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November 25, 2007

Recovering a dead external hard drive

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

November 15, 2007

HOWTO: using tabbed bookmarks in Safari and Firefox

A friend of mine was commenting today on a common scenario that a lot of us run into. When you're actively working on a project, you often times have several tabs open in your browser solely related to that work: some API documentation, a couple versions of a site you are working on, a google spreadsheet, a project resource/status page, and things of that sort.

When you change gears to work on something else, you might have another entirely different set of pages that you keep open all the time. If you juggle several projects at the same time, it can be a nuisance (not to mention a waste of time) to constantly be closing and opening all those windows throughout the day.

This isn't new news, but Firefox and Safari both have a really convenient--and often overooked--feature built into their tabbed browsing and bookmarking functionality that makes managing groups of commonly viewed documents really simple.

In Safari, just create and fill a folder in your bookmarks menu for each group of sites. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open in Tabs. Clicking that will open the entire folder's bookmarks at once, each in a tab of the active window.

Firefox makes it even easier. Just set up your tabs the way you normally would, then click on Bookmarks->Bookmark All Tabs. Firefox will create a new folder in your bookmarks menu and automatically import all of your current tabs to the folder. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open All in Tabs. This works just as you would expect, conveniently loading all of the documents in the bookmark subfolder.

November 9, 2007

HOWTO - Use rich fonts in your web design

Only Two Cross-Browser Web Fonts
If you want to choose fonts that will look similar across most modern browsers you have two choices: Georgia and Verdana. Yeah, there are a few other fonts, such as Times, Arial, Helvetica, etc., that are available on all platforms, but they tend to look really nice on one platform and really crappy in another. Or they look nice in both, but the kerning or the letter height will be different for the exact same font size.

The web is a boring, two-font world.

Here's the thing though. Georgia and Verdana are really decent screen fonts. For large blocks of body copy, they provide you with a very respectable serif and sans-serif font option. When it comes to titles or navigational elements, however, you often want something that will stand out from the rest of the copy on your page.

Fonts in GIFs: The Old Way
The typical solution is to create your titles and nav buttons in Photoshop, then cut GIF images for placement in the web page. This lets you use any font face you desire, ensures that things look exactly the same in all browsers, and takes an extraordinary amount of extra effort.

If you want to put slick looking titles on your blog posts, this method will probably have you in a big white coat with extra long sleeves before a month is up. Even worse—hey, some of us look good in white—if you're using images for navigation or titles, the text isn't selectable, it isn't search friendly, and it's probably a nuisance for people who use screen readers to navigate your site.

sIFR: The Better Way
sIFR is a little Flash/CSS/Javascript hack created by Shaun Inman and maintained by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. It uses Flash's font-embedding and rendering capabilities to place whatever typography you like in your site. What makes it different from the GIF method is that you develop your site with plain-ol' HTML, apply normal CSS classes, and if your browser supports Javascript and Flash, sIFR replaces the text on page-load with the desired typeface.

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
If Flash isn't installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you've designated as something you'd like "sIFRed".
Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

Essentially, you can have the titles on your site render in any font you like by just adding a few lines of Javascript to the page template. Search engines and screen readers will still see normal HTML text, you can still use traditional fonts in your CSS classes so that it degrades gracefully on unsupported browsers, and the other 95% of browsers out there will render your site exactly as you designed it, regardless of platform. Oh, and you can select your fancy text too.

Seriously? Flash can used to improve web design _and_ promote web standards, accessibility, and indexability... This has been available for a couple of years, but I'm still left scratching my head.

Links:
Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - Link
Download sIFR - Link
sIFR Wiki Documentation - Link
sIFR Example Page - Link

October 3, 2007

HOWTO - read RSS with a POP email client using FreePOPs

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

Read full story

September 29, 2007

Automate using your Mac on untrusted networks

When you're on an untrusted or unencrypted network, everything from what you browse to the email and IM messages you send can potentially be snooped by a third party. Sure, some sites use https and you can use ssh to connect to a remote server, but what if you want to jack in and enjoy the relative comfort of knowing _all_ of your applications are communicating over a secure channel?

For that, you need a secure proxy. By setting up a SOCKS proxy, you can have your applications route all of their network communications through a secure connection to a network you trust. Gina at Lifehacker put together a quick guide for setting this up, and once configured in OS X's System Preferences, most of the default apps like Safari will just start using your proxy and you're good to go.

A lot of your favorite applications--ie. Firefox and Adium--need to be manually configured to use the proxy, however, as they don't pull this information automatically from the system preferences. This is straightforward to do, but it means that every time you cruise over to the local coffee shop, you need to set up your proxy configuration in multiple places.

Albert Lee came up with a nice solution to this problem. An application profile manager called rooSwitch and some quick Actionscript is all you need to make a couple of command line scripts that will set up or tear down your proxy, as well as switching all of your application preferences.

If you save this script with a .command extension, then you can run it by double-clicking on the icon in the Finder like a regular application. When it runs, it will change the location, switch your profile, and start up the SSH tunnel. Enter your password and off you go!

I should mention that his script also introduced me to a useful mac command line utiliy called scselect. By typing scselect [locationname], you can switch your Mac's location straight from the command line.

Safer Surfing on Untrusted Networks (Mac Edition) - Link
How to configure an SSH SOCKS proxy @Lifehacker - Link
rooSwitch - Link

September 21, 2007

Use Compact Fluorescent Bulbs in a Ceiling Fan

I bought some GE bulbs that are supposed to work in ceiling fans, but they flicker and flash big time. I was able to get them to stop, oddly enough, by activating the dimmer and finding a sweet spot for the settings, but that was a hassle. So I did some trial and error tests and as you can see in the embedded video, 3 CF bulbs + 1 incandescent is the magic recipe.

I think the problem is in the fine print that says the bulbs aren't designed for dimmer switches; even though the lights are set on full power by default, I think there's something in there that interferes. So a future project might be to remove the dimmer from the fixture, get a new fixture, or find a CF bulb that supports dimmers and ceiling fans.

September 1, 2007

HOWTO - beat carnival games

I decided to brave the manure, mullets and *-on-a-stick this weekend and swung by the state fair. It seems like every time I go there are a couple people walking around all day with enormous stuffed animals, presumably won through some feat of basketball tossing or ring flinging. Enormous. Impossible to win enormous. Paid carnival employees walking around with giant stuffed bears tricking innocent folks into thinking it's actually possible to win enormous. Like, such as, the Iraq.

Anyone who's attempted the balloon dart throw or the coin toss knows how rigged these games are.

What if you knew a few tricks that could increase your odds? For those of you who'd think about climbing back on that Jacob's Ladder and giving it another try, here's a guide to beating a few of the more popular carnival games.

How To Beat Carnival Games - Link

August 5, 2007

Investment Spreadsheet 2.0

Meet Sue. She's straight out of school with 0 investments and a $36,000/year job. She's hardcore in her simple living, and has a roommate so she can save for an early retirement. She manages to live on a tiny $16,320/year take-home budget.

It's hard work, but she'll be a millionaire at 44, even without a major promotion. There's a good chance she could retire at 40, or keep working to drastically increase her retirement quality of life. If she keeps it up for about 30 years, at 50, she'll be making 140k just on investment income and she'll have a couple million in the bank (and growing toward major f.u. money).

Introducing FU Money Calculator 2.0
My trial run of an open-access wikisheet was a huge success. Thanks to the hundreds of you who have collaborated and experimented with the document in the last couple of days, I've put together an update that accounts for your pre-tax 401k contributions as well as a home loan. Special thanks to James G. McIlhargey, who contributed the loan debt model!

In the interest of proving a point, I've put together 3 example scenarios of very normal people becoming wealthy by being excessive in their frugality.

John Q. Hacker

John doesn't care about being rich. He just wants to retire ASAP so he can focus on his software and robot projects. He's a 27 year-old hacker and has been working hard for several years. He makes reasonable money, could make more, but enjoys a fun open source job working for a small company. He reads Hackszine daily, and decides to try taking an aggressive retirement path of 13 years, so that he can spend the rest of his life writing his own software, making robots, and tending to the garden in the house he just bought.

It's not easy and he has to make some sacrifices, but John is able to retire at 40. Any side jobs he decides to take on are just gravy. He's his own man.

Dick and Jane

Finally, meet Dick and Jane. They're college grads and have been out of school for a while. They have some savings, and a combined income of 80k. They have just taken out a loan on a modest home for 170k. After a few years, they have a baby and their income drops 25% due to childcare and one parent working part-time.

Before their kid is in college, they could start thinking about retiring.

Run Your Own Simulation
FU Money Calculator 2.0 is available both as a template that you can copy to your own private spreadsheet, or as a fully collaborative wikisheet for those of you who would like to contribute fixes, improvements or other simulations back to the Hackszine community. Thanks to Hackszine reader jrochelle, who tipped us off on how to make a Google Spreadsheet template.

FU Money 2.0 Template: run your own numbers in your own private copy - Link
FU Money 2.0 Wikisheet: help improve and update FU Money - Link

August 3, 2007

The FU Money Spreadsheet

If you're a Cryptonomicon fan, you might recall uber-hacker Randy Waterouse's business partner, Avi, who had a spreadsheet which tracked a particularly interesting value.

The subject heading of Avi's first message is: ``Guideline 1.''
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for ``fuck-you money.'' It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of ``fuck-you money'' at a glance.
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

There was a post recently at Lifehacker about the "crossover point," another magic number—albeit with a less colorful name—representing the point where your investment income exceeds your living expenses.

For all intents and purposes, the crossover point _is_ the attainment of FU money, as you could essentially quit your job on a whim, check out, and live off of your investments for the rest of your life. What's funny about the crossover point, is that you actually are in control of the major factor determining how long it will take you to acheive it.

In a simple model, you can think of your crossover horizon as being effected by 3 parameters: your income, the percentage of your income you invest, and the rate of return you get on your investments. Only one of these factors is really up to you to control to a large degree. Your percentage of investment is directly tied to your lifestyle, your ability to live frugally, and your willingness to skimp in the short term for a larger long term benefit.

The Hackszine FU Money Spreadsheet
To illustrate the point, I've created our own Hackszine version of Avi's FU spreadsheet with Google Docs.

It would probably mean skipping yearly computer updates, eating out a lot, and the purchase of all the latest doodads and gizmos, but if you can be happy only spending half of what you earn and investing the rest, a hacker earning 50k a year can actually pass the crossover point in about 10 years.

Given 18 years of living like a spartan college student, your investment income will actually have passed your salary, at which point you can start raising your standard of living a bit while watching your investments continue to grow exponentially.

What I find really amusing and counter-intuitive about all of this, is that an increase in salary doesn't necessarily put you any closer to the crossover point. Assuming you invest at the same percentage of your salary, you'll have increased your standard of living, but you'll also have increased the sum you'll need to accumulate before hitting the crossover point. Think about it: if you can be happy living simply, assuming you earn enough to live on 50%, you could actually retire in 10-20 years, no matter what age you are.

Run Your Own Numbers
Keep in mind, I haven't included the nitty gritty details like inflation and taxes, but you get the idea. I've given you all edit access to the spreadsheet (should this be called a wikisheet?), so you can run your own numbers, fix any glaring bugs, or even add your own FU money model to another sheet. Feel free to experiment with different scenarios and discuss this stuff in the comments.

References:
FU Money Calculator 1.0 - Link
Make your investment returns exceed your spending - Link
The "Crossover Point" - Link
Cryptonomicon - Link

July 19, 2007

Run Keynote with a Wiimote

A couple people wrote in today in response to my post about WiiRemote, the Windows Wiimote input device driver. More specifically, I've been reminded that I completely left the similarly capable DarwiinRemote for OS X out of the discussion. In all fairness, there was a driver roundup back in March that mentioned it, but what the heck - it's a cool app and deserves a little more attention.

So this hack goes out to all the Mac diehards who have an older machine sans Apple Remote. You folks don't need to upgrade your trusty system just to control Keynote or iTunes from a distance. Just pick up the cheap (relatively speaking) Wiimote and download DarwiinRemote.

When you start the program up, you'll need to hold down the 1 and 2 buttons on the Wiimote. This will let the device pair with the DarwiinRemote application, and you should start seeing the three lines on the graph go up and down as you move the device.

At this point, you're set. You can use the arrow keys on the Wiimote just like the arrow keys on your keyboard. The home button is wired up by default to hit apple-esc, which will launch Front Row. The A button is a left click by default, etc. etc.

You can change all these settings in the preferences menu. Most of them are set up fairly logically, I thought, but one nice feature is to set the 2 button to trigger the F9 key. This will help you quickly navigate between applications with your new airmouse.

This brings me to the cool part. Hit the 1 button and you can now control your mouse by tilting the Wiimote forward, back, and side to side. Your buddies with the fancy new macs and Apple Remotes can't do that, now, can they?

You can adjust the sensitivity in the preferences as well. It's a little goofy until you get the hang of it, but it gets easier with a little practice. Just call it payment for looking like a Wiimote wielding rockstar in your next otherwise booring business presentation.

References:
DarwiinRemote: Wiimote as a Mac input device - Link
WiinRemote: Wiimote as a Windows input device - Link
Control Your Applications With a Wiimote - Link

July 13, 2007

Scratch: exploratory programming language for kids

Developed by those nice folks at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a visual programming language for kids.

The development environment reminds me a little of the Lego Mindstorms programming interface, where you can drag blocks around and attach them to create procedures. Instead of hacking robots, though, kids can use Scratch to create games, animations, art, and whatever else they have an inclination to build.

As young people create projects in Scratch, they learn many of the 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future: thinking creatively, communicating clearly, analyzing systematically, using technologies fluently, collaborating effectively, designing iteratively, learning continuously.

After you've created something, your masterpiece can be posted to the Scratch website for other kids to play and comment on. More importantly, kids can download and learn from the source code, which they can then apply to their own projects.

Check it out - it's a social network for 8 year old open source hackers.

Scratch - Link
Deweybears' Scratch Donkey Kong - Link

June 12, 2007

Surf privately and anonymously with JanusVM

JanusVM is an open source VMware image that combines Ubuntu, Tor, dns-proxy-tor, Squid, Privoxy, and openvpn all into a convenient little package. Just load up the appliance in VMware and make a VPN connection to the virtual machine's IP. Once you've connected, all of your traffic (including DNS) will be localy encrypted and anonymized over Tor. This is incredibly useful for you road warriors and coffee shop surfers who don't trust the security of a public wifi network.

For windows machines, setup is incredibly easy. The JanusVM server has a network share with a .bat file on it that will automatically configure your VPN for you. Linux users have to set up the VPN connection manually but it's a fairly simple process. I've been trying to get this to work under the new VMware OS X client, but for some reason the network completely conks out as soon as I activate the VPN. If you get this working, let me know. I'll keep monkeying with it myself and let you know what I come up with.

JanusVM network security appliance for VMware - [via] Link

May 23, 2007

Increasing your car remote's range with your head

According to the completely authoritative sources of youtube and metacafe, you can extend the range of your car remote by holding the remote to your head. It's easy enough to test, and if it works it could come in handy for finding your car in the parking lot. So far, I've found two videos demonstrating the hack, and both use a slightly different method.

In one method you simply touch the remote to your noggin - Link.

In the other video, a more sophisticated open mouth, below the chin technique is used - Link.

I'm guessing that your head is acting as a crude directional antenna, but if you know more about how this works, let us know in the comments.

May 17, 2007

Use bread to remove crayon marks from the wall

Hackszine reader Keith Hanshaw sent in a tip for a safe way to remove scribble marks from your walls. Just grab a piece of bread, roll it into a tight ball, and start rubbing. It looks like it takes a bit of elbow grease, but it's a cheap and chemical free way to clean up after the kids - Link.

May 14, 2007

10 ways to improve your night vision

Sam Noyoun posted an Instructable with 10 ways to improve your night vision. Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson covered some of these techniques in Astronomy Hacks (including the pirate eye patch trick), but there are a few I hadn't heard of:

1. Protect your night vision

It takes approximately 30 minutes for the human eye to adapt to darkness. Protect your night vision: do not look directly at bright objects (for instance car headlights when driving).
...

10 ways to improve your natural night vision - Link

Robert Bruce Thompson, who has had a lot of experience looking at dim objects in dark places, says that only a red filter will work: green and blue won't do the trick. Robert also says that the elite forces and soviet special forces techniques don't work.

Related: