No Fixed Point

Today I spent the better part of five hours trying to get a Kyocera KM-C2520 KX network printer to work. It was an arduous, and ultimately futile task, and has only served to re-enforce my animosity towards PC printers.

That’s not to say that all printers are bad. Some work—out of the box even. But as far as I can see, their numbers are rare, especially if you want to do anything more complex than plug the printer into a single PC.

Nor am I a stranger to printers that won’t work. I use Linux as my primary system, and know all to well that printing is a black art at the best of times. Even when the printer manufacturer says their printer will work with Linux (I’m looking squarely at you, Brother) more often than not, I’ve found that the printer will simply not print. Sure, the printer is visible. And I can get status reports from it. But print to it? Oh no, not on your life. Only the select few can print to it.

Today’s ordeal revolved around a printer networked to a small group of Windows 7 machines (crappy printing support isn’t just for Linux, kids). I tried so many work-arounds, and kludges, and fixes, that they swirl about in my brain, slowly growing into a hideous monstrosity. But despite all my efforts, the printer would not print. Sure, Windows could see the printer over the network, and select the appropriate drivers to install. But actually printing was an entirely separate matter. Something I could not do, much to my dismay.

I tried altering the network settings, and re-installing the printer drivers (more times than I can count, at present), and swapping cables, and ports—but none of it mattered, there was never any change. The printer remained a greyed-out ghost, taunting me. Mocking my technical impotence.

I am sure there is a simple explanation, and fix, for this particular problem, but it has crystalised my opinion of printers as evil beasts from the depths of hell, that will only work for those trained in the black arts. And that Windows has equally crappy printer support as Linux.

And now, I am going to find a printer, and beat it until it oozes toner.

Death to all printers!

I do not like running as the administrator on any machine unless absolutely necessary. And I like others running as administrator on machines I maintain even less. And seeing anyone run as the Administrator on a Windows machine makes me weep tears of blood.

As such, I try to make it policy to move the default accounts that users create when they first start using Windows 7, from being an Administrator, to being a standard user. As this removes the various Administrator powers from the users realm, and as I like to have an Administrator account to log in to, I’ve taken to enabling the hidden Administrator account.

To do so, open a command prompt in Administrator mode, and run:

net user administrator /active:yes

Once done, be sure to create a password, as this account should be accessible to as few people as possible.

Next, for the sake of ease-of-use for the user, I set up the machine to log in automatically to the user’s account.

In the run box, type: netplwiz

This will open the Advanced User Accounts window Find the ‘Users’ tab, select the user you want to log in to automatically, un-check the box for ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’, and apply the changes.

A window will appear that should contain the name of the desired user, and two places to input that user’s password. Do so, and click ‘OK’. The deed is done.

Today I was playing around with my Windows XP partition, (following my own security advice), and set the passwords for both the default Administrator account and my user account before I had properly set the keyboard layout in the Administrator (I use a very unique layout). Not realising this at the time, I rebooted my machine, and was promptly denied access (as I had also forgot to set the password for the auto-login feature–clearly I was not focused on the task at hand…). Fortunately, my primary partition has Arch Linux installed, so I wasn’t locked out of the XP file system, and I could reset the passwords from Linux.

You will need a mount point for the Windows file system. I have mine set to load by default to:
/winxp

You will also need to have chntpw installed (or a live CD with said programme included on it).

Once the XP file system is mounted, in a terminal, drill down to where the passwords are stored. My directory path looked like this:
/winxp/WINDOWS/system32/config/

Once there, run the following at the command prompt:
chntpw -u Administrator SAM

Choose ’1′, and be sure to save the changes.

The Administrator password has now been cleared, and you can reset it again from within Windows (or from chntpw if you so choose). This process also works for other users. Just be sure to substitute the proper account name for Administrator.

In the past week, I’ve had to remove two trojans from two separate Windows PC’s; one running XP, the other running Windows 7, and both set up in the default Windows fashion. The technically inclined know what I mean: primary user operating as Administrator (or with Administrator privileges), thus able to install anything from anywhere to any place on the machine.

Having had to undo the damage that resulted from this poor choice of setup, I thought I would highlight some key actions to take to help secure any Windows NT-based PC (so 2000 and up).

1. Create a limited user account, and use it! This is the account you should be using for daily tasks (email, web browsing, games, work, etc.). Do NOT operate as the Administrator for such tasks.
2. Use the Administrator mode sparingly, such as for globally installing software, or performing necessary system maintenance.
3. Make sure all the user accounts on your machine have passwords (and make each one unique).
4. Install anti-virus and anti-spyware software. They don’t need to run in the background continuously (if you know what you’re doing), but be sure to keep them up to date, and run them routinely (perhaps once a week at shutdown). I’m partial to:
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• AVG
• Spybot Search and Destroy
5. If none of this makes sense to you, then ask someone you know who is computer literate to help you. They will be impressed that you gave any thought at all to computer security. But be sure to have cake and/or cookies available for them (they will appreciate knowing that you don’t take their skills for granted).

Do these things, and your computer will be at significantly less risk of contracting a virus, trojan, or other malicious programme.

…Y F d @ H:i

At long last, I have finally managed to get the date and time to display as I want them to.

‘Surely it could not have been that hard,‘ you say. ‘After all there, there is a function for changing how the date and time are formatted under Settings –> General.’

That is true, and I tried using that very function. But nothing changed. It turned out that I had to manually edit the various templates so that the date would display as I wanted it, modifying the _time entries.

No–it is not a difficult process, just a tad on the inconvenient side.

‘So why mention it at all?‘

Well–uh, to make sure I do not forget what I did, I suppose.

‘Ah, well then… I’ll leave you to it…‘

Almost a year since I last played World of Warcraft, I have received yet another plea from to come back to the lands of Azeroth, and engage in e-combat combat with the e-multitudes. And once again, I shrug with indifference, and delete the email. I have done my time in Azeroth’s dungeons, and have no inclination to return.

My time playing WoW was always done as a means of engaging with a small group of particular people, a service that is no longer required. We have all found other, and better means of maintaining contact (Mario-cart and a speaker-phone are a fantastic combination). My friends still retain found memories of their early adventures in the WoW-verse, having spent several years exploring, and questing together. But I came late to the party, and only spent about a year playing the game. I remember very little of the experience except for the group raids that we would do, the power-levelling they would help me through, and the fact that Blizzard kept wanting money every three months (once a month, towards the end of my playing).

I look back fondly on the first two of the list, content in the knowledge that we have moved on to better things (to my mind), and I miss the last item of the list not at all.

Blizzard, you are getting no more of my money. Please find another e-corner to pimp your wares on please. Your bringing down my digital property values.

As a child, I remember many a happy hour spent pouring over a random volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica that my family had (and still has). I was particularly interested in the maps of long dead countries, my favourite being Austria-Hungary (I have always found that country particularly intriguing and mysterious). I then got a kick out of visiting both my maternal and paternal grand-parents, and seeing what their EB’s contained, and how the encyclopædia had changed its form through the years.

But that is coming to an end. After the 2010 edition, there will be no further print edition of the Britannica.

I am saddened by this, a sentiment partially brought on by nostalgia, but largely inspired by the realisation that my (theoretical) children will never have the same simple pleasure (and opportunity) that I had growing up.

Certainly, they will have the latest, greatest technical gadget that will put information at their fingertips. But there will be no tactile connection, no flipping through pages, and significantly less random discovery of obscure articles and information.

Sure, the latter of these things (and most important, in my mind) can definitely be done with Wikipedia. But it just isn’t the same. And until such perusal can be done regardless of the state of the power grid, and without concern for the duration of a power supply, it never will be.

Hail and farewell EB print edition.

So many posts deleted. So much frivolous idiocy cast into the pit whence it came. So many ignoble foot soldiers cut down before ever seeing the light of the ‘Pending’ list. ‘How many?’ you ask. Well, let us take a look.

Current to-date attempts to post by banned spam IP addresses:

33 255

Glorious!

The wind today blows with such ferocity! I had to lean into it to make any headway, and when I turned around, it was all I could do to keep from being blown forward onto my face.

By the end of my walk,  my lips were so numb from the constant battering, I could barely speak. And my ears, nose, and cheeks barely registered when I touched them.

Still, it was an exhilarating foray.

First Attempts

Does anyone remember the VHS cassette; those bulky rectangles of wound magnetic tape that used to entertain friends and family, from the seventies to about 2002? I do. It’s hard not to when you have 200 of the damned things hanging around–like I–serving as a constant reminder that the format is dead (for all intents and purposes), and the content is slowly degrading.

It was (primarily) because of the latter fact that I decided to set about archiving all of the videos that had been accumulated over the years. Thus, I took a Panasonic DMR-ES25 DVD player/recorder, and hooked it up to a Sony SLV-750HF VHS set, and a TV (so that the recording process could be periodically verified), all using RCA cables, popped a VHS tape in the VCR, a DVD +R in the DVD recorder (formatting required), and hit play in the VCR. After fast-forwarding through the previews and such, I hit the record button on the DVD player and, well, nothing happened.

Well, not exactly nothing. I did get a NoREC message on the display, and a box appeared on the TV that informed me that the tape was copy-protected.

Thus stymied, I returned to the internet with the symptoms of this electronic problem, and after a few minutes of searching, reading, and clicking, I came upon a diagnosis: Macrovision.

Macrovision is a copy-protection scheme (and the name of the company that makes copy-protection schemes) used in some VHS tapes since about 1985, and most all VHS tapes since 1997. Alliance, Disney, Fox, and Columbia-TriStar used macrovision on just about everything. Warner Brothers and MGM used it only on a very few number of videos. Paramount used it occasionally prior to 1997, but from 1997 onwards, they used it in everything.

The scheme is recorded in the “header” and/or “footer” of the video (the portion of the video image that is hidden from sight on a 4:3 CRT TV–I’m not sure about LCD, or plasma TVs), where the closed captioning can also be found. I was initially dismayed by this discovery, but rather than panic, I decided to see what else I could find out about Macrovision, and whether something could be done about it. The answer turned out to be yes, something could be done about it.

Dealing With Macrovision

There are a variety of ways to deal with Macrovision copy-protection on VHS tapes.

1. Use a VCR made before 1985. Such VCRs’ do not recognise macrovision. Regrettably, I did not have access to such a VCR.
2. Use an early model DVD recorder on which you can turn off macrovision. As with a pre-1985 VCR, I did not have access to an early model DVD player.
3. Find a firmware hack for your DVD player that will allow you to turn macrovision on and off.
4. If you have the service manual, open the VCR up, find the portion of the circuit-board that handles macrovision, and disable it. I did not have the manual, and even if I did, I was unlikely to try the operation as the VCR was not mine to tamper with (and potentially render unusable).
5. Use a filter that strips out the content (including things such as closed-captioning) from the unseen header and footer

Thus, I set about recording to DVD those videos that I could, and began searching for a filter. I found a few filters on the internet, available for purchase, but being a mildly paranoid type, I decided to see if I could find one locally. After phoning a dozen stores, some from big chains, others small, local places, I came away empty handed, and thus set about trying to determine which company looked legitimate enough to use. A couple days later, I settled on a company based on the North American continent, and ordered the filter, and am pleased to say, it has done an admirable job.

Filters

The devices that can be used to remove the macrovision protection scheme are referred to by various names such as “video filter”, “video stabiliser”, or on forums “macrovision filter”. A couple of the ones I stumbled across are listed below:

• Ambery Digital Video Stabilizer
• Dimax Grex
• Qualitek Digital Video Stabilizer

(For the curious, I went with the first one.)

Or, if you want to try and make your own filter, you could try the guides offered below. A more than rudimentary knowledge of electronics is recommended.

• Macrovision FAQ: 5.2) How to eliminate
• Video Stabilizer/MacroVision Removal

Other help can be found at:

• Macrovision FAQ Index V1.2
• VIDEOHelp.com