THEY ARE ALL WEARING THE SAME GOD DAMN HELMET!

Thank you.

So, Mark Hoekstra of Geek Technique has died of a heart attack earlier this week, while riding his bike.

Shit.

Mark was a really huge inspiration to me, I absolutely loved the guy and his work. I really related to his love of SGI gear and various obsolete chunks of hardware. I read geek technique with almost religous, cheerful glee every update.

I can’t believe he’s gone, I truely am sad now. This really is sad day.

Turns out local administrators cannot elevate their privileges over the network, with UAC enabled.

Note that this doesn’t affect users in the Domain Admins group!

Now, you could do the dumb “neowin poweruser” thing and turn UAC off, or you could change this particular behavior in the registry. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And add a new DWORD named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1, and then reboot. It all should work.

Again, users with Domain Admin privileges are unaffected.

I used to use tethering with my previous Motorola phones via bluetooth, my Treo, and the many blackberries I have owned, and found it was fairly practical to be almost guaranteed internet access from my laptop no matter where I actually am. This enabled me to support clients no matter when, even while in transit between two cities, on a bus.

So, all that NetShare software did was set-up an HTTP proxy on the iPhone. This immediately sprung a lightbulb over my head, as there’s another way to accomplish just that, without the application, provided your iPhone is jailbroken.

The idea is to use SSH, and just tunnel stuff through it. Simple and effective.

First, jailbreak your iPhone and install OpenSSH on it. If you’re a Unix hacker and haven’t done that yet, please turn in your geek gard. Right now.

Second, set-up an ad-hoc wireless network on your laptop. On a mac, it would look like this:

I named the ad-hoc network the same as my laptop, and password protected it.

Next, join the newly created wireless network with your iPhone, and establish an SSH tunnel to it. You don’t actually have to set-up ip addresses and all, thanks to the magic of Bonjour/Avahi/Zeroconf. Just use youriphonename.local as the hostname to connect to. My iPhone is named Glitch. (My iPod Touch is named Copland. You win a cookie if you catch the reference). This means my iPhone would be found at “glitch.local”. If it was named Cookie, it would be “cookie.local”, and so on.

If you have iTunes installed on Windows, this will also work since it comes bundled with Bonjour. If not, you can download bonjour for windows here.

Establishing the tunnel would then go something like this:

ssh -D 7070 -N root@glitch.local

You can of course use PuTTY on Windows, or use plink.exe and the exact same line above.

Of course, replace “glitch.local” with whatever applies to you. Then, just point your browser to the newly created SOCKS proxy running on port 7070 of your local machine:

(Firefox)

(Safari/OS X)

Important note regarding Firefrox: Firefox is actually quite stubborn and likes to do it’s own name resolving. Since you’ll most likely have no working DNS servers available to you, you’ll need to have Firefox let the SOCKS proxy endpoint do the DNS resolution. This can be done by changing the value network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to True in about:config.

Then, restart Firefox. Once all of that is done, bang, you’re surfing the interwebs using your iPhone’s connection.

Now, I understand it is not a true tethering solution, but NetShare isn’t that either. I could probably tunnel a PPP link inside SSH, too, but that sounded a bit overcomplicated to me.

For applications that don’t support SOCKS proxying, just use tsocks.

So there you have it.

So, for this to happen, after correctly adding your ISAPI Filter to your IIS site, enabling it, creating the virtual directory it requires if necessary, etc, you must create an Application Pool for it, or modify the default. You can do this by expanding your server in IIS Manager, and selecting Application Pools.

Once there, select the pool you want to modify, right click on it, and select “Advanced Settings“, and set “Enable 32-Bit Applications” to True. You might also want to select No Managed Code if that Pool is to be used exclusively by your ISAPI binary.

Also note that you can change a bunch of lovely settings there, such as processor affinity.

So, once this is done, your pool will be allowed to spawn a WOW64 environnement for the filter, and it will most likely run fine after that.

The pictures above don’t do justice to its beauty. It’s just gorgeous.
What I like, save the awesome steampunk or neo-victorian look, is that the watch is entirely mechanical, which only adds to its charm. And now, I can be hit with an EMP blast, and still tell the time! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go back to pretending I’m a neo-victorian, and that this watch just came out of the matter compiler.

So, you know, there are times where you’re just tired as fuck, worn out, and you don’t feel like cooking. At all. When these times come around, you eat junk. Or at least, toast.

Well, this is my junk food:

Crisp iceberg lettuce with shredded shrimp and mayonnaise, avocado, palmtree hearts with a dash of balsamic vinegar, vegetable crispers with strong crackerbarrel cheese and pepper paté.

The sad thing is, I had plenty of junk available in the pantry, I just decided that this would be a quickly-done-meal.

I must be getting older.

Mitigating factors are that the camera is really awesome, and also that I got root on it, voiding my warranty a mere fifteen minutes after unboxing it.

You’re basically engaging into a form of post-purchase masturbation, where you sit in almost religious contemplation, envelopped in a smug sentiment of confidence in your purchase, and how much joy it has brought you.

You then obviously want to repeat the experience with a friend, who will confirm how right you were in your purchase, and perhaps be inspired to get one too, so you can fill countless hypothetical conversations with how much it rocks, over dinners or perhaps even funerals.

But there’s always this sceptical friend of yours who makes a weird face when you showcase the object of your affection to him, who brings his face closer to your giant cinema display as to physically show that he’s making an honest effort to understand what the fuck you’re on about. And you stand there with eyes glistering, still trying to save the day, asking a rethorical question in such a way that it would make any Philosophy major cringe and instantly able to sand down coarse wood with the goosebumps he’s getting: “Is it not more awesome?! Isn’t it the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?”

You obviously know he doesn’t share your appreciation for the chunk of hardware you just blew 600$ on, yet you still hope he’s just not seeing it yet. So you keep pointing out how things are better looking, crisper, much more fluid and polished as the previous version, but you lose conviction with every word.

Then the verdict comes down. And then you remember that any sentence prefixed with an apology invariably spells bad news for you.

“I’m sorry. I don’t see it at all, it looks just the same on my system at home.“

The emphasis is mine. You don’t feel ready to question your own first impression, write your excitement off as mere placebo effect, and return your purchase, enshrouded in its new plastic scent for proper burial and a muscled application of the “15 days satisfaction guaranteed” rule involving the explosive combination of manager, making a loud, obnoxious scene, and bystanders for witnesses.

The logic behind this is simply that the system at home the friend refers to in his verdict is a piece of shit Acer machine bought three years ago. That’s god damned aeons in IT time.

The other factor involved is the fact that he has a refurbished CRT monitor, and you use your long standing friendship as an excuse not to describe him as a fucking savage.

So you go on and assume that there’s a possibility that he’s simply jealous of your new purchase. So you keep probing a bit, until you reach the alarming conclusion that he really doesn’t see it.

When the friend realises that he has offended you in some way, he usually backs off with an excuse such as “Oh, maybe I just forgot what it looked like on my machine!”.

But it’s too late. It’s nice of him to try to patch things up, but operation mutual masturbation has failed miserably.

The reason why I’m bringing this up is because, more to the point, most of my friends don’t see the difference between SDTV and HDTV. And that infuriates me.

See, I have a 1080p HDTV set. I have a BluRay player. I also have a shitty sound system but I don’t really care about that. So when I play Apocalypto, on BD, don’t tell me you don’t see the difference with normal TV. It’s not like you’re watching a movie, it’s more akin to looking outside the window, only to find Maya people in your backyard.

When I change channels to Discovery HD on the Illico HD PVR, don’t tell me it’s the same. It’s so crisp and clear, you feel like you’ve been blind for the past few years (and it’s only 720p!).

Whenever I watch the hockey game on RDS HD (which Montreal won 5 to 0 against Boston yesterday, by the way. Pftblbl!), I can see the scars skates have inflicted upon the ice ring, I can see the fucking razor burn on Claude Julien’s face.

I always use Apocalypto to showcase BluRay and HD in general, crank the output to 1080p, fire up the movie, and let the first few minutes roll. Then I jump to the temple scenes, where colors are vibrant, and the image is so crisp you get to see every single detail on the Mayan ladies with jade teeth, and then you have no choice but to actually believe in it. It’s a really nice, immersive experience.

So I did just that the other day, hoping to disprove the myth that HD is just some kind of gimmick once and for all, for the lady.

Once the temple sequence was done, I looked up at her expectantly, my arms outstretched towards the LCD television, grinning like a madman. She just squinted for a while. Then her head swayed from left to right, reminiscent of a bobblehead figure. The verdict came down.

“Yeah… I guess It’s sort of better. But I don’t have my glasses.”