DNS Issues

Sorry about the site being down for a while. I moved my domain over to hover.com, and completely forgot to update the DNS settings....

Samsung ARM Chromebook Review

Samsung ARM Chromebook Review

I've been a fan of Chromebooks ever since Google shipped me the CR48. For what seemed like a pretty under-specced netbook, the potential was really the main thing that hooked me. I used the CR48 religiously until I upgraded to the new Samsung Series 5 (3G/Atom). It became my main computer in college courses, doing pretty much everything I needed a computer for, minus a few programming assignments. For those types of projects, I relied on LogMeIn to get me through, but it wasn't a great solution.

With the old Chromebook, I encountered quite a bit of slowdown when streaming some high-def content or streaming music and browsing image-heavy websites (non-recovering Reddit addict here). I had to make a rule for Chromebook use, no Gmail in the background if I wanted to keep things running smoothly. For the most part, this wasn't a huge problem, but over time it starts to get grating.
I'm happy to report, as I write this review from my new $250 Samsung Chromebook, that I am streaming music, keeping an eye on Gmail, streaming 720p from YouTube, Redditing, and writing this review in Docs (Drive?) with only a few hiccups here and there as new songs and videos load, not even enough to be an issue. If there's any general-purpose computer that could make me believe in the power of ARM, its this.

The good news is that Google has finally done away with the under-powered 'feel' of the old Chromebooks. This computer feels fast, and in reality, that's the only thing that matters. It finally feels good to use. If I were Intel, I'd be reviewing the battle strategy right about now.

As far as software goes, the stable build of Chrome OS is nice enough, its still mostly cloud based, although the majority of what I use Drive for works offline. I had to restart the system to switch to the Dev channel, and Chrome OS restored my tabs and windows to the exact location where I had them open on the screen, that's pretty cool. You can even pin files for offline access (think pinning Google Books or Music in Android). Chrome OS also has support for VPN connections (L2TP/IPsec [PSK or User Cert] and OpenVPN), although as of this writing, I haven't had the chance to test this functionality.

Now, lets get to hardware. Initially, the build quality feels a bit plasticy and cheap, although this wears off once you get your hands on the keyboard. The whole machine is incredibly lightweight, so much so that it feels more like a toy or display model than an actual computer. Its light enough that carrying it from room to room with one hand almost feels natural. The keyboard is rather nice to type on and feels very natural. The whole system has a very sleek look of it. With a slightly-shiny silver paint job and a matte black keyboard, it really has a professional look going for it. Google Goggles even thought I was taking pictures of a Macbook Pro. I can only imagine how cool it would look with a backlit keyboard. Battery life seems less than other Chromebooks I've used (from my averages, about 6ish hours of high usage / high brightness), but I don't see this being a problem. The power adapter scares me a bit, it uses a very thin plug that seems like it may get bent out of shape if a wayward child or dog ran at it from the wrong angle, but time will tell on that point. In this build, Samsung decided the majority of ports would be better places on the back of the system, and given the sleek design, I'm inclined to agree with them. Full-size HDMI, 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, SD slot (with a really nice auto-flap that you can't break off), 3.5mm Audio Out, and Sim Slot. The Mali-T604 GPU really shines when streaming 720p video. I watched an entire movie streaming from Google Drive with 2 performance hiccups, much better than previous models. Next year, I'm placing my bets on ARM.

But this is a Chromebook after all, and Google is all about  building open platforms, so lets talk dev options. Samsung did away with the physical 'jailbreak' switch in favor of a key combination to launch into recovery mode. I can't say I really blame them, as long as the feature is well documented (and it is). Even the boot flash is writable (if you remove the write-protection screw from the bottom first), much better than taking the CR48 apart to put it into write-mode. Theoretically, you could hack the software on this as much as you wanted without prying apart the case once. This is absolutely wonderful. Check out the developer page for everything from component information to disassembly guides to dev mode guides: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook

All in all, for $250, you can't really go wrong. This is an outstanding build for the money, and I finally feel that Chromebooks have hit the price point where they are considered more than a joke or a nerd product. Friends of mine have actually purchased this model at retail stores because the price was right. I do still dream of a day when you can buy a Chromebook for $100, and it looks like Acer is moving that direction already.

Check out the gallery for some pictures of the machine: https://plus.google.com/photos/114490039330264150159/albums/5812848961089473681

Eject the Warp Core: A practical look at filesystem segregation and encryption.

Here's my presentation I gave at Ohio InfoSec Forum today about the "Ejectable Core Backtrack Machine" and how filesystem segregation and encryption can help keep your data out of the wrong hands.

To get the full experience, open up the speaker notes to read along with what I'll be saying. It won't replace actually being there, but hopefully it'll help you grasp the concepts.

Future considerations (from InfoSec):

• tmpfs instead of /tmp
• Find a way to disable direct memory access on the kernel level (firewire and PCI can exploit this)

Tom's Tutorials: TrueCrypt - Easy Mode

I've been looking to post some more tutorials on various tech things, so here's the first. In this video, I explain getting started with TrueCrypt. Just the easy stuff for now, how to create normal and hidden volumes. Later, I'll explain full disk encryption and hidden operating systems.

If you want to subscribe to the playlist, you may do so here.

Chrome OS: Aura Window Manager

Google made a major update to Chrome OS today, releasing the Aura window manager on the Dev channel users. Check out the full rundown and screenshots in the Google+ post here.

Chromium OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 11/4/2011)

This version brings a bunch of beta design functionality and some speed increases! Enjoy!

I did notice some driver weirdness on some machines with this build, let me know what you find out.

Chromium OS - 11/04/11

Credits and Utilities:
To unpack this file, you will need the totally awesome and free unzipping utility: 7zip
This pack contains the Image Writer for Microsoft Windows, which is a great, simple way to take or place images onto drives. Give these guys a hand!

Instructions are included in a text file in the download!

Kodingen

As a coder, I've never found cloud-based IDEs to be very useful. Sure, its a great idea, all of your data and project work accessible from any location and securely stored. It sounds like the perfect development environment. I had played around with Cloud9IDE, but I never felt that they were getting it quite right, they had moved in a good direction, but their scope was too limited. I didn't just want to store my open source projects in the cloud, I wanted shell and FTP access, I wanted a small hosting platform for testing, I wanted the ability to share and publish my creations at will. No cloud IDE could give me that... until now.

Enter: Kodingen. Kodingen is a web developer IDE, plus FTP server, plus SVN/Git/CVS host, plus web host, plus platform. Its hard to describe all the things Kodingen does, or... will do, rather. Lets get that point out of the way first. The first thing you should keep in mind when building things on Kodingen is that it is a beta platform. Work has been progressing fairly rapidly as they gear up for their big stable release, but in using this as a development platform, you'll run into things that just aren't built yet. For instance, the integrated domain purchasing/linking: I have no idea how this will work in the future, it looks like a good idea, but the final product has yet to be released. As far as version control systems go, don't count on it just yet, those are still in development. For every feature that Kodingen has, there's another feature that just isn't finished yet. I don't really see this as a downside, however, instead, I feel very excited for what the future holds.

For a very-much-in-beta project, Kodingen is one of the slickest HTML5 applications I've laid eyes on. Everything slides in panels, smooth animations permeate every little thing, right click menus are abound and easy to use, and the interface is extremely clean for how powerful it is. They rely on a bunch of open source tools and technologies, which is a huge benefit for them (no licensing) and for their users (we can move away if we want). The major gripe I have is that we haven't heard from the developers in quite a while, the last public post was from March 16th. When you get into the backstory of the project, though, you can't really fault the guys. Kodingen was built from savings, without investors, without VC funding, without Techcrunch Distrupt or the LAUNCH conference. This incredibly useful, incredibly cool project was built by a very small team of developers with their own money. Very cool.

One thing that I wish worked now was the ability to pay for an account, out of all the features to lock out in the beta, I was initially surprised this was one of them. When thinking about it, you wouldn't want people paying for a half-baked, unfinished product, though. These guys are smart, they aren't greedy, and they know how to make their users happy. Progress is slow, but the site is fast and stable, and I'm sure when they finally release 1.0, its going to make a lot of people happy (and hopefully make them a lot of money as well). In the mean time, why don't you sign up for the free account over at https://kodingen.com and consider throwing these guys some dough if you like what you see.

Google's Super Social Search Shift

Just running a standard search for the Fedora Project (I'm on a VM kick lately...), and I see that Google is now retroactively looking at content you've posted from other Google properties, not just Buzz or Plus. In this instance, Google pulled directly from my Fedora 13 review (Not entirely sure why my picture is showing twice...). I can only imagine that this is the beginning of a huge fundamental shift for Google search and how it operates. The future of search is social and Google has seen the writing on the wall. I can't wait for the day when I run a search of some new gadget or software and some of my tech blogger friends pop up in the search results. This is going to be very cool.

Edit: Now that I think about it... anything I've posted to Blogger automatically got shared in Buzz... I guess Google could just be pulling from Buzz (which they've been doing for a while now), but either way, still cool to see it in action.

Ghost in the Wires - A book by Kevin Mitnick

Disclaimer: Above image links to Amazon with my affiliate code.
If you buy the book from the above link, I'll get a buck or two.

Just finished reading a wonderful book by Kevin Mitnick, hacker extraordinaire! As some of you may know, Kevin Mitnick was a fugitive hacker who ran for years and taught us all about social engineering, how to effectively use zero-day exploits, but most of all, how hackers need to target people first, computers second. In this book, Kevin is finally able to write about his firsthand experiences running from the law, compromising administrators and systems, and going into some great technical detail at the same time.
The very first thing you'll notice about this book is that it reads like a spy novel. Twists and turns! Backstabbing! RHosts files! Its all in here.
The book contains technical bits for those who 'get them' (I do! I do!), but the story is completely comprehensible to anyone without any technical experience whatsoever, thanks to Mitnick's brilliant writing style. If you've read any other books concerning this tale, you'll get the other perspective, straight from the source. It isn't a very deep book and should be looked upon as a spy-novel dealing with computer hackers. Its fun, its a ride, its about 400 pages, but it is a popcorn-style book. Have fun and run through this, I enjoyed it.

Chromebooks: A Disappointing Price Point

I LOVE Google's Chrome OS. I love Chromebooks. So much so, that I regularly build and release USB live images of Chromium OS on this very site. I love the idea of a fire-and-forget web-based computer that people don't have to maintain or take care of. Computer explodes? Grab a new one. Your data is just fine in the cloud. No worrying about viruses, backups, theft (thanks to the miracles of encryption). The Chromebook is the embodiment of the modern dumb-terminal. Like I said, I really love everything about Chromebooks.... except the price.

When rumors were flying to and fro about Google's new operating system, the guess was that these machines would be mass produced with cheap hardware and would run a customer anywhere from $100 to $200 a pop. Writers and business managers were swooning over the day when they could walk into a big box consumer electronics store, throw down $500 on the table and walk out with 5 brand-new, shiny computers. Cheap, replaceable, cloud-based. Chromebooks were supposed to do away with "The Digital Divide" and put everyone on a level playing field.

So far, this hasn't been the case. At all. The cheapest Chromebook is $350 for an Acer build with wifi-only. For $400, a person could buy a 'normal' laptop (granted, a really really low-quality laptop) and get more out of the hardware. Its really killing me. For a quality Chromebook (currently, the Samsung Series 5), you're looking to spend about $400 for the wifi-only model, and $470 for the 3G model. Ridiculous.

Chromebooks offer the promise of being the 'refrigerator' of computers: A true appliance that you can treat as such. But at this price, only cloud-junkies are going to be willing to shell out premium dollars for less hardware. Maybe the idea is to make them expensive so they acquire a certain demographic (read: become trendy), but I seriously doubt this is the case.

Here's a tip, if you're looking for a Chromebook, look no further than eBay. For about $350-$360, you can play an auction for a little bit and end up with a brand-new Samsung 3G Chromebook. I believe manufacturers should set the price to $350 maximum. Yes, I realize that the hardware and R&D that goes into this project costs money, but if Google wants Chromebooks to become a lasting success and staple of computing, rather than a small distraction and all-around nice idea that fades into the past, they need to change the pricing structure now and/or start subsidizing manufacturer costs.

I absolutely love my CR48, but I would never pay more than $300 for it.

Windows 8 Developer Preview

As some of you may know, Microsoft has released a Windows 8 Developer Preview for bug testing and information gathering. Just like it happened with Windows 7, this developer preview is getting everyone excited for the next Windows release, me included. I am a bit skeptical, however. It seems to me like Microsoft is concentrating more on the tablet aspect of Windows 8 and almost completely ignoring its desktop PC roots. I'll take you on a screenshot tour of sorts through a PicasaWeb album and offer some commentary along the way. While it is a bit buggy right now, you should give it a shot, its free after all.

Click on the Windows logo to start the screenshot tour.

Currently, my favorite feature is the built-in re-imaging and wipe functionality in Control Panel. Windows 8 lets you re-format your system with a button, but it does a Windows Easy Transfer type process in the background, letting you keep all of your user data and settings. This is HUGELY helpful for anyone who has ever had to format their machine (pretty much everyone). The wipe feature is beneficial to those of us who sell off or give away our old systems: The wipe feature formats and re-installs Windows 8 without keeping user data, allowing you to give your system away with peace of mind. I don't know if this does a security wipe before re-installing Windows, if it doesn't, it would make for a prime target of nefarious data-recovery specialists everywhere.

Brands and Businesses are Coming to Google+

And soon!

Click for full size.

I just went to add 'Freelance Tech Guy' to my list of employers on my Google+ profile, and I was surprised to find that Google not only lists potential business, but lists their pictures/logos as well. Is this part of the brand rollout we've been hearing so much about? It seems rather apparent to me that brands and companies will be added soon.

Again, I have no insider information on this, just a guess based on my experience with this unannounced 'feature'.


Edit: Also, notice how some 'non-companies' will show up in this list, things like Pokemon show up in the list if you try it out. In the next screenshot, I search for 'mario', and 'Nintendo' pops up in the list. Check the screenshot for a peak.

Google+ Games

Just spent a bit of time playing around with Google+ games, and I have to say, I'm really enjoying them! I don't ever see any game status updates, I don't get notifications about games, I don't get spammed about games, UNLESS I'm in the "Games" tab. I love gaming, I really do, but I don't use the Google+ Social Network to play games, I use social networks to socialize, the games are a nice bonus, but I don't want them to be the main feature. The Games Tab makes this simple and elegant. One of the main reasons I'm loving Google+ right now. And beyond that, the games are actually pretty good! More to come later!

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 8/9/2011)

New version! I'm also cleaning up all of the old versions and linking them to this page. This version is very very cool, lots of new ideas and features. Chrome OS is really coming into its own, you can see Google's new design team hard at work here. Check it out!

Chrome OS - 08/09/11

Credits and Utilities:
To unpack this file, you will need the totally awesome and free unzipping utility: 7zip
This pack contains the Image Writer for Microsoft Windows, which is a great, simple way to take or place images onto drives. Give these guys a hand!

Instructions are included in a text file in the download!

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 6/7/2011)

Another version! Its been quite a while since I've put one of these out, so I figured it would help everyone if I released an updated version. As usual, all instructions are included in the download, so pull it down and give it a shot. Chrome OS is really growing up, and fast. I'm really excited for the future of Chrome OS and cloud-based computing in general. This is the future and it is now.

Chrome OS - 060711.7z

Chrome OS - 061311.7z

New Version Here

Update: Looks like there were a few nasty bugs with the June 7th build, I've rebuilt with newer sources in an attempt to give you a more stable build. Enjoy!

Update 2: Looks like the 6/13 build has some major GUI bugs and stability issues. Here's the main point: These are daily builds, nasty bugs happen. I'll wait a bit before releasing the next daily build, see what happens from there. I've re-included the link to the previous version, as it is a bit more stable.

Credits and Utilities:
To unpack this file, you will need the totally awesome and free unzipping utility: 7zip
This pack contains the Image Writer for Microsoft Windows, which is a great, simple way to take or place images onto drives. Give these guys a hand!

Instructions are included in a text file in the download!

Why the Academic World is a Steaming Pile of Shit (For CS Majors)

Ah, school! Teaching me the most worthless things ever! Check this out, actual comment from one of my programming projects:

"Create your own sort. Don't use one that's in the API. (-5)"

Huh... Strange... At my job, what would happen if I re-wrote a piece of code specifically designed to be convenient and save time (thus, money)?

I'd get fired.


This is exactly why Academica is worthless for people in my field: Complete lack of perspective and field experience. If I walked up to my boss and said, "Hey, Boss! I'm going to re-do the work that Sun Microsystems already did for me by re-writing perfectly good API calls because I don't want to feel lazy! Oh, and you'd be paying me for these extra hours!", he'd fire my ass on the spot (and rightfully so).

Here's a cool academic exercise: Write a simple Twitter app (Using the given APIs), then make it work on Android. Its cool. Its relevant. Its academic. Its learning and experience.
Don't make me re-invent the wheel, college... Some motherfucker did that for me so I wouldn't have to. I'm not paying you gobs of money to duplicate the work that others have done before me, I'm paying you gobs of money to stand on the shoulder's of giants and build into the sky.

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 3/28/2011)

 

Well, here it is again! Another build, this one a week later. I've heard some reports that the Chrome Web Apps weren't working quite perfectly on some machines, that's the risk when you're running daily-builds of an operating system. This is freshly built as of yesterday, and I've update the instructions to include how to create a bootable Chrome OS flash drive in both Linux and Mac OSX. As usual, the Windows instructions are still there as always. After the jump, I'll include a copy/paste of the Instructions.txt file for your convenience. Have fun and let me know what you think!

Chrome OS - 032811.7z

New Version Here

Credits and Utilities:
To unpack this file, you will need the totally awesome and free unzipping utility: 7zip
This pack contains the Image Writer for Microsoft Windows, which is a great, simple way to take or place images onto drives. Give these guys a hand!

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 3/24/2011)

I've taken to packaging my own vanilla builds of Chrome OS (Well... Chromium OS), and am going to start releasing them semi-regularly. Comes packed with the great Image Writer for Microsoft Windows (https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer) and stupid-simple instructions on getting a bootable flash drive made to test drive Chrome OS. Ever since Hexxeh stopped major development (that I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong), I've been listening to people clamor for an easy way to test drive Chrome OS without having to build from the source code up. I want to help those people. Every so often, I will make a build of Chrome OS and post it here to my blog. Enjoy!!

This file is packed with 7-zip! The completely free (and open source) zipping utility! Grab it here: http://www.7-zip.org/
Chrome OS - 032111.7z - ~120MB
New Version Here

An Academic Waste of Time and Money: College

I posted a Twitter update and would like to expand on it for a bit...

"On the top ten list of worthless things I have done with my life, college is quickly nearing the top."

I feel like I really am pissing away time and money and getting nothing in return. I wish there was a 'college' for people like me, where you go to a place, socialize, drink, party, network, but none of the class bullshit. The people I've met in college are fucking great, the networking is brilliant, the experiences I've had outside of the classroom setting have taught me more than any parent ever could. But what I'm actually paying for... what I'm actually buying here... I get nothing out of it. At all. The course material is a joke, the professors are comedians, but at the end of the day, I'm left with an empty wallet and not nearly enough laughs to make my night worth it.

If I wanted to sit in a room for a few hours having some idiot recite shit out of a book that will never pertain to any facet of my life: I'd go to church.

Its like going to a comedy club to drink really good beer. What you're paying for isn't what you're there for. I've been told that this is the college experience, this is exactly what it is designed to be, but I don't really buy that. In my mind, college should be there to expand your mind and get you thinking differently about what is possible and how the world currently works, then should work. I've never had this experience in class. Ever. Instead, I've had these grand experiences in my interactions with others at college. Not in a class, but at a party, hanging out playing games, or standing around in a hallway, just being bored. Why do I need professors, grades, classes, or textbooks when they have done nothing for me? I could have gotten the same experience by just hanging out at a college, without the added burdens of paying an ungodly sum of money for fairly good academics (from what I have been told).

Maybe I'm an outlier. I've always been better at learning on my own and teaching myself things. I've done my own research, processed, then came to my own conclusions. I expand my mind regularly with topics outside my comfort zone, I don't need a person biased in staunch bureaucracy telling me what I should learn and what I should not learn. Academia as a whole is frustrating. From my time at college, I've never learned anything truly useful in a class. When it comes to my career (entrepreneurship and technology), college has taught me nothing useful. To this day, in each job I've held, every contract that I've worked on, I have never used anything I have 'learned' in college. When I walk into a tech or business class, most of the time, I end up teaching the professor. I know how that sounds, everyone knows that guy who fights with the professor about everything, but I don't mean like it like that. I end up bringing up new concepts and ideas that are fairly standard practice in the tech industry, but are brilliant breakthroughs in the world of academia. For a tech guy, walking into a modern college course about technology is like walking into a technology museum.

Academia, for the most part, is in its own little world. Business practices, current research, the very latest and greatest that computers and the internet have to offer aren't being taught in colleges. What's being taught in a high-level management course at my college is this: "Employers who want to maintain a stable working environment and want to posses a good relationship with their employees should avoid yelling at or taking things out on them." Yes... that was an entire chapter. For one entire week, my business class discussed why we shouldn't scream at the people working for us. Brilliant.

To sum up plenty of other examples in a sentence: Academia tends to be 10-15 years behind the curve, no matter what the subject.

Sadly enough, I've come this far, so there isn't much point in quitting now. From what I'm looking at, I've got a year left of school. I already have the well-paying job, I have the lifestyle, I have the job experience, I might as well relax as I work my way through the rest of this degree. One thing is for sure, though, I will never view the academic side of college as an investment after my experiences, I will always look down on it as waste of time, energy, and money.

Bing: Powered by Google - Stolen Search Results

Breaking tech news today! It has been uncovered that Bing has been poaching Google search results! Here are the cliff notes:

• Bing will show the spellchecked search results from Google, without fixing the misspelling.
• Bing results have been suspiciously close to Google results for a long time, Google decided to create a sting operation.
• Google created non-sense words and results pages for those made-up jumbles of characters.
• Google tasked engineers to search for these words from home, using Internet Explorer with Suggested Sites enabled and the Bing toolbar installed.
• Soon after, these non-sense search results (Which had NOTHING to do with the term searched for) started popping up on Bing.
• 7 out of 9 tests give overwhelming evidence that Bing has been stealing search results from Google.

So what exactly does this mean for Bing? Microsoft is holding a search event later today (which is why Google could be unveiling this now), and Matt Cutts is on a panel with them later today, so I expect we will hear more then.

The original tweet is here: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/32459370511994880

Check out the very thorough and awesome analysis of the situation by Search Engine Land.

I think search is going to get very interesting over the next couple of weeks...