Delayed Post: LENOVO ROCKS

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible. From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating. About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100” I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily. ...

July 13, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ' I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ ...

July 12, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

Lenovo x61 Tablet Hard Drive (Near) Disaster

So, I love my lenovo tablet, so far through all the trails, tribulations, transcontinental visits, banging, bashing, bumping, swinging, twisting, scribbling, et al, its survived and become a near essential piece of my working and personal development. Famous…Last…Words. Appear back at the house last night after a fwe bevvies with the guys and loe and behold, “Error 2100 - Hard drive initialization error” The BIOS cant see the harddrive. But wait, lenovo built in that seemingly pointless blue button to do recover right? Recovery off the hard drive… That it cant see. ...

May 22, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

Set up and running of DNS tunnelling on MBWE

Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) ...

April 4, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

The Omleritto

Ingredients: 2 eggs Dash of milk 1 tortilla Cheese assorted herbs and spices Eggs, Dash of milk, and Herbs etc into a bowl and whisk until uniform colour and consistency, pour into an appropriately sized (eg tortilla size) frying pan, pre-oiled (Extra Virgin Olive oil does the best) Turn the heat up to about half, and let the egg slowly cook When the bottom of the eggs are hard but the top is still liquid, grate the cheese over it so it melts into the eg, and then cover in the tortilla. ...

March 29, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

New Productivity Mantra

Check Email / Twitter / Facebook / et-al for 10 minutes every 3 hours (10/1/4) Focus on 1-3 activites / fixes / waypoint actions a day Keep a Log of those actions Obviously this only applies to my working life :D Original

March 1, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

Hacking Weekend

So, I’ve been experimenting over the weekend with Backtrack 4. My… Lord…. Times have changed, it used to be that if you wanted to mess with WEP you have to go thru a dozen intermediate stages. wesside-ng makes life so much simpler.30 minutes, fully automated. What i had done previously was manual airodump-ng, aireplay-ng with arp attacks, and then shifting the caps onto my big box to crack inside of 10 seconds, pity is the packet capture on a quiet network can take a day. ...

February 15, 2009 · Andrew Bolster

MBWE Fuel Gauge -> Speedometer conversion

The Fuel gauge on the front of my MBWE is fairly useless, noone cares, so why not repurpose it as a speedometer? first, stop it displaying the “fuel” Stolen from http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/reduce_disk_usage.php Disable the service that displays the disk usage with the leds in the front panel of your MBWE. Admit it, the feature is pretty much useless and because the service has to check the amount of free space on the disk(s), it is causing disk access. ...

November 6, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

My conkyrc

Contents (what you get out of this) Weather, HDDtemp, UL/DL speed and cumulative meters, CPU load, Folding@Home status, Remote transmission download status (could be local, easy change), gmail status, RAM usage, Uptime, Date/Time, ToDo list These all automatically update dependant on the execi variable. Preface (What you need to get this all working) Linux OS (Ubuntu?) Conky (obv, see someone elses guide for how to get that HINT synaptic is ur friend) Transmission download manager (local or remote) Folding at home installed with origami (could be local or remote using the same logic as the Transmission manager) Passwordless SSH authentication (if your using this with any remote hosts) A todo list on the desktop called todo (strange that…) ...

October 27, 2008 · Andrew Bolster

Getting Skype to work with weird webcams.

I’ll keep this as informative. If your webcam works in ubuntu (I’m running the 8.10 RC atm, fantastic btw) under cheese but not with skype, I did a bit of digging and cheese uses v4l2 (the ’new’ webcam api) which inherently screws up skype that uses v4l1. So, its easy enough since i came across this post and after chasing up my own system locations (this guy must be on 64bit, but i didnt ask) dead easy, instead of in the terminal going ...

October 25, 2008 · Andrew Bolster