Landi's textpad

Audio Questions and Answers to Civics Naturalization Test

Landi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you are getting ready to become a US Citizen you are required to take a Civics test (100 questions). When you go for fingerprinting you are give a book with all the questions and answers and if you want to hear the questions you are given a CD. I am including them in mp3 format.

Civics Lessons - NaturalizationTest.zip

List installed Kernel Extensions on a Mac Terminal

Landi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:52:00 GMT

Simple command for displaying/listing installed kernel extensions via the Terminal

Terminal prompt type: kextstat

If you want to exclude anything Apple then type: kextstat | grep -iv com.apple

DD-WRT greasemonkey script

Landi — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:51:00 GMT

With the release of DD-WRT v24 they made it available to see current connections on your router. Awesome! However, depending on the amount of traffic that list could be pretty big and DD-WRT doesn't give you a way of filtering what you want to see. In my case I only want to see active/established connections and ignore the rest. Here comes the beauty of Gresemonkey + jquery or in my case Greasekit + jquery.

v0.1: For now only ESTABLISHED connections are displayed. If you want to see other ones you will need to edit the script. Future versions will allow you to use checkboxes or whatnot on the page. There are two versions: one for firefox and one for safari. I made two versions because Gresekit wasn't playing nice when I would try to load externally hosted js files. NOTE: Script is currently setup to only look at 192.168.1.254 please change this to your router's ip address.

v0.2: Added a fixed div to the top of the page where you can show/hide individual states and view only the states you are interested in.

Bug and feature requests can be sent via this form

Download for Firefox also at: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/53834

Download for Safari

Photos:

Before picture: After picture:

Captcha Control for Community Server 2.1

Landi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:25:00 GMT

If you are like me and use CS 2.1 and want people to comment on your blog posts you have realized that you get way too much spam. There is something you can do about it, and that is to install a Captcha control. When the page is created an image with a random number, in this case, is created for the user to enter before submitting their post.

I am using Dave Burke's captcha control and the download link is posted below. I am hosting the zip because I have not been able to find it posted anywhere else. Hope this helps someone out there in the intrawebz.

DaveBurke.CS21.Captcha.zip

Edit: After having this installed for about 2 months now I am glad to inform you that this works like a charm.

How NOT to remove electro-magnetic interference from your GSM phone

Landi — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

I was searching the google a few days ago on how to minimize electro-magnetic interference from my iPhone and it looked like I was not alone. Most of the solutions were telling me to foil the back of my phone. Uhmm, don't think so. Another idea was to put the iPhone inside an anti-static bag. Having one of these bags handy I said: "What the hell. Let's try it. After all, everyone said that it worked great for them without any signal loss.".

Well, I did try it and I will show you a few photos of the results. Pictures are worth 1000 words.

What worked for me was a pair of ferrite cores from RadioShack.

Install or uninstall .Net services

Landi — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:40:00 GMT

To register the service:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe ServiceName.exe

To unregister it:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe /U ServiceName.exe

If using x64 platform change Framework to Framework64

Installation is done in a transactioned way: If one of the assemblies fails to install, the installations of all other assemblies are rolled back. Uninstall is not transactioned.

Remotely logout a user from Remote Desktop Connection RDC

Landi — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:49:00 GMT

Have you ever tried to log into a 2003 Server and RDC said that: "The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections."? The solution is to log in under console and boot someone. But if you can't log in under console? Well than you have to open up your console and use the query session and reset session commands.

To find out who is logged into ther server you issue:

>query session /server:myserver

To log someone off the server you issue:

>reset session 1 /server:myserver

number 1 is the session ID that person was using.

Commands above assume that you have Administrative priviledges. myserver is the machine name that I am using as an example. Replace that with your own machine name.

Reset menu bar on Leopard Mac OS X

Landi — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Items in bold are command line entries.

I added CPU.menu from /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras and wanted to get rid of it and no way to do it. After CPU.menu started iStat menus would not start anymore and the way to get menu bar back to normal is to run the commands below. After I ran the commands below I was able to start iStat again

Reset menu bar to only have Airport, Volume, Battery and Clock

defaults write com.apple.systemuiserver menuExtras\
'( "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/AirPort.menu",
"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Volume.menu",
"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Battery.menu",
"/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Clock.menu")'

Restart UI Server

killall -HUP SystemUIServer

If SystemUIServer is not running, open terminal and run /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app

Windows XP running with minimal services

Landi — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:19:00 GMT

Find instructions here. Windows XP Pro is now consuming under 100MB or ram. Pretty nice!

Why I hate Philadelphia (part 2)

Landi — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:19:00 GMT

Adding on to what I was saying before about hating Philadelphia,Travel and Leisure ran a survey about best looking cities in US and Philadelphia came dead last. We are the fattest and now the ugliest city. We can't catch a break. Survey results can be found at Travel and Leisure. This Reuters article has a good photo of what Philadelphians really look like.

Update 9/23/2008: We finally have something going for ourselves; we are the best tippers

Connect to Cisco VPN using VPNC in Ubuntu

Landi — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 04:12:00 GMT

I have tested this on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The best tutorial I could find is located here and the only thing that's left out of that tutorial is the example of using a token provided by your IT team.
After finishing section 2.1 you will need to remove Xauth password line from your config file that way when you run sudo vpnc myconf it will ask you for the password.
After all said and done your config file should only contain:
    IPSec gateway gateway.to.use
    IPSec ID groupname
    IPSec secret passwordforgroup
    Xauth username myusername

Why I hate Philadelphia

Landi — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:01:00 GMT

Why does it take the City of Philadelphia 4 days to get rid of a car that's blocking half of the road?

Photosynth and Seadragon Preview

Landi — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:55:00 GMT

A demo of Seadragon and Photosynth This is by far the coolest thing I have seen in a while.

Went and looked at the car yesterday

Landi — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:42:00 GMT

Holly shit! Seeing the car in person for the first time was scary and I mean scary. Looking at the car and thinking that I was damn lucky to have made it out alive and how my head rest probably saved me from having a completely broken neck. There are two pictures that I think explain a lot about the condition of the car and what happened. More photos can be found here

Remembered some more about ...

Landi — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:07:00 GMT

… the accident. I was in the shower washing my hair and all the sudden I heard these voices like someone was crying/screaming from pain. At times it looked like he was gagging from blood or whatever he had in his mouth. I got a feeling of being in the ambulance but no visual and the other person that was in the accident with me was in the ambulance too. I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t able to move and I remember shaking either because I was cold or because I was nervous.

Coming back to the office today I thought that it could had been something that I had seen on Gray's Anatomy or some similar show but when I remembered that I was shaking and that I couldn't move that made me sure that it was me.

Accident

Landi — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:22:00 GMT

Just a few days after the accident and I feel like shit. My left eye has started to get black and blue and it has swollen quite a bit. I still can't remember what happened at all. will continue to write a litle more. Too tired to continue right now.....

This is what I wrote after I got home on Friday...

Reggie Bush gets owned by Sheldon Brown

Landi — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Sharp Aquos 108-inch LCD HDTV unvailed at CES 2007

Landi — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:17:00 GMT

WOW, this thing is huge. With today's prices a 45-inch is about $2'500; I wonder how much this will cost?!

read article on MSN tech and Engadget

What a way to get dumped

Landi — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:02:00 GMT

Damn, I feel sorry for the guy! Listen to this.

Marriage proposal

Landi — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 09:14:00 GMT

Okay so tonight I was at a chain restaurant (Carrabba's, great food) and towards the end of the meal people started to clap and congratulate this couple. The guy had proposed marriage. Congratulations, whatever, good luck. Now this schmuck couldn't have found a better restaurant to propose to this poor girl? I mean, come on dude, it's a chain restaurant and nothing romantic about it. What will you say when people ask you how you proposed to her? Think about it! Lame way to propose to someone you will spend the rest of your life with.