December 2015 - List of Stuff

Back again with this month's List of Stuff. The list for this month is pretty short, so enjoy!


Japanese book store stocks only 1 book at a time for consumer experience:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/23/japanese-bookshop-stocks-only-one-book-at-a-time


NES graphics:
http://www.dustmop.io/blog/2015/04/28/nes-graphics-part-1/


You Should Make a Doom Level - Old school modding guide for Doom. Really concise:
http://eev.ee/blog/2015/12/19/you-should-make-a-doom-level-part-1/


Year-End Checklist for Financially Wise People:
http://www.financialsamurai.com/year-end-checklist-for-financially-wise-people/


Season 7 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is out. President Barack Obama is the first guest driving a 1963 Corvette:
http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/


There you have it. December 2015 List of Stuff. Please enjoy and have a safe and wonderful New Year. I wish you all the best of luck going into 2016!




~Michael

Breaking Into Linux: 28 Backspace Key Presses

It was just announced that there is a vulnerability with a lot of Linux systems. If you press the backspace key 28 times when the user login screen is up, the machine will launch a Grub rescue mode that gives full access to files/data. See more here.

There is a patch available for most systems, please see this for more:

http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-bypass.html#fix


Try it on your own system to see if you're apart of this and then patch/prepare accordingly.

Adding a Donation Button

Currently to the right of this post >>>>>> you will see a new donation button $$$!!!111. I debated on putting this on the blog, but in the end I chose to. I used to run ads on this blog, but I feel like that went against a lot of what I stand for when browsing the web. These ads can trick people and I don't feel like that is the best approach.

In the future, if anyone would like to make a donation because of my content they will now be able to do so easily. This money will be used to fund projects and buy equipment that will be featured in this very blog.

As always, I'm open to project ideas. If you would like to see certain content featured here (A guide, a review, or even a cat video) please let me know and I will try to come up with something.



~Michael

Is Your Printer Tracking You?

Check this out!

Bootable USB Software

Lots of computers don't come with DVD/CD drives these days. This can be frustrating when trying to run a program that you have on a disc.

I've used these 3 programs lately and they are great for making bootable USB drives with programs on them. Example: Copying Windows install disc onto a USB and making it bootable to reinstall Windows.

The programs are:

Rufus - https://rufus.akeo.ie/

xBoot - https://sites.google.com/site/shamurxboot/

Easy USB Creator Lite - https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/turn-iso-files-into-bootable-usbs/

Using these programs, you'll get by now having a physical drive just fine.

Linux: Mounting an NTFS Drive for Read/Write Access

Recently, trying to work on a client's computer using the Ultimate Boot CD. I came to the situation where I could mount the Window's drive that I was trying to work on  and I was able to see the files, but it was read-only. This meant that I could not really manipulate that data.

The trick was mounting it as read/write. We will use NTFS-3G to do so which was installed already with the Ultimate Boot CD.

Open a terminal as root and type in the following two lines:

mkdir /mnt/ntfs      

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda5/mnt/ntfs/       (Where sda5 is the name of the drive you want to use)


The first line above creates the mount point and the second line carries out the work of mounting the drive with read/write access.

And just like that, read/write access is now available on the drive.