Saw a fun album cover generator on DadHacker just now. It takes random text from Wikipedia and a photo from Flickr and makes an album for you.

Here are my favourites so far:

techknight General flickr, generator, wikipedia

Recently I used QuickPWN to jailbreak my iPhone, and one of the great tools not available in the official App Store is iBlacklist. As other Canadians know, there’s been an unfortunate increase in telemarketing calls since the National Do Not Call List went into effect.

With iBlacklist, I just add a number to the blacklist, choose an action (auto-hang-up, straight-to-voicemail, etc), and I never have to receive an unwanted call or SMS again. The application keeps a log of what it has blocked:

That’s three unwanted calls in the last few days that I never even got a ring for! (According to 800notes.com, this particular caller purchased my information from a credit card company.)

techknight Gadgets, General blacklist, iphone, quickpwn, telemarketing

The combining I mentioned recently is now complete. The old URL (www.gameslifeandstuff.com) will now forward here. Unfortunately the comments were not able to be imported along with the posts that I chose to save, but from here on the data should be more portable.

I’ll work on a proper Wordpress theme soon.

techknight General admin

Instead of continuing to have two separate blogs, I’m going to rename and backfill this one with selected posts from gameslifeandstuff.com.

The RSS feed might become temporarily cluttered as a result.

techknight General admin

Just played with Microsoft Tag for the iPhone. It’s a system like QR codes, except that more information can be placed in a smaller space.
This tag will take you to techknight.com:

techknight General iphone

Today Matt and I built solar-powered theremin kits made by ClockworkRobot!

The instructions were pretty straightforward… Except for an undocumented film on the solar panel that was very difficult to remove.
There was also a fair amount of cursing involved but both kits finally made that distinctive heliophone sound.

techknight General photos, theremin

I got my subway buttons from Spacing the other day:

These are my “home stations” since moving back to Toronto in 1997.

techknight General photos, ttc

This is something I discovered a few months ago but never got around to writing about here. Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is a subscription service that allows one to read scanned versions of Marvel comic books online. The issues that one can read are never current with those on the shelves, but I suppose Marvel had to make some concessions to retailers.

It’s a decent enough service, but the Flash applet used for reading the books in your web browser is nigh unusable. So just after Christmas I started working on a Firefox extension that would allow me to read the books in an offline reader like CDisplay.

In researching how the Flash applet communicated with Marvel’s server, I discovered that although an authentication value was being passed with every request, it was being completely ignored. The upshot being that a request for an image file like http://www.marvel.com/dotcomics_issues/ASM093_1963/hi_res_col/02.jpg?stdi=ckfq35k8nfep915892v1nsift2dgr didn’t actually require the “stdi” variable to be passed, effectively making every comic open to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

I decided to inform Marvel, but I had no interest in wading through a phone tree trying to explain security vulnerabilities to receptionists. Unfortunately, Marvel’s contact information page is fairly useless unless you want to book Spider-Man for your next corporate function. So I contacted Rich Johnston of Lying In The Gutters, a long-running comic book rumour column.

In the January 7th, 2008 edition of LITG (under “Marvel Comics Unpaid”), Rich reported my findings and asked Marvel for comments. Apparently they never responded, but the security hole was fixed that very day. My guess is that Marvel was aware of the issue but hadn’t pushed a fix out to production yet. I know how that can go sometimes.

Anyway, the reason I got around to writing this is that I expect to have a proof-of-concept of my downloading utility later this week. It won’t be a Firefox extension as I’d originally hoped, but I will try to make it as convenient as possible.

techknight General comics, security

This week, when I noticed that 500GB drives had gone down to $99 at Canada Computers, I decided to upgrade my file server.

I use mdadm, a Linux-based software RAID solution, to handle the array. For the non-technical, this means that if I have four hard drives I can combine them into one big drive with a certain percentage of the space reserved for parity data. This parity data acts as a safety net: if any one of the hard drives die, the missing contents of that drive can be calculated from the data on the remaining drives. It’s magic!

When the two extra drives were installed, the array had to be grown to use them. The documentation for doing this is kind of scattered all over the place so I wanted to record the steps I went through in one place:

Notes

My raid device:
/dev/md0 (ext3 filesystem)
Existing drives in the array:
/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd, /dev/sde
Newly installed drives:
/dev/sdf, /dev/sdg

Add the two extra drives

mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdf
mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdg

Grow the array

mdadm –grow /dev/md0 –raid-devices=6

Increase the default speed of the growth (For me this meant the difference between taking 125 hours to complete and just 12 hours)

echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
echo 50000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

Watch and wait for the growth of the array to finish

watch cat /proc/mdstat

Do a filesystem check

e2fsck -f /dev/md0

Resize the filesystem to match the new array size

resize2fs /dev/md0

Isn’t Linux ridiculously simple? If you’re using /etc/mdadm.conf don’t forget to update it with the new value for num-devices.

techknight General mdadm, raid

Since September, writer Spider Robinson has been doing a wonderful weekly podcast called Spider on the Web. It started out with essays written for the HR MacMillan Space Centre and chapters of Variable Star, alternating each week. Now the podcast has expanded to include original material, op-ed columns from The Globe And Mail, and even music.

In some ways, SOTW feels more like a radio production than a podcast (I mean that in a nice way). It wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the CBC or WBAI and doesn’t have the aimless uh, “podcastyness” that so many other shows have. I encourage everyone to give it a try. And if you like it, use one of the handy monthly PayPal subscription options show your support.

I also want to share this lovely Robert Heinlein-designed greeting card that I received from Spider and his wife Jeanne a few weeks ago:

techknight General author, podcast

Ever since the Content-Aware Image Resizing presentation at SIGGRAPH 2007, there has been excitement around finally getting to play with the underlying software. Some developers have gone so far as to implement their own version of the techniques described in the paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

Yesterday, I saw a post on Digg about to one such implementation: the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin by Carlo Baldassi.

So I’ve installed The GIMP (an open source image editing software similar to Photoshop) and tried out Liquid Rescale on a some images from Flickr:

Original (Photo by Chuq Von Rospach)

80% width

50% width

45% width, 80% height

The plugin is in early stages, so there is currently no way to select areas of importance. That means people sometimes get mangled:

Original (Photo by Boltronic)

80% width

Even though they’ve hired Shai Avidan, Adobe hasn’t confirmed that the technique will make its way into Photoshop. However, it will be interesting to see third-party implementations grow and become more optimized.

techknight General gimp, photoshop, resize

I just watched a really interesting presentation of a technology called Seadragon that was acquired by Microsoft:

In the presentation, we find out that Seadragon can be used to process and visually work with many gigabytes of photographic images without any slowdown.

Further, the technology is used in Photosynth to spatially map thousands of photos into a navigable virtual space. In the picture above, the presenter shows an example of what happens when every photo on Flickr tagged “Notre Dame” is thrown at the Seadragon technology.

Anyone on a decent connection can try out Photosynth for themselves here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Be sure to check out the Grassi Lakes collection where you can see climbers ascend the Rocky Mountains:

techknight General photos

A crane truck seen on stilts this morning in the process of building the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the ROM:

techknight General photos

There is a condo being built on the site across the street from my apartment. However about 20 minutes ago the large construction crane collapsed in the wind:

More pictures here at Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/tech_knight/sets/72157600067652295/

techknight General photos

I visited the Microsoft Digital Ice House after work today. It was set up at the end of January to promote the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Outside, a group of people from Ubuntu Canada were giving out free Linux CDs and information pamphlets. Security watched them carefully to make sure that they didn’t actually set foot in Dundas Square, but it wasn’t possible to miss the cries of “Free operating system! Don’t buy Windows!”.

Click here for the full set of pictures (camera phone, sorry).

techknight General photos