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Paul's Time Sink

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Harmony Remote and Logitech

Paul Westbrook | 27 July, 2004 19:50

Harmony RemoteThe harmony remote is the best universal remote that I have used. It has hard buttons, so it is a lot easier to use than the Philips Pronto remotes (which I have owned also). You connect it to your computer, and use their web based interface to program it. It work great with Mac OS X

It looks like Harmony was bought by Logitech. When you go to the harmony web site at http://www.harmonyremote.com, the browser gets redirected to http://www.logitech.com/harmony.

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Motorola V3

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2004 21:13

Motorola V3
Engaget has a post on this great phone. It is just 14mm thick, with a case made of titanium. It has a builtin camera phone, Bluetooth, a 4096 color external LCD, and a 26,000 color main display.

If this works with Apple's iSync, this will be the best phone that I have seend

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Touch Screen Smart Watch

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2004 20:56

Smart watchesThe Tissot High T Touch Screen watch is a very cool watch. It receives personal content such as appointment reminders, or Instant Messages. It has a touch screen to interact with the interface. It costs about $725, and that includes 6 months of service.

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Updating modified php install

Paul Westbrook | 25 July, 2004 11:29

There is a new update to php. yum offered to install the update for me, but I couldn't do it since I modified my php installation. I compiled php with mcrypt, so I could use encryption with Maia Mailguard

These are the steps that I use to update php

  1. Download the source rpm from Red Hat
  2. rpm -Uvh php-*.src.rpm
  3. cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
  4. edit php.spec to include "--with-mcrypt "
  5. rpmbuild -ba php.spec
  6. cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386
  7. rpm -Uvh php*.rpm
  8. restart apache
 (More)

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google and atom.xml

Paul Westbrook | 21 July, 2004 21:38

I have been noticing that Google has been trying to crawl a file named atom.xml, even though I don't have any links to this url.

64.68.84.9 - - [21/Jul/2004:23:01:17 -0700] "GET /atom.xml HTTP/1.0" 404 1085 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

I believe that atom is Google's replacement for rss.

Since plog has the atom feed at /rss.php?blogId=2&profile=atom, I wrote a rewrite rule so my atom feed will be crawled by Google.


RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/atom.xml$ /rss.php?blogId=2&profile=atom [L,R]



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New domain

Paul Westbrook | 21 July, 2004 19:24

I just registered a domain for this blog. I registered paulstimesink.com from Aplus.net, for only $5.95. The main reason that I wanted to do this is to add search to the blog. plog, doesn't have a search functionality (which I think is pretty bad), so I am going to add a google search, since it can be set up to limit results to a certain domain.

I also have created a mod_rewrite rule to automatically forward traffic from www.westbrooks.org/blog to the new domain.

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Motorola V710

Paul Westbrook | 20 July, 2004 19:39

V710Engadget has a post on the next phone that I want get. The Motorola V710 has a 1 megapixel camera phone, as well as BlueTooth. It looks like Verizon will be locking down the phone to only work with their software. If this will work with Apple's iSync, I will get one of these.

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Motorola Bluetooth adapter

Paul Westbrook | 16 July, 2004 19:35

Motorola Bluetooth AdapterEngadget has a post on Motorola's bluetooth adapter. It adds Bluetooth functionality to Motorola cell phones that have a data port. The prices is pretty good, as it is only $39.99.

I will buy one of these for my T720, if I can verify that when using the bluetooth adapter it works with iSync. The phone currently work with iSync with the USB data cable. Also, if I bought it, I would think about buying the BlueTooth Car Kit. It does look like the car kit will only work with the V600 and the Timeport 270c. Maybe iw will work with my T720.

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tinyurl.com

Paul Westbrook | 15 July, 2004 19:58

TinyURL.com is a very cool but very simple service. It will convert long urls to short ones. For example it converts:

http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypMap.py?Pyt=Typ&tuid=12005015&ck=1714580355&tab
=B2C&ycat=7737307&city=Campbell&state=CA&zip=95008-6739&uzip=95008&
country=us&msa=7400&cs=9&ed=ikFr96160SzGYWtylOsVBXZXaPZpM4dNUHjWP
jcMNiyWiuaGa1E_xJbAINlV3LyR4ThZXFhM&stat=:pos:0:regular:regT:1:fbT:19

to:

http://tinyurl.com/475rl

Right now the service is free, but I could see themputting ads into it. For example, when clicking on one of the tinyurl.com links, it could put the linked content into a frame, with ads around it.

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cyrus imap ssl

Paul Westbrook | 15 July, 2004 19:34

Today, the certificate for my imap server expired, so I had to generate a new one. The problem was that I couldn't remember how I generated it the first time. I looked online to find some instructions, and I found these

openssl req -new -nodes -out req.pem -keyout key.pem
openssl rsa -in key.pem -out new.key.pem
openssl x509 -in req.pem -out ca-cert -req
-signkey new.key.pem -days 999

mkdir /var/imap

cp new.key.pem /var/imap/server.pem
rm new.key.pem
cat ca-cert >> /var/imap/server.pem

chown cyrus:mail /var/imap/server.pem
chmod 600 /var/imap/server.pem # Your key should be protected

echo tls_ca_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
echo tls_cert_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
echo tls_key_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf




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Realtime black lists

Paul Westbrook | 14 July, 2004 20:15

Trying to prevent the denial of service and spam attacks that I was getting, I looked into setting up some real time black lists for Postfix. I tried relays.ordb.org and xbl.spamhaus.org. ORDB.org is a black list that only lists verified open relays. The Spamhaus Project has two black lists

  1. xbl.spamhaus.org lists machines that have illegal 3rd party exploits, like proxies, worms and trojan exploits.
  2. sbl.spamhaus.org lists machines that have been verified UBE sources
I ended up not using xbl.spamhaus.org, since it didn't seem to be catching the zombie machines that were sending email to me. Also in some ways, I don't want to block spam, since I want my Bayesian filters to be as accurate as possible, so I want to scan all of the spam that I am sent.

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Date for Alpine iPod device

Paul Westbrook | 14 July, 2004 19:54

Alpine KCA-420iA while ago I wrote a post about Alpine's iPod interface. Gizmodo posted an article stating that Alpine has announced their availibility date for the KCA-420i. It will be avalable in late September.

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Belkin PureAV

Paul Westbrook | 14 July, 2004 19:35

Belkin PureAVGizmodo had a post about a new digital audio receiver. Belkin is coming out with their PureAV Wireless Digital Audio Receiver at the end of this year. It look like this will be pretty cheap at $130. It has 802.11b and it will stream mp3s from the local network. Also it will play internet radio without a computer being on.

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mail dictionary attacks

Paul Westbrook | 12 July, 2004 18:25

It looks like one of the domains that I administer is being dictionary attacked for spam. It looks like it is adistributed attack, where all of the requests are coming from what appears to be zombie machines. The thing that doesn't seem all that smart about the attack is that they are using a first name + last name in the user name.
 (More)

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Amazing Watch

Paul Westbrook | 11 July, 2004 19:47

Tag Heuer Monaco V4I just saw this Tag Heuer Monoco V4 watch mentioned in the latest Popular Science. This is a beautiful watch is driven by an interesting mechanism. It uses 13 half-millimeter-wide synthetic belts. They drive metal wheels that rotate on microball races. The watch is powered as you move your wrist. It looks like it will keep a charge for up to 50 hours when the watch is not being worn.

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