05.05.07
Posted in Uncategorized, Gaming at 5:14 pm by moj
Getting the Ice Beam in Metroid: Zero mission when you’re supposed to takes too long. The room that contains the upgrade seals behind you when you enter with a green super missile door, so go get it just after you get the varia suit and are returning to Norfair.
So, just after getting the Power Grip, leave Norfair and go get Kraid! Oh wait, how do you get out of Norfair without freezing the rippers? This CAN be hard. You need to study the rippers and use some luck manipulation. Do the rippers bounce off the wall at exactly the same time? No good. Save and restart the game. Actually power off and get back to the title screen. That’s the luck manipulation. Zero Mission seems to grab its random seed early and use it consistently, so dying and starting up at your last save point will not alter any of the randomness of the game. So, manipulate this thing until the rippers bounce off the walls at different times. You want to wall jump up one side of the shaft. When the rippers bounce off at different times, one side will always work, but if you try jumping up the other side, you’ll be hitting the upper ripper before you can wall jump a second time. So then try the other side 
After you get the speed booster and the high jump, be sure to get the super missile in Brinstar.
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04.18.07
Posted in Gaming at 3:29 pm by moj
Trying to shave some time off your Metroid: Zero Mission speed run on the Game Boy Advance? Skip an entire boss!
Immediately after you get the high jump/jump ball in Norfair, return to Brinstar to get the Varia Suit as normal, but on the way be sure to get the only super missile tank in Brinstar. Refer to one of the excellent maps at http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/mzm/maps.htm if you need to.
With this super missle tank in hand, when you get to the green door just to the left after entering Ridley for the first time, you won’t need to backtrack for the bug.
Should save a few minutes, this guy usually seems to cost me a lot. The alternative is, of course, if you’ve gotten this super missle tank in Brinstar, just waste the bug quicker and get his tank too.
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09.20.06
Posted in Networking at 7:46 am by moj
I’m starting a really cool project that will bring another broadband offering to Sitka. It is radio-based, with non-line-of-sight transmission. From the base station I can expect a 12-15 mile radius to be provided with fast, always-on broadband, that doesn’t require a phone or cable tv line. This coverage radius will cover much of Sitka Sound and many of the islands present. It should reach Kruzof just fine, and across the Eastern Channel. Please follow along at http://www.sitkawireless.com/ and you might be able to help beta test the system!
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Posted in Software at 7:40 am by moj
Act now, get your own copy of Windows Vista RC1. They’re accepting new members now, and you can download a DVD ISO or request a DVD in the mail. The link is http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx
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09.07.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:26 am by moj
Check this site out in the next couple weeks if you want your own copy of Windows Vista to play with. Microsoft is releasing Release Candidate 1, and their Customer Preview Program will let you test it for them.
Windows Vista: Customer Preview Program–RC1
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08.28.06
Posted in Software at 9:59 am by moj
Free Nobeltec Charts!! That’s right, free charts for use with Nobeltec Visual Navigation Suite or Admiral! Their RNC products are standard BSB files, compatible with any version of the Nobeltec navigation software. Their ENC products are lovely up-to-date vector charts, comparable with Nobeltec’s $250 (?) ‘passport’ regions. These are compatible with Nobeltec’s products, but only versions including and later than version 8.1. So save yourself some money and read this guide to download and install vector AND raster charts for ALL of the United States
The website in question is http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/ .
Downloading Vector Charts
For vector charts, click on “Electonic Navigational Charts” (http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/MCD/enc/index.htm)
Click on “Download NOAA ENC®s” near the top of the page.
Read the User Agreement to make sure you will comply with it, and hit the gray button down the page that says “Proceed to NOAA ENC® Downloads”
At this point you may select charts to download by pointing and clicking on a map, by selecting the specific charts you need from a text list, or (my suggestion) you may download “All available ENCs”. There is a 326MB zip file there containing the entire set. Yes, all of the United States, including much of the Carribean and Hawaii as well! I have not noticed Nobeltec’s software to slow down with all these charts installed, so why not install them all?
Downloading Raster Charts
For raster charts, click on “Raster Navigational Charts” (http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/Index.htm)
Click on “Download NOAA RNCs™” near the top of the page.
Read the User Agreement to make sure you will comply with it, and hit the gray button down the page that says “Proceed to NOAA RNC™ (BSB) Downloads”
There is no way to download all of the raster BSB charts at once. That would just be too convenient. Unless you have a lot of patience at clicking checkboxes on the text list of charts, I recommend the graphical chart browser. You can add up to 100 charts at a time to your basket. I recommend beginning with, for example, Overview charts, and then General charts, etc., working down to Berthing charts last. This will help you keep track of which charts you’ve downloaded. There are just over 1,000 total! Note that once charts are in your basket you hit Place Order to proceed to the download page. Place Order, in this case, means nothing about money. It simply means that the chart server will package the selected charts up into a ZIP file for easy downloading. Each connection seems to be limited to around 40 Kilobytes per second, so download a few zip files at a time. I also recommend bookmarking the download links in case the download aborts. For this reason I ALSO recommend that you use a downloader that supports resuming.
Installing the Vector Charts
The vector charts unzip into a folder called ENC_ROOT, with each chart in its own subfolder. This is not a problem. Remember where the ENC_ROOT folder is.
Open Nobeltec up and go to the file menu. Select Chart Table. Go to the Install tab, and change the dropdown box to “NOAA ENC/S-57″ charts. Hit the Browse button and locate the ENC_ROOT folder. Hit Select All and then Import. This took over an hour on my friend’s test system. Close the chart table, make sure (V)ector charts are selected, not (R)aster.
Installing the Raster Charts
The raster charts unzip into a folder called BSB_ROOT with each chart in its own subfolder. This IS a problem as Nobeltec will only look inside the folder you point it to, and you don’t want to point it to each of the 1,000+ folders you may have downloaded in the zip files. The easy way to fix this in Windows: Open up the BSB_ROOT folder and hit the Search button near the top. If windows asks, you want to search All Files and Folders. Hit Enter or proceed with the search, which will find lots and lots of folders and files. When the search is complete, select everything in the list that is NOT a folder (click on the top file, hold shift, and click on the bottom file for example). Right click one of them and choose “Cut” with the left mouse button. Now hit the Back button to return to the BSB_ROOT folder. Right click in an empty area of the folder and hit Paste with the left mouse button. If you are told that files already exist with those names, hit Yes or Yes to All to overwrite them. They are just text files. Now, all your raster charts are in that one folder.
Open Nobeltec up and go to the file menu. Select Chart Table. Go to the Install tab, and change the dropdown box to “Raster” charts. Hit the Browse button and locate the BSB_ROOT folder. Hit Select All and then Install. This took no more than five minutes on my friend’s test system. Close the chart table, make sure (R)aster charts are selected, not (V)ector.
Go boating!
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08.25.06
Posted in Security, Malware at 10:18 am by moj
I followed the README online at http://nepenthes.mwcollect.org/documentation:readme — It is a very cumbersome document and kind of hard to follow due to both the complexities of nepenthes and the many different distributions it may be installed on. This is, therefore, a condensed version that details the steps I followed and ONLY the steps I followed to install this fine tool on Ubuntu. This document MAY work well with Debian too.
I installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake Server Edition. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/download, choose a mirror near you, and get “PC (Intel x86) server install CD”. Burn it, boot from it. Install it. Make sure your cdrom and hard drive are on separate ide cables ’cause this can take a while… I created a user account and set the time zone, but other than that, all options were set to their defaults. This distro finishes installation with NO ports open at all. Excellent!
We might, however, want an ssh server to be installed for administrative purposes.
sudo apt-get install ssh
for prerequisites (should all be typed on one line):
sudo apt-get install libcurl3-dev libmagic-dev libpcre3-dev libadns1-dev libpcap0.8-dev iptables-dev autoconf automake1.9 autotools-dev libtool build-essential patch
go somewhere predictable:
sudo chmod o+w /usr/src
cd /usr/src
mkdir nepenthes
cd nepenthes
To get Nepenthes I did the following:
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nepenthes/nepenthes-0.1.7.tar.bz2
tar xvjf nepenthes-0.1.7.tar.bz2
Download its patch (again, all on one line):
wget http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=137598\&atid=738445\&file_id=176367\&aid=147928 -O mydoom_bagle_endless_loop.patch
And patch it:
cd nepenthes-0.1.7
cat ../mydoom_bagle_endless_loop.patch | patch -p0
Then to configure and build it:
./configure –prefix=/opt/nepenthes
make
sudo make install
FYI, I actually typed ‘time make‘ to see how long the build process would take. The results on my Pentium 2 333MHz box w/ 128MB of ram were:
real 30m11.687s
The README noted above said it took one minute and twenty seconds to compile on a AMD64 3.5GHz system with 1GB of ram.
I liked how the configs were set up to begin with. Simple logging, feigning vulnerability to everything it can, and saving the samples to disk, but I also wanted reports emailed to me on the samples received, so I edited (with nano) nepenthes.conf:
nano /opt/nepenthes/etc/nepenthes/nepenthes.conf
Look for the line that contains:
// “submitnorman.so”, “submit-norman.conf”, “”
and remove the “//” from the beginning. Save and exit.
Now let’s run it:
sudo bin/nepenthes
Regarding detection: If you left your ssh server installed, it should be fairly obvious to an attacker that you are not a windows system. Hide that behind a knockd setup if you are worried about this, or remove the ssh server when it becomes unneeded and control the box from the console. I’m not sure if it’s the SSH server’s presence or not, but an nmap OS fingerprinting scan (sudo apt-get install nmap; sudo nmap -O localhost) of this box told me plain as day that it was linux. I’ll try the nmap scan again without the ssh server installed and see what I get.
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07.24.06
Posted in Security, Privacy, Software at 9:17 am by moj
Scatterchat is a Instant Messenger client that allows for end-to-end private, encrypted communication, without fear of eavesdropping.
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06.14.06
Posted in Gadgets, Software at 7:46 am by moj
Google Earth
Google Earth deserves a place on my tech lineup since they decided to make a version that runs natively in Linux. Yay! It runs super-smoothly and I don’t have to use Wine any more.
Here’s an aerial photo of the town I live in, Sitka:
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06.01.06
Posted in Gadgets at 3:09 pm by moj
As my first post, this is almost a necessity. Type with light!
Virtual Laser Keyboard Click for more info
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