve been checking for updates every day since I saw that Samsung is releasing Jelly Bean in October.

Now I just need to wait once again, this time for my S2 to receive the update. This time I’m really hoping I can get the update OTA, because my faith in Kies isn’t exactly sky high after today. (It wasn’t really high before today either…)

I started Kies, plugged in the phone and it’s not recognized… ¤#!%

Not very unexpected, knowing Kies, so I unplugged and plugged the phone into another USB port. Same thing.

Ran Kies troubleshooter, which reinstalled the drivers for the phone (I assume), plugged in the phone again. And… No.

Some googling, lots of people with Kies issues, nothing really popping out other than a bunch of flaming and bickering on forums over people not supplying “all information” about their issues.

I sigh. I download the latest Kies installer from Samsung, uninstall the old one, install the new one, open Kies, plug in the phone… and pray to the tech-gods of the universe.

Yes! It connected!

Yes! Firmware update! Here we go!

It took a while to download, push it over to the phone and then install, but as you can see from the images above I’m running Jelly Bean.

Oh, and those looking for Google Now… you find it by holding down the Home-button and then pressing the “G”-icon in the lower part of your screen. Watch the examples, select “Yes, I’m in”. You’re done.

Two solid state drives versus a regular 7200RPM HDD

Can’t really argue with the results, the first SSD is on my work laptop which uses sata-6. The SSD in the middle is the system drive of my desktop computer and the HDD at the end is the “junk-drive” on the same.