Category Archives: Geek

Anything IT related (which is most things I say) :-)

Leave them kids alone!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Jethro Carr

I’ve been reading a disturbing number of articles lately advocating and promoting software solutions for the monitoring of children’s smartphones and computers. I don’t have too much issue with children having software on their computers for filtering access to the … Continue reading →

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National Bank SSL Cert Fail

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Got to wonder about your bank when they manage to upload the wrong SSL certificate to one of their webservers. :-/ Every sysadmin has their bad day, but I would have thought a bank would have had a bit more … Continue reading →

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Porting to 2degrees

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Having been a long-suffering victim of poor experiences with performance on Vodafone’s data network in NZ and expensive pricing, I’ve now shifted to NZ’s third and youngest mobile provider, 2degrees. Two major incentives – firstly unhappiness at Vodafone’s 3G data … Continue reading →

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Introducing Smokegios

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Having a reasonably large personal server environment of at least 10 key production VMs along with many other non-critical, but still important machines, a good monitoring system is key. I currently use a trio of popular open source applications: Nagios … Continue reading →

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Google Search & Control

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Jethro Carr

I’ve been using Google for search for years, however it’s the first time I’ve ever come across a DMCA takedown notice included in the results. Possibly not helped by the fact that Google is so good at finding what I … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Paranoia Justified

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Jethro Carr

It’s human nature to be friendly and trusting, we want to assume people are generally good, and we want to help out others where we can. However this makes us prime for social engineering attacks – from calling up pretending … Continue reading →

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Mozilla Firefox “Pin as App”

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Jethro Carr

In a moment of madness, I decided to RTFM the latest Mozilla Firefox Feature List and came across this nifty ability called “Pin as App”. It’s pretty handy, I’m using it to maintain tabs of commonly access websites or web … Continue reading →

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Incur the Wrath of Linux

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Jethro Carr

Linux is a pretty hardy operating system that will take a lot of abuse, but there are ways to make even a Linux system unhappy and vengeful by messing with available resources. I’ve managed to trigger all of these at … Continue reading →

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Mozilla Collusion

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Jethro Carr

This week Mozilla released an add-on called Collusion, an experimental extension which shows and graphs how you are being tracked online. It’s pretty common knowledge how much you get tracked online these days, if you just watch your status bar … Continue reading →

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Mozilla Sync Server RPMs

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Jethro Carr

A few weeks ago I wrote about the awesomeness that is Mozilla’s Firefox Sync, a built-in feature of Firefox versions 4 & later which allows for synchronization of bookmarks, history, tabs and password information between multiple systems. (historically known as … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments