Hello everyone, 

We are back online! We had some unexpected server issues after routine maintenance and updates corrupted the server configuration files. We ended up needing to rebuild the entire nginx config for multiple domains from the ground up, but everything should now be working as expected. 

There may be a few loose ends that we are still fixing. Let us know if you come across any other bugs or issues and we will resolve them promptly!

Hello everyone, 

As many of you know... 

We've been hinting at some big changes over the past few weeks.

We've actually been internally discussing BIG things since last summer, and have tried a LOT of different prototypes. We've been working behind the scenes for quite some time, and we are finally getting ready to do the biggest facelift in the entire history of this community. 

We will be sharing more details over the coming weeks, and want to make everyone a part of everything that will be taking place. We're putting a lot of time into this and will be exploring new limits that are much further than what we've been able to do previously. The purpose of this post is to not only announce the facelift, but to also get open ended feedback and ideas from you guys. We want to know what you'd like to see in this community. If you could take MS in any direction you wanted over the next five years, what would you implement, and why? 

This is an open ended discussion for everyone in this community. Although not every idea will be technically feasible (we can't make Facebook 2.0, nor would that be a good thing  ), we will be seriously considering your suggestions as we progress. We also plan on implementing a lot of long-overdue fixes and features during this transition, and will make sure it's as seamless and simple as possible. 

We will be announcing more details as we progress. Stay tuned!

Art Metrano, who portrayed Officer Ernie Mauser in two Police Academy films, has died. He was 84.

The actor, who suffered a serious injury that derailed his career in 1989, died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in Aventura, Florida, according to Deadline.

Metrano's son, Harry Metrano, revealed the news on Instagram on Thursday by sharing a series of photos of him and his father.

"It's with a heavy heart that I write this caption. Yesterday I lost my best friend, my mentor, my dad. He was and will always be the toughest man I know," Harry wrote in the caption. "I have never met someone who has over come more adversities than him."

He added, "He's fought and won so much over the years that I always viewed him as indestructible, but the truth is we don't live forever on earth, but a person's spirit can live forever within you. Dad, you will always be a part of me and I will continue to live out your legacy. When someone came up with the quote, 'legends never die,' I'm pretty sure they were talking about you dad. I love you and miss you so much! One day I'll see you again. Rest in Paradise. You're now my guardian angel...


R.I.P

I’ve been wanting to dabble with Linux again on a couple of old computers laying around. I still use Debian for my development machine from time to time, but I wouldn’t call it my daily driver. I’ve also heavily customized Gnome with custom themes and am purposefully using Debian so that regular gnome shell updates don’t break the extensions that are installed. 

Gnome is great. It's an elegant desktop that has a wonderful workflow, but I must admit that it has also started to become frustrating. Not because it’s a flawed concept, but because they have increasingly adopted the mentality of discouraging any customization away from default behavior. Yes, extensions and themes exist, but both are somewhat hacked together and both break on new shell updates. And gnome has few intentions of doing anything about either problem and has actually started to speak against theming of the desktop. This is a bit odd because customization is a hallmark of the Linux experience, and the Gnome desktop has started to become, in recent years, wary of it. 

The devs are quite defensive about this, and it's sort of become an "our way or the highway" mentality. They recently started posting on their blog about the issue, and it is taken as a bit of an insult to suggest that the default theme or functionality might not suit everyone’s tastes. I’m not the hugest fan of Adwaita, for example, and it turns out that many Ubuntu users agree. It’s not that Adwaita is "bad" in any way (it’s certainly simple and clean). It’s just a style that not everyone will like, and that’s very normal with any design ever made. Not everyone likes MS’ default design either, and that’s why we have alternative themes.

Suggesting this to Gnome devs, however, is gonna get you slammed publicly in front of the open internet.

Ubuntu did A LOT of work and made Gnome recognizable and easy to use for many of us who loved Gnome, but who weren’t fans of the defaults chosen by the Gnome team upstream. Ubuntu even had to hack together desktop icon functionality back into the desktop after Gnome removed it. (Yes, desktop icons). This has become very commonplace in the Gnome world, as the defaults are often a contentious issue. And people go through all the work of fighting a broken theme and extension system anyway because Gnome has a TON of potential once the loose ends are tied.

It’s been the general direction of Gnome for years, and it’s stood as a bit of an outlier in the Linux community. A similar mentality happened with SystemD when the developers were starkly defensive of their ideals and were not open to outside input (To be fair, Systemd did a lot of stuff right and did a lot of work towards improving Linux performance. But they also made a lot of highly controversial changes and the devs were very notorious for being completely closed off to any kind of criticism or input from the Linux community). The general direction has been disappointing because Gnome 3 was a brave project in many respects that has done a lot of things right - and they’ve made perhaps the most unique mainstream desktop ever made. But they are also ignoring a lot of glaring requests from users and are making it harder to work with on each release. They’re increasingly working against customizeability and are increasingly forcing defaults and removing features, which has left much of the Linux community feeling frustrated.

I still love the concept and workflow of Gnome 3 once I’ve extended it a bit. I’ll probably continue to use Debian/Ubuntu for the time being, but I do hope that they reverse course and start listening to their users again with regards to customization. If not, it will eventually force some of their user base to jump ship.

What are your thoughts?

Going to go over the tools and separate them into hardware and software, needed and nice to have.

to Start with let's go with hardware you should absolutely have.

A Multimeter: any multimeter but one that can do circuit and component testing to look for broken circuits and traces at the very least, so even a cheap $20 one will do.

A grounding strap/Anti-static Wrist strap/anti-static mat: This one's also a no brainer, you need one because static electricity can fry sensitive components, less so now than in the past due to manufacturers hardening them against it but still a vital safety precaution.

A #1 and #2 Philips screwdriver: you need this at the minimum because most computers, and in fact most electronics use either the #2 or both the #1 and #2 Philips head screw driver

A flathead screwdriver: For prying off keyboard keys or carefully prying at panels that won't release, of course check for securing screws first.

A Decent Light source: another no brainer, get a good light, ideally a work lamp and a headlamp so you can see into the abyss that awaits inside.

A clean workspace: do I need to explain this one?

A screw tray or container to put screws in: Some people use ice cube trays, some use plastic bins, the classic is the magnetic screw tray which I primarily use however my toolkit comes with a nice organized screw tray built into the lid for fixing stuff when I'm not at home.

Nice to have.

A Decent Screwdriver kit: this one because it has everything you need for any electronic device

A logic probe: For reading the logic on circuits and to determine if the output of chips is faulty, or if something needs to be reprogrammed (like a bios).

An electronics workbench: It's not required but it should contain everything you need to fix anything electronic, from Soldering irons, multi-meters, and oscilloscopes to bench-top power supplies and shelves full of wires, components, and anything you could ever need to fix most anything, for everything else, there's amazon.

now for the Software.

you really only need your install media however there's an extra toolkit I'd like to talk about.

Hirens Boot CD: https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

This tool is insane, it has everything you could possibly need to diagnose a problem, remove a virus, repair a bugged OS, format drives, etc.

it's all free legal software and it's built on top of a version of windows 10 PE, I highly recommend running this tool if you're concerned about faulty ram, failing hard drives, or just want to do some data recovery, for everything else there's a linux variant.

As an alternative you can also grab the Ultimate Boot CD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

basically this is an ISO that contains a series of disk images, each one pertaining to different types of problems and containing everything you need to fix it, super useful if you want to get rid of a virus or problem that the above has failed at.

Both are super powerful and allow you to do everything from virus removal and debugging to hard drive recovery up to complete drive failure, (this is where you'd need your workbench... and some kind of air tight cleanroom in a box, for transferring disk platters.)

just load either one onto a flash drive and boot from it.

This is my new BMW S1000RR, Test drive made, super !!!  ,but unfortunately I have to wait until September 15th for delivery

   
   

So while I was setting up Pop! OS to do some software compiling I ran into a few issues.

the biggest of which was an error that looked like this: (NO_PUBKEY)

now what that means is either through network issues or other problems the public key for a repository to match the key to safeguard the repository is not available.

in my case it was because I needed the Xenial repositories for some libraries I need to compile stuff.

I tried a few different fixes but nothing worked so I went and tried the most manual and direct way short of going into they keychain and manually dropping it in there, provided i had the key...

I used the following Command, edited for the keys the error indicated I needed.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys THE_MISSING_KEY_HERE

you need to do this for each key missing but it works well, hopefully this will prove useful to people looking for how to fix this.

Anyone wanna play?

So for obvious reasons I'm going to keep it short and simple without going into detail on how to use these tools because they can be used for good or evil depending on who uses it and how, just examples of how they can be setup and how to detect them.

to start with wireshark is a popular packet capture and analysis tool, that's what it does, it allows you to capture and look at information on a network as it passes through a node you control.

the easiest way to set it up is to setup a computer as a proxy for the router (see check out the pi-hole firewall for instructions on that one).

once you have that computer setup as a proxy so all traffic goes through it you need to run wireshark, luckily this tool works on linux, mac, and windows so it can be any computer with a decent network card.  you can do this over wifi or ethernet, and this is commonly how a man in the middle attack works, by routing traffic through a device setup to monitor stuff.

there's detailed instructions on how to setup wireshark to do this on the web that do a much better job than I could at explaining it, but setting it up to monitor all packets is usually pretty straightforward, it can also be setup to filter and look for specific types of communication like emails or login requests.

now once you have it setup you often get two kinds of traffic, encrypted and unencrypted.

encrypted will often come out as a jumbled mess but unencrypted is usually plain text, this includes passwords, website traffic, p2p connections, emails, etc.

these days a lot of stuff is encrypted, it's why HTTPS is important because the S stands for Secure meaning the connection is encrypted against this sort of thing.

now this is useful for things like monitoring IP's for re-directs, locating anomalous traffic like Remote Admin tools, keyloggers, etc, and if you have kids it's an easy way to keep an eye on where they're going without needing to install software on their computer.

in the wrong hands it can also be used to spy and steal information like bank info, username/password entries, and emails.

There are other tools like it but wireshark is generally the most popular, usually in conjunction with other tools, such as the wifi pineapple for wireless interception, or setting up a raspberry pi or similar computer to sit between a computer and the network, as well as Remote admin tools and keyloggers to monitor information.
Getting into a place and setting up these tools is usually referred to as red-teaming, kinda like the real world equivalent to the oceans series of movies.

the good news is, it's usually pretty easy to catch these methods using a tool called tracert, now while this does require some familiarity with what you are connecting to a great way is to have a firewall or test box setup on your modem/router which you know the connection route to.

let's say your router is 10.0.0.1, your computer is 10.0.0.21, and your firewall/test box is 10.0.0.42.

your tracert should look like this.

tracert 10.0.0.42
hop 1 10.0.0.1 10ms
hop 2 10.0.0.42 10ms.

if instead it looks like this:

tracert 10.0.0.42
hop 1 10.0.0.1 10ms
hop 2 10.0.0.11 15ms
hop 3 10.0.0.1 15ms
hop 4 10.0.0.42 16ms.

then somebody is intercepting traffic.

similarly it would look like this if it's going through a switch before the router instead.

tracert 10.0.0.42
hop 1 10.0.0.1 10ms
hop 2 10.0.0.11 15ms
hop 3 10.0.0.42 15ms.

your mileage may vary but this is the basics in detecting this sorta thing since usually tracert/traceroute does exactly that, it sends tracer packets that report back the path they took to get to a destination, in windows 10 you need to install this tool as it's no longer included by default.

and there are ways to mask or prevent packets from reporting their path through a network but most don't go through the extra hassle to do this.

tracert/trace route is super handy to have and I often use it for other stuff like checking to see if an ISP has connection problems by seeing if it's been re-routed and thus slowing down the internet connection to say google or linux.com where I know it should be no more than 5 or 10 hops.

Edit: as a fun experiment, try connecting to a TOR node and running tracert to the other side of said node, it's a great way to see how many hops and connections it makes before surfacing from the subweb/deepweb and is a great example of a randomized/distributed proxychain.

My iPhone 8 served me well for three long years. Paid full price for it and it lasted through swimming pools, 130 degree cars, plenty of drops, and heavy use. But it finally gave out recently and I decided to replace it rather than spend over $200 to fix it. 

The iPhone 8 was about $700, and at the time, that was the best that $700 could buy. Apple has since raised the prices substantially. I ended up buying the most expensive phone I've ever bought and paid $830 upfront to buy the regular iPhone 12 (6.1 inch) directly from Apple. AT&T forced me to order it because they refused to sell me a phone without financing it. Apparently prepaid customers are discouraged from using high end devices, but prepaid cuts my bill roughly to 1/3 of what it would otherwise be, so I have no intentions of switching. 

I can confidently say that this is the best phone I've ever owned. The screen is absolutely amazing. It's an OLED, and it looks as though you're looking at a real paper when you're reading on the screen. It pops out and it's bright, and it supports full HDR. The phone itself is snappy and fast, the design is great, and the speakers are very loud and clear. The battery life is 13-14 hours (much better than claimed on paper), and the phone is overall highly polished. 

(It's worth noting that Androids have had OLED screens for years. For us Apple users, most of us are only recently finally able to experience them. )

There were some things that irked me a bit as well. Of course, Apple cheaped out and didn't even bother to include a charger in the box. They claim that this is for "environmental reasons" - but the included cable itself is a USB C -> lightning cable, obsoleting all of your old chargers anyway. The headphones are not in the box either, nor is the lightning -> 3.5mm converter. Apple pretty much just gives you the phone and a cable, and nothing else. $830 is a lot of money to be spending to not even get a charging brick.

Secondly, the ultrawide lens was noticeably subpar compared to the main lens and performed much more poorly in low light conditions. They no longer include the telephoto 2x zoom lens in their two-carmera phones, and force you to spend over $1000 on the pro if you want the same optical zoom that $800 used to be able to get you. They also included weird arbitrary restrictions again, such as only allowing 30fps HDR videos on the non-pro models (forcing you to pay more for 60fps), despite having the exact same hardware between both phones. The main lens on the iPhone 12 is still fantastic, and it takes incredible photos. But some of the more advanced features are largely restricted to the Pro.

Otherwise, I've been pretty impressed with it. I do want more freedom from a phone and will probably be switching to android sometime in the next few years, but this one will carry me for a little while, and it's definitely the most polished and advanced iPhone they've ever made. 

Anyone else have the new iPhone 12, or planning to get the 13 when it comes out? What are your thoughts?