Humorous Scam E-Mails

Posted on August 17, 2011 by sillyscientist

I usually totally ignore these 419 emails, they drop right into my Spam box – but this one was really quite funny, and oddly came from HK/China (they usually appear from Africa!).

Anyway, I was massively excited by a whole $17.3 – wow! And he has done the underground works – totally legal – awesome!

 

Attn:

 

I am contacting you as the senior manager in a bank in China and financial advisor and account officer to a private investor about fund deposit totaling $17.3. I assure that the transaction is 100% risk free and legal having done all the underground works.

 

As soon as I receive a response for your interest, I will send you the complete details of the successful completion of this transaction. Please contact on my private email below for further clarification.

Best regards,

 

Jan Yiun

Posted in Misc. | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Create a PDF of images (PNG, JPG, GIF etc) on Mac OS X with Preview

Posted on July 28, 2011 by sillyscientist

PDF document icon

I recently wanted to compile several images into a single PDF document – after searching for a relevant tool and discounting Word or iWork as too time consuming I hit upon the following very simple solution…

  1. Open one of the images you want to put into your document in Preview
  2. Now open the ‘Sidebar’ (if it isn’t already open)
  3. Drag the rest of the images into sidebar in the order you wish them to appear in your PDF document
  4. Select all the images in the sidebar (Cmd+A)
  5. Do ‘File -> Print’ and click the ‘Save as PDF’
  6. Follow the prompts to save the file and you should now have a PDF containing all your images!
Posted in Howto | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Installing gitorious on Ubuntu 10.04 HOWTO

Posted on December 12, 2010 by sillyscientist

I like using Git for my projects and I tend to host them outside of the computer I work on. I was finding the current way I was managing projects a bit cubersome so I decided to install Gitorious which gives you a nice web interface to manage it all!

Here are some instructions on installing Gitorious on your own Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. The instructions from gitorious were a little out of date/confusing so I thought I would show you what I did to get it working successfully. It is based upon instructions from both gitorious’ own instructions and some others they link to, plus some other digging/googling around [1], [2] and [3].

Updated: Added some fixes/clarifications from the comments below! (If you spot any errors do please tell me!)

A few notes on this tutorial: Firstly – This tutorial is approaching it’s first birthday which means (as with all things like this) it is getting somewhat outdated. With that in mind – approach with trepidation. I would read up on the relevant documentation from the developers yourself and make up your mind how helpful / relevant to you this whole process is.

Secondly – I have now moved to indefero (see http://www.indefero.net/open-source/) this is a lot easier to install and manage – offers all of the functionality that I have needed – which more than makes up for the lack of prettiness that gitorious had…

Continue reading →

Posted in Howto, Server Admin | Tagged , , | 37 Comments

rsync Backup / Dropbox style setup

Posted on December 8, 2010 by sillyscientist

Introduction
This tutoral/HOWTO is designed to help you setup an rsync back/dropbox style synced folder on the Netgear stora. The aim of this is to have a synced folder that will automatically back up to a remote location. The main reason that I wanted to do this was so that I could have a folder of documents backed up to my VPS and synced to my work machine and laptops.

It is similar in style to the ‘dropbox’ service. It is largely based on this HOWTO. It just covers a number of points for installing on the Stora!
This guide assumes you have a fully working package management system as described here – Installing a package manager and also assumes that you have SSH fully working.

Posted in Howto, Server Admin | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Useful Server Setup Tutorials

Posted on September 25, 2010 by sillyscientist

So I decided to take a leap and move VPS providers. Moving servers turns out to be hard work. Here is a list of useful stuff that I had to dig out again when setting up the new one –

As I find more of these I will update them as and when…

Posted in Howto, Server Admin | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Netgear Stora and Time Machine Setup

Posted on July 17, 2010 by sillyscientist

Netgear Stora NAS boxHaving just got a Netgear Stora I wanted to use it as my time machine backup (I have an old ibook G4 and 10.5 so some of this may or may not work for 10.6 – i haven’t tried it!). It turns out this isn’t a simple operation (despite ease of use supposedly being a big selling feature of the Stora…). Here are the steps I eventually worked my way through to get this working:
Continue reading →

Posted in Howto | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Open Workbench Logic Sniffer First Impressions

Posted on May 15, 2010 by sillyscientist

Open Workbench Logic Sniffer Board Photo A while ago I spotted the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer on Hackaday. A logic sniffer . analyser is a useful tool have around the place and at ~$50 with some flying leads to make it up to the free shipping threshold. Seeing as it arrived the other day I thought I would share my first impressions of it…

Continue reading →

Posted in Other Peoples Projects | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Microchip Development Kit & Programmer for Sale! (SOLD)

Posted on April 4, 2010 by sillyscientist

As I no longer have any need for them I dug out my EasydsPIC4 and Microchip ICD2 (In Circuit Debugger) the other day and they have made their way to ebay. You can get the EasydsPIC4 development board/kit here SOLD and the Microchip In Circuit Debugger (ICD) 2 here SOLD. More info after the break…

Continue reading →

Posted in For Sale | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Clock Faces

Posted on March 20, 2010 by sillyscientist

After spending a bit of time playing with Conky I wondered if there was a Windows option. Turns out there is – it is called Samurize and it comes with a functional GUI editor to make all your system monitors very easily. At the moment I have quite a fascination with the clock style meters. A picture of my configuration is below and you can get the clock meter configuration from here.

Samurize Clock facesThe bottom left circles show my hard disk usage (top circles) and my network rx/tx. The ones above that show CPU0 and CPU1 and also RAM usage.

The big one in the middle is a clock that ticks round with seconds, minutes, hours, day, month working from the outside in.

It’s quite a nice funky addition to my desktop. I like it!

Posted in Jiggery Pokery | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Google Powermeter

Posted on March 5, 2010 by sillyscientist

A post on hackaday alerted me to google power meter and them releasing their new powermeter API. This looks pretty cool- especially for my energy monitoring project!

Taking a look at the more detailed information it looks like Google have some pretty interesting requirements for devices:

  • Have to be able to do HTTPS (so need SSL)
  • Have to have a webserver on the device (for configuration etc)

SSL is going to be the biggest challenge if we choose to go down this route. Once we have SSL the rest should be pretty easy. The concern with the SSL is the size of the stack and whether one can be implemented and fitted on an XMOS core.

Thankfully Google provide some libraries for the power meter implementation of their API which might go a long way to providing an initial solution – again this is going to need to be ported to whichever TCP/IP stack is used and what SSL stack is used. The current C implementation is specifically tailored for Microchip PIC libraries… so to work I guess!!

Posted in Energy Monitoring, Projects | Leave a comment