Update Hell! Or where did my music go?

Recently an update to Microsoft Windows caused some PCs to bluescreen on reboot. The other day my Fedora Core 11 File server installed some updates and afterwards my music share was empty of all our music. Fortunately it was caused by a security update which stopped the soft links working until I added "wide links=yes" to the smb.conf (samba file server software configuration file).

The moral of the story? Sometimes shit happens and you have to clean it up.

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The Extended Attributes Are Inconsistent in Windows 8

I have upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and all was fine for about three hours and then I started to get an error when trying to run any application that required Administrator privileges. Half an hour of Googling led me to this blog post Case of the broken uac prompt This problem was caused by downloading themes. The final theme I had decided on included a new sound theme. Clearly at least one of the sounds did not play (the one for the UAC prompt!). Changing the sound theme (right click on desktop, choose "personalisation") to Windows Default sorted out the problem. Doing a clean install would also have fixed it but that would have been a drastic solution and as soon as I installed a new theme it may have happened again.

Beware vnc and upnp

My new linux box got hacked yesterday. I was careless. My ADSL router has upnp support and it is turned on by default. I enabled "Remote Desktop" in Linux - which is a version of vnc - and decided not to set a password as it would not be accessible from outside the local network. That was my first mistake. Last night I noticed a second connection to the linux box. Someone was using the browser and had connected to Western Union and was trying to install the flash plugin. They had not got very far as Fedora 14 does not install Flash on a 64bit system as it is still in beta so the install is not straightforward. I was able to disconnect this errant person before they got any further and I then disconnected the ADSL line from the modem to prevent another attempt and proceeded to diagnose what had happened. I checked the preferences for VNC and noticed the automatically configure the network check box had been selected and that it was reporting an external address could be ...

Which tablet?

I have been playing with a SmartQ V7 for the last month. As a toy to learn about Android and to get an idea about what I want in a tablet (or slate as they used to be known) it has been a useful tool. The first thing I have learnt is that a 5 to 7 inch screen is too small to read books comfortably unless care is taken to make the fonts look crisp. I tried out the eReader at Borders (a Kobo 6 inch device) and the books looked good. The letters and words were easy to read. However if you put a PDF document on the same device the experience is not as good unless the same specially optimised fonts are used. When you go to colour graphics such as for comics then the screen resolution becomes more inportant. The iPad with its larger screen and decent resolution will be a good choice for this sort of usage. It will still read books and it may not be as comfortable as an eInk screen and its battery life will be less - some eInk based readers can go weeks between charges - however the iPad stil...

Micks' Musings

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