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computer support

How to backup the Samsung M400 phone to Ubuntu

This nasty little problem is not well documented out on the net. I couldn’t move files over using the USB cable, because it won’t show as a mass storage device.

Here is my solution.

 

1. on your Ubuntu computer turn on Bluetooth.  If it doesn’t have it, you can buy a cheap USB dongle for $5 on ebay.

2. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone.

On your Samsung M400

On your Ubuntu

1. From your home screen, press Menu/OK.
2. Select Settings/Tools > Tools > Bluetooth.
3. If Bluetooth is off, select On/Off and then press the left Option key to select On.
4. Make sure you have “bluetooth manager” on Ubuntu
5. In Bluetooth Manager, search for new device.
6. It will find a device, flash a hex address, then update the name to M400
7. Choose “pair device” after you see it.
8. Approve pairing
9, Go to Settings/Tools > Tools > Bluetooth>Visibility and turn on for 3 minutes  (this may not help but i did it)
10. Go to Settings/Tools > Tools > Bluetooth>Trusted devices  and select your computer name that it gave you after the pairing. (it should be there) there is on option to ‘transfer’  choose it! Then choose ‘send contacts’.  It will show all your contacts but none are selected. In options, choose ‘select all’.
Then click “send”This begins the transfer once you approve step 11
11. Ubuntu asks you to approve incoming files. Click yes, even tho it didn’t give you an option of where they are going.  After I accepted, it dumped them into ‘/home/(me)/Public’ as one file per contact.
 If this worked for you, feel free to tip me some LiteCoin  LWnAqriAeMywWFZ5VAeYd3SakLoAUNHXSU

My opinion of this phone is low. The flip sanyos are much better. Unfortunately all the smart phones are very dumb in that they leak data out wifi horribly and I can’t use them due to security.

Oh, and if you hate the ‘nuance’ button being pressed while in your pocket (“Say a command”)  and trying to pocket dial, you can pry out the button (bottom left) with the tip of a knife. Nuance will still work when activated by your bluetooth headset. I have no frilling idea why these idiots dedicated an outside button to it.

 

Source of inspiration: http://www.credomobile.com/support/phones/Samsung-M400/Transfer-Contacts-M360.aspx

Categories
computer support

Replacing a failed disk on Freenas 0.7 in a ZFS pool

Yikes, my zpool showed a drive remapping lots of failed sectors. I expect it to fail soon.

However, ZFS was just added in Freenas 0.7 and their are some problems to jump in order to replace it.

Steps

0. Do a ‘scrub’ on your zpool to verify pool before turning off the machine and adding the drive.

1. Add a new drive to replace the old one. Use the DISK management tab to add the drive, and make it a ZFS filesystem disk.

freenas adding drive

 

 

2. I was told by guides online to use the GUI to flag the old disk as ‘offline’ (using tools->offline->*select bad disk*) then use ‘replace’ and choose the bad disk then the new disk. But this took it offline and I couldn’t replace it. THe replace command would not see the new drive.  So I had to turn the bad drive back ‘online’.  That forced me to step3 – the cli method.

3. Go to freenas executing replace‘Advanced’->’command’ and issue the following command ‘zpool replace bigstack /dev/ad6 /dev/ad8’  which means ‘zpool replace zpool-name failing-drive new-replacement-drive’

This begins xfering data over.  And yes, the failing drive is still online.

(Note, i instead tried to ssh into freenas and issue this as cli but it failed due to sudo issues of some kind)

 

zpool status replace

Categories
computer support

Litecoin config for Gigabyte ATI HD 7970

The Script

Did a quick study to see hashrates. Concluded the best config script a launch is:

export DISPLAY=:0
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

./cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://litecoinp2pool.com:9327 -u (your-litecoin-addy-here) -p anypasswordyouwant –intensity 13 -g 2  –worksize 256 –thread-concurrency 8192  –auto-fan   –gpu-engine 1075 –gpu-memclock 1500

Running on 12.04 Xubuntu.

So the 7970 are known for good mem overclocking which is useful for Litecoin

Of the launch script above the –gpu-engine 1075 –gpu-memclock 1500 is the most critical parts.   Gigabyte cards perform better with ‘-g 2’

 

The GPU/Mem ratios test results

First we need to see how fast we can push the memory clock.

GPU/Mem  –  kHash/s

1024/1425   531

1024/1475 556

1024 1500 578

1024 1525  476

1024/1512  486

1024/1496 571

Thus the 1500 is the ideal target, after doing small increment testing. Now to tweek the GPU clock.

1044/1500  590

1100/1500 545

1066/1500  593

1075/1500  610

1085/1500 580

1080/1500  596

1077/1500 608

And some other testing around 1075, 1076 isn’t as good nor 1074. So I opted to go with 1075/1500.   I tried different Intensity levels but 13 was the clear winner.  I varied other variables, but not to much avail.  The final script shows what works. I get 610kH on average.

Hey, was this helpful?  Feel free to tip – LTHB43DWkmmxMKo7N7QG5uYg9WsE2WwffG

Just an FYI for other folks.
Other 7970 cards should be in the same range, start at 900/1400 and work up.

Categories
computer support

Protecting Clickbank delivery pages

So I wrote a book on beekeeping a year or so ago. I sell it on Amazon but also via Clickbank. The trick was to protect the delivery page from bots and google spiders and other folks who wanted to download the book for free.

There was an old solution that an update to WordPress made invalid, I posted about it in an earlier post.

For those who want to send someone a url to a password protected page without them having to log in, this is it. It is called the “Post password token” plug in available for free on WordPress.  But give them $10 donation if you use it, for good karma.

http://top-frog.com/projects/post-password-token/

Categories
computer support

Best Technologies UPS manual LI660va or LI660

OK, so I had a problem running down an error code on an old Best Technologies Fortress LI660 UPS.  Code was “A 4” which turned out to be “Alarm” code 4. Just means I have a battery going bad. I think this UPS takes two 12V batteries.

I like this UPS, easy to read buttons, shows Voltage out and Line in and whether you are in a brownout condition.

Manual is here. best-power-fortress-li-user-manual

I found other Best UPS manuals here http://www.powerprosinc.com/user-manuals.html

 

Hope this helps someone else.

Categories
computer support

WordPress Security plugins

So i’m locking down more of my websites. I’ve found two very good plugins – Bulletproof Security and WordFence.

Bulletproof is more powerful, but you will need to FTP into your site and change file permissions it recommends.

Wordfence is simpler and easy to use. Sort of like tripwire, it emails you any files that were recently changed in the core install.  Also, it does a anti virus scan.

If you are a techie, go with Bulletproof. If you want simple do Wordfence. I’ve not yet tested their combined comparability, someone needs to.

Categories
computer support

Free up disk space on Ubuntu

My server seems to eat disks. Constantly at 99% and when it hits 100%  php barfs and can’t store variables thence it won’t let people login.

Ubuntu helpdesk saves the day,

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoverLostDiskSpace

with every damn possible CLI you can think of to hunt down and identify all the files that hog space.  Saved me a hell of a lot of effort. Maybe you too.

Categories
computer support

Sending links to password protected pages in WordPress

Update  16JAN13 – the older post blow  is now invalidated.

The solution you seek is now the Post Password Token plugin, http://top-frog.com/projects/post-password-token/ which is a FREE plugin on WordPress.  Donate $10 if you like it !  I did.

 

Old solution

————————–

So if you are reading this, you already know how to click the password protect button in WordPress. But what you are really wanting to know is how to send a link to someone, with the password option already embedded. Say a client who isn’t going to remember his password.

First, you probably searched WP looking for the #@$! plugin that does this. No luck.
Second, you’ve realized that you’ll have to either install a ‘membership’ style plugin or tweak htpaccess code.
Third, you’ve found my humble musing with a promise of an elegant solution.

Well, i’m hitchhiking off of http://wordpress.org/support/topic/bypass-password-prompt-with-direct-link-to-protected-page
who really solved it, but made a typo just at the finish line and screwed up the answer.

So use your friendly ftp program to log into your website, download the /wp-includes/post-template.php and look for function post_password_required about halfway down.

insert this little snippet near the top.

if ( $_GET[‘get_password’] == $post->post_password )
return false;

so it looks like

function post_password_required( $post = null ) {
$post = get_post($post);

if ( $_GET[‘get_password’] == $post->post_password )
return false;

if ( empty($post->post_password) )
return false;

if ( !isset($_COOKIE[‘wp-postpass_’ . COOKIEHASH]) )
return true;

if ( $_COOKIE[‘wp-postpass_’ . COOKIEHASH] != $post->post_password )
return true;

return false;
}

SAVE THE FILE locally. On the server, save the old file post-template.php as post-template.php.old (in case you screw up, you can roll back).

UPLOAD the new file post-template.php.

And now send the link as http://www.mysite.com/my-secret-post-which-sucks/?get_password=your-password-here

it pulls up like a public page.  Note that once it pulls up, that I think a cookie is set, and it keeps showing. So you’ll have to test on a 2nd computer that hasn’t entered the password before.

 

Done.

=========

Note! 4/23/12 – WordPress updates will wipe out this file. So you need to save a copy of this file as post-template.php.working and then after an update, replace the post.template with the post-template.php.working after EVERY wordpress update.

==========

BTW, this is really really handy for delivering ebooks from Clickbank so you can control access to the files.

-mt

—————————–

8/1/2012 recent WordPress updates changed this and this solution is no longer valid. now the best thing to do is simply hide the page to deliver the product.