Today is Earth Hour 2012.
Most lights in the office are shut off. I’m working the night, I usually do that whenever I work alone, but doing it with a thought today.
Changing the theme to require less energy to display (in theory, on CRT:s anyway 
).
Swedish Prepper skrev i måndags en artikel, och länkade till en föreläsning av Fredrik Härén om utvecklingen i världen. Jag såg den igår morse när jag kom hem från jobbet. Mycket tänkvärd, kolla in den. Siten verkar i övrigt ha en hel del intressant att läsa. Jag har tänkt börja skriva lite om survivalism och “preppande”, och/eller relaterade saker så småningom.
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Before you do anything else with the MikroTik RouterBOARD RB751G-2HnD, or any other device running RouterOS with a default configuration I guess, you should configure the device with some bare minumum security features.
The first thing to do is changing the password for the default user “admin”. When you are logged in, you can do this two ways (at least), either by setting it directly:
[admin@MikroTik] > user set admin password=somegoodpassword
Or by using the “password” utility to set the password interactively:
[admin@MikroTik] > password old password: ******** new password: ******** retype new password: ********
I bought a MikroTik RouterBOARD RB751G-2HnD a little while back. Tonight is the first time I power it up and connect to it, examining what it can do, and how to do it. From the outside it’s a nice looking little box, with a seemingly sturdy enough plastic casing with the size of 113x138x29mm. There are holes for passive cooling, some status LEDs, 5 RJ45 ports, and a USB 2.0 port. On the other side there is an antenna connector for an external MMCX antenna.
The labeling on my case is “RouterBOARD 751G”.
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The following video is from 1963, before, or in the middle of the creation of proper operating systems. It explains so fantastically well how computers work in general, and also important concepts that was later developed further, and which are the foundations of modern operating systems today.
This video should be shown at the first lecture of any operating system, or general “computer science” course. Enjoy.
.BASIC
NEW OR OLD--OLD
FILE NAME--HELLO.BA
READY
RUN
HELLO BA 5A
HELLO, MY NAME IS PETEY P. EIGHT.
WHAT’S YOUR NAME ?BEARDY
HI THERE BEARDY. ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF HERE
IN THIS WONDERFUL PLACE?YES
OH, I’M GLAD TO HEAR THAT BEARDY
SAY, BEARDY, I CAN SOLVE ALL KINDS OF PROBLEMS
EXCEPT THOSE DEALING WITH GREECE. WHAT KIND OF
PROBLEMS DO YOU HAVE (ANSWER SEX, HEALTH, MONEY,
OR JOB)?
Not even a DEC PDP-8 (simulated in SIMH) running OS/8 and a BASIC program, HELLO.BA, can help with Greece!
Guess if I dropped my jaw in surprise and amusement when I read that, when playing around with a simulated historic computer just now. If not even that can help to solve the problems of/with Greece, I guess they’re doomed!
On another note, SIMH is a great thing, the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer (from 1965) seems to have been a nice machine in its days, and OS/8 quite a decent OS for its time and environment. Expect another post on SIMH and simulating/emulating old computers shortly.
Cron is a job scheduler found in most Unix-like operating systems. “Chronos”, which is the Greek word for “time”, is where the name cron comes from. Cron makes it possible to schedule jobs, which can be commands, a series of commands, or scripts, that you want to run periodically. Common uses are backups, notifications, periodic checks on availability of services, networks, machines, or other things, and administration and maintenance tasks like rotating of logs, to mention a few. It is very general-purpose though, (like Unix tools is and should be) and can be used for whatever you can think of that needs to run periodically. Continue reading »
Unfortunately the third-party packages of Opera and Skype do not contain menu entries for the Debian menu system. Not very surprisingly one might think, but I just think it’s sloppy. If you, like me, like the Debian menu system and want Opera and Skype available in it, do the following to solve that, until the packagers have included the menu entry files themselves:
(Update: I noticed that Opera has apparently had a menu entry in its package before, but has now removed it. It’s explained in this post, but I still think that was a bad choice.)
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This Sunday’s video (I will from now on try to post atleast one video from this series, or another, each Sunday (even though it technically is Monday in this part of the world)) is about modems and bulletin boards (BBS:es). I also have to recommend the movie/series ”BBS: The Documentary“ which is very interesting and well made.
From high-tech trysts to selling black-market software, computers users are talking.
Guests: Ezra Shapiro, Byte Magazine; Rory O’Connor, InforWorld; Matthew McClure, The Well; Donald Ingrim, Alameda County DA; George Morrow, Morrow Computing
Products/Demos: CompuServe, Byte BBS, The Well
Let’s hear your thoughts and comments after watching the video, enjoy.
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Advanced Permalinks dashboard screenshot
Yesterday I decided to change the permalinks structure of this site. I wondered if WordPress had redirection built into to the core, but it seems it does not yet. But there are many plugins, like always, providing the needed functionlity. At first I looked at one called Redirection, but it was not really what I was after. If seems to do most things one could want regarding redirects and 404 logging, but I only wanted to simply redirect my old “YYYY/MM/DD/postname” structure to “/postname”. I then tried another plugin called Advanced Permalinks, which does exactly what I wanted. After installing it, its options/functionality is found under Settings->Permalinks->Migration in the WordPress administration dashboard.
This allows you to move from one permalink structure to another one, and have the old structure be forwarded to the new, for each post. I used the “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/” structure before, but I switched to the “/%postname%/” structure. Now, with the Advanced Permalinks plugin my possible old links in to my articles are forwarded properly.
The second plugin I installed and tried yesterday was Optimize DB, a simple plugin that just does what the name says, optimizes the MySQL database with one click. Seems to do its work well too. For my little site it wasn’t that much to optimize, but a few kilobytes atleast.
The third plugin I installed, and which you can see the effects of in this post, is Lightbox Plus, which handles the viewing of images fullsize in an overlay frame using javascript, instead of opening the image directly. Click on the image in this post and see.
Are you using any of these plugins and have anything to add? leave a comment.
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