Author Archives: The Old Wolf

My New Western Digital Passport Ultra: Delightful hardware, hideous software

Posted on by The Old Wolf

shopping

About the size of a pack of poker cards. Lightweight and functional, stores 1 Terabyte of data; I can back up my entire hard drive and that of my wife onto one little box.

Unfortunately, the WD SmartWare (which should be called something more obscene and less family-friendly) is the abomination of desolation.

The thing refuses to back up my large files, despite upgrading to the latest version (2.4.6); worse than that, there are processes running in the background – specifically WDBackupEngine.exe, but others as well – that will not die, can’t be killed, and consume so many resources that my greased-lightning core i7 box slows down to the speed of London traffic.

resources from WD

The WD forums are full of complaints about this issue going back to 2011. Western Digital has not provided a workable solution, and the fact that their latest software has not solved the issue points to the fact that they are either insouciant or incompetent.

I understand the need for background monitoring for a system that backs up changes on the fly and provides a dynamic mirror of the source disk or portions thereof, but the process should not bring the rest of the system to a screeching halt.

I have reluctantly removed WDSmartWare from my system and will have to use the device as a manual backup, which is still a lot better than having to use multiple devices. Again, I like the box itself, but the management software has no business existing.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Wizards in Winter: Taking it to the next level

Posted on by The Old Wolf

In 2005, Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio electician, decorated his home and synchronized it to the music “Wizards in Winter” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. A higher-quality version of the original video that was circulated by email can be seen below.

Not to be outdone, a neighborhood in Yucaipa, Calif. decided to one-up the Joneses, as it were, and got everyone on an entire block to come up with a similar synchronization. They recorded the result with a drone; it’s breathtaking, to say the least.

Paul Ó Neill, the creator of TSO, was moved. He told Billboard,  “We were incredibly honored and flattered when we first saw a house in Mason, Ohio, sync their lights to ‘Wizards In Winter,’ but to see a whole community band together and do something like this is beyond words. We only hope they don’t send us the electric bill!”

Here’s the neighborhood video:

This is one of my favorite pieces of music, largely as a result of the original video; I was delighted to see this evolution.

Probably not good for epileptics, though.

The Old Wolf has spoken.,

Attn;Beneficiary!

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The Lads from Lagos never seem to give up. What saddens me is that as long as these letters keep going out, it means that somewhere people are falling victim to this fraud.

38_021022_nigerianemailmain.jpg.CROP.original-original

From: “MR.JOHN FRANK” <office_moneygram@yahoo.com>

Subject: WELCOME TO WESTERN UNION HEAD OFFIC

WELCOME TO WESTERN UNION HEAD OFFICE
BENIN REPUBLIC COTONOU
MR.JOHN FRANK

Attn;Beneficiary,Information reaching us from our corporate headquarters now, states that you only have 72hours to effect payment for the activation of your MTCN to enable you cash up your first $5,000.00 from your total (fund us$4,800,000,00,) since you are finding it difficult to make this payment we have decided that you are to go ahead and pay whatever you have from $105US above for the activation fee since you are not able to come up with the required sum, time is of the essence here.

You are to pay what ever you have from $105US above for the activation fee we will activate your MTCN upon receipt of this payment.here is the payment for the $5,000 usd but you can not pick it up because the chairman of the western union say that before you pick that money you must pay the any amount you have from $105US above OK

Here is the Senders Information;
Sender Name, MIKE
sender last name, OGUEJI
MTCN:):759054421
Amount Sent $5000.00

Please be inform that we just give you Nine Numbers for now and the remaining one number will be giving to you as soon as you send the activation fee of $105 usd today I will give you the complete number to pick up your fest payment of $5,000.00 uas as well,

Be informed that you will have to pay the balance sum of your activation upon cashing up of your first 5,000.00 usd, also i am using this medium to inform you that failure to pay the balance sum will leave us with no option but to deactivate your mtcn of which you will and can never cash up the balance sum  I will wait to hear back from you in regard to this massage so that I will give you the information that you will use to send the $105 usd.

You are advice to get back as soon as you receive this massage so that we will furnish you with the information needed to send the activation fee of $105 usd to able us release your first payment to you as promise kindly give urgent attention we are waiting

MR.JOHN FRANK
EMAIL: (westernunion132@qq.com)
WESTERN UNION HEAD OFFICE BENIN
REPUBLIC COTONOU OPERATION MANAGER)

For what it’s worth, qq.com is a Chinese hosting outfit. For the love of Eudora Welty and the Concert of the Galaxy, never respond to emails of this nature.

☛ NO ONE IN AFRICA HAS MONEY FOR YOU. THEY ONLY WANT YOURS, AND THEY WILL HAPPILY TAKE AS MUCH AS YOU ARE WILLING TO SEND THEM. ☚

Please protect your loved ones. Make sure they understand this.

DrudgeSirenSmall NEVER SEND MONEY BY WESTERN UNION, MONEY GRAM, GREEN DOT MONEYPAK, OR ANY OTHER METHOD TO SOMEONE YOU DO NOT KNOW. YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. DrudgeSirenSmall

Phishing: My Yahoo Account has “expired.”

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Phishing, as I have mentioned numerous times elsewhere, is rampant. In a world with over 7 billion people, it’s hard to say how many electronic bad guys there are out there, but even if its a relatively small number, the nature of the web gives the bad actors a lot more access to a global pool of potential victims than your average con-man enjoyed in pre-internet days.

This email arrived this morning:

yahoo1

Two things:

  1. YahooMail is always free. There’s a no-ad service you can pay for, but the drones are counting on the fact that grandma or grandpa (or any other potential sucker) won’t know that.
    77
    A significant portion of internet users are terribly un-technical, and find computers are to be feared; if they use them at all, it’s on a cookbook level. “If you see it on the internet, it has to be true” is sadly a part of far too many people’s psyches, hence many people get taken advantage of in myriad ways.
  2. See that little yellow circle by the link? If you hover over it with your mouse, you’ll get a popup indicating how any particular website has been rated by users for trustworthiness and child safety.Yahoo2That’s a function of a browser extension called “WOT” (Web of Trust) that I have mentioned elsewhere. It’s invaluable for stopping problems before they start. The circles displayed are green, yellow, or red, and you can follow the “Click to view details” link for more information, user reviews, or to rate a site yourself if you have a (free) account.It’s not perfect by any means – WOT can be subject to shill reviews and malicious comments from unethical competitors and the like, but like anything else on the internet, it’s part of a body of evidence and I find it extremely useful as a canary in the mine.  In this case, the top-level domain “twomini.com” is rated very poorly on both counts, with the one user-posted review stating “Domainhoster hosting sites used for fraud, scam and Accountphishing.” Which is certainly true in this case.

If you hover over the “go here” link, your browser indicates that you are being directed to “http://bit.ly/10VyM2I&#8221; which is most definitely NOT a Yahoo address. It’s a shortened link which expands to:

DrudgeSirenSmallhttp://infoskale.twomini.com/obyno/Connect%26True%3DUser1%25%3DXclusiv-
3D%23Anonymous7Dole%3DReason%26Upgrade1%25continue%25True4.php DrudgeSirenSmall

Web addresses like that are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but they are not what you would expect to see when you visit a major site like Yahoo, or Comcast, or your financial institution. Those little drudge lights up there point out that this kind of URL is a red flag for suspicious activity, and to proceed with extreme caution.

If the victim unwisely clicks on the link, they get this:

Yahoo3

which quickly redirects to this:

Yahoo4

If you try to “log in” from this screen, your account information is sent to Russia or the Ukraine or Nigeria or somewhere else, and the bad boys now have access to all your email, as well as an account to send out spamvertising or other scams with, and they do so on a regular basis. The victim is then sent back to the regular Yahoo Mail  website, and continues on their merry way none the wiser.

indiana_jones_grail_knight-you-have-chosen-poorly

I logged in several times with user names like “ScammersEatCamelDung”, just to make sure they got the message. Of course, it’s possible that responses are simply harvested into a login script that will never be seen, but what the heck; I’ll take any opportunity to insult one of these wastes of human cytoplasm.

Please be careful out there, and for the love of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and the music of the spheres, protect your loved ones. If you have people you care about who use the computer and who are not tech-savvy, educate them on how to protect themselves from scammers.

We demand that people get licenses to drive a car; it’s a shame no basic training is required before venturing into the potentially-scary world of the internet.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Kids love puppets, past and present.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

FTP_children_watching_marionettes

Children watching marionettes in New York, 1935 (From Wikimedia)

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Alfred Eisenstaedt Children At A Puppet Theatre Paris Picture. It appears the French kids really get into this.

431411

Children watching a puppet show in the street. Honshu Shizuoka Izu Peninsula, Japan
Photograph: George Dixon Aked, 1937

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Children watch puppets and performers at the Polynesian Luau – Orlando, Florida
Photo: Philip Guataer, 1981
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

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Modern puppeteer Nicola McEldowney entertains children with Just So Stories in Cambridge, MA, 7/20/12 — at Henry Bear’s Park.

Of course, marionettes are not only for kids. Although the puppet show in the Sound of Music was put on ostensibly by the children of the family, it was actually the famous Bill Baird and his troupe who created the puppets and the segment, for the enjoyment of the adults.

soundofmusic

Puppets can be useful, too:

Grondahl - Puppets

© Calvin Grondahl

The Old Wolf has spoken.

How to have a Merry Christmas

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Well, according to one math professor, this is how it’s done:

  1. CodeCogsEqn
  2. CodeCogsEqn (1)
  3. CodeCogsEqn (2)
  4. CodeCogsEqn (3)
  5. CodeCogsEqn (4)

Funny. But all joking aside, Oxfam has come up with a practical formula for knowing whether or not you’re really enjoying the holidays, and it looks like this (and there’s no reason this wouldn’t work for Chanukkah as well):

formula-oxfam

That’s a bit more complex; here’s what it boils down to as a “word problem”:

“It’s great to see that ultimately, happiness at Christmas comes down to quite simple things, such as enjoying time off work to spend with friends and family.”

Key ‘happiness factors’ include:
• Number of calories consumed on Christmas Day (any more than 7,000 calories and you’ll be too stuffed to enjoy yourself)
• Amount of time off work (just one day off boosts happiness by 70%, with three weeks being the optimum amount)
• Centimetres of snow (15cm is ideal)
• Family arguments (more than five and happiness levels plummet)
• Number of hours spent trawling the shops for gifts (any more than 10 hours and shopping-induced stress sees happiness decline rapidly)
• Miles driven to see friends and family (0 miles is ideal, with 500 miles generating a 40% reduction in happiness levels)
• The number of gifts you receive has an impact on happiness (6 gifts gets you to optimum happiness levels), but….
• ….most crucially, how many gifts you give (even giving just one present makes a huge difference to happiness levels, increasing Christmas enjoyment by 50%).

To estimate your score, visit the original article. (But we need a bigger picture of the formula there.)

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Why I love reddit

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Yes, it can be a tar pit of trolls and Not Safe For Work posts, but if you arrange your settings to filter out the garbage, it’s also an amazing community.

Example 1:

  1. User /u/thespite posts a clever way to send a holiday greeting using Google Maps. You can try the Holiday Message yourself.
  2. User /u/benlaor tries it, and discovers a picture of his beloved dog of blessed memory. He wrote: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. You don’t understand what happened because of this video.I have never looked at my house on street view before (strange, huh?). This was the first time. The images for Israel are a few years old, probably around 5 years in most cases.

    At the end of the video it lets you just look around freely. I look around my house, look over at my parking stop, and there he was. Lazying about in the sun was my plump little fatass of a dog, who was my favorite thing in the world until he died a few years ago. I have almost no pictures of him due to my not backing anything up and my HDD being destroyed in a power surge.”

  3. User /u/jangoo identifies the location.
  4. User /u/thespite extracts a high-res image
  5. User /u/fatty_tines creates a lovely color drawing of the dog.
    tS2shSI
  6. Tears all around.

Example 2:

  1. User /u/LE_POOR_MERIT has a teenaged son who does an awesome drawing entitled “Who Dares Summon Chrismotron?”
    egQ6lO5
    ©2014 “Unknown ben LE_POOR_MERIT”
  2. User /u/pohjankonna, a freelance artist from Finland, does an amazing digital rendering of the drawing
    Chrismotron
    ©2014 Pekka Veikkolainen
    and makes this offer: “You have of course the permission to print & frame it, after all I took the original without asking first! I do have a slightly larger version that I can send you. Better yet, I could also send you the original Photoshop file with all the different layers on it, if your son would be interested in deconstructing the painting to see what it’s actually made of (kind of a step-by-step view to creating a digital painting).”
  3. Tears all around.
  4. For those interested, a wallpaper version.

Keep in mind these people don’t know each other from Adam’s off ox. They’re just regular people being awesome to one another for no good reason, which is what the best of humanity is all about. Also, these are only two recent examples; similar things happen all the time on reddit. It always lifts my spirits to read about one.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

How to get your senators’ and representatives’ attention on any issue without being a wealthy donor

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Seen at reddit: Protip from a former Senate intern, with thanks to /u/SomeKindOfMutant.

This is worth sharing, since most of us are not among the 1% who have access to government:

An email to your senator or representative may result in a form letter response and a phone call to the office may amount to a tally mark on an administrative assistant’s notepad. But, for any given policy concern, if you want to get their attention a letter to the editor in one of your state’s 5-10 biggest newspapers that mentions them specifically BY NAME is the way to go. If your message is directed to your representative, pick a newspaper that is popular in your district.

That is the crucial thing to know–the rest of this post is an explanation of why I know this is true.

I know this because, when I interned in the D.C. office of a senator one summer, one of the duties I shared was preparing a document that was distributed internally both online and in paper format. This document was made every day and comprised world news articles, national news, state news, and any letters to the editor in the 5-10 largest newspapers within the state that mentioned the senator by name. I was often the person who put that document on his desk, and it was the first thing he read every morning after arriving to the office.

I began to suspect that this was standard operating procedure because several other senators’ offices share the same printer in the basement of the Russell Senate Office building, and I saw other interns doing the exact same procedures that I was involved in.

Since the internship, I’ve conferred with other Senate and House employees past and present and determined that most–if not all–offices use essentially the same procedure.

Usually when I write or call or email a senator or representative, I get the expected form letter in return. Recently I was actually contacted by a staffer at Orrin Hatch’s office who had some more questions about a letter I wrote regarding the regulation of money-transfer services like Western Union who are participating in so many Nigerian scams. It was gratifying.

That said, this is an excellent tip.

The Old Wolf has spoken.