Crossover 404K – Unboxing and First Impressions

Here’s Part 1 in a three two part series of videos covering the Crossover 404K and off-brand Korean monitors in general.

It’s nothing fancy, but somehow I spent 20 minutes unboxing this thing. And yes, I did edit it down. So put on your best tray of popcorn, and hold onto nothing at all for this mildly unexciting voyage into a 40 inch “4K” (actually UHD) monitor.

Thanks in advance for watching, and please subscribe to make me feel better about what I’m doing with my life to catch the next videos in the series!

Digital Juice Sound Effects Library File Renamer

digital_juice_by_tappy

What’s this for?? I have some Digital Juice SFX library DVD files from circa 2006 or some such. The DVDs contained tons of small WAV and MP3 files of sound effects, foley and music. They’re meant to be accessed with Digital Juice’s Juicer app, which contains all the metadata. I lost the DVDs a while ago, but had already copied them to my file server. The problem is that I don’t want to use the Juicer app. I have a bunch of other sound libraries, and want to be able to search them all at once. Unfortunately the sound files on the DVDs are all named generically, such as 00293_SFX.wav, which is pretty useless. My savior I did a quick … Continue reading

DIY Motion Control Camera Slider

Motion Control Slider - YouTube Featured Image 01

Introductory Video This video is and introduction of my motion control slider project, showing the basics of what it can do and how it’s used. Time Lapse Assembly Video I figured that I’d record the entire assembly process of the MC slider from start to finish. This video shows about 24 hours of real time in 15 minutes, and in it I discuss some of the problems I faced and design choices I made. Feedback If you’ve got any comments or random abuse to hurl, please post it here on the ol’ blog. Seriously, I’d appreciate any and all suggestions and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. As promised in the videos, various downloads and a parts … Continue reading

Microsoft Web Deploy – Bad Application, or the Worst Application?

Down load Microsoft Web Deploy to your toilet today!

Background I’m migrating a bunch of corporate websites hosted on Win2k8 and IIS7 to a new server running exactly the same. I’m sticking with the same environment because there are some things I really don’t want to risk breaking — we just needed faster hardware and more spindles. I figured I’d use MS Web Deploy 3.5 to move all the IIS settings from one server to the other (a task that was gloriously simple in IIS6). Web Deploy adds the following option to the IIS Manager context menus for the server and individual sites: It looks great! Simple and straightforward. Export or import. Indeed it’s a simple interface. I wanted to export everything, so I chose to deploy from the … Continue reading

Making ejabberd 14.12 work with Microsoft Windows Active Directory LDAP

Wireshark tcpdump LDAP example

Why ejabberd? My office uses Google Talk for intra-employee instant messaging. This Monday all users got a broadcast message from Google saying that the Google Talk desktop client will cease working on February 15. (Though this may be an old automated notification from when Google was threatening to EOL Talk last February.) Update (2015-03-09): They finally did kill Talk for Windows as of February 23, 2015. Of course we can’t take the risk of Google actually shutting down our IMs, and I personally don’t like the new Hangouts Chrome app. Moreover, we want to limit employees to only messaging other people in our organization. We also don’t necessarily want Google being a party to all of our communication. That means … Continue reading

Sprint / Netgear 6100D 4G Antenna Installation (Video)

What’s all this, then?

Back in August I reviewed the Netgear 6100D from Sprint and followed up with a post detailing some advanced configuration options.

The Video

I also installed a flat panel 4G antenna from 4G Antenna Shop. I made a video detailing the unboxing and installation (which I just got around to editing together):

It’s my first video of this sort, so if you have any feedback please let me know in the YouTube comments or by email!

4G Antenna Shop

I didn’t get into it in the video, but overall I’d recommend 4G Antenna Shop. The cable and antenna I got were both of very high quality and definitely worth the price.

Their customer service was great; I had a couple of questions about my order, and one of their guys (Robert) got back to me within 15 minutes and was extremely helpful. They shipped really quickly, too.

I did have two minor issues, both of which I talk about in the video:

During checkout they give you the option of selecting your device so that they can provide the correct adapters to go from the cable (if you order it through them) to the device. At the time I’d ordered, they had an option for “Netgear Sprint Spark LTE”, which I thought was the Netgear 6100D. There was no separate option for the 6100D, but it turned out that they were referencing a different product, and so I received the wrong adapters. (They’ve since added the 6100D as an option.)

I chalked this up to being mostly my fault, as I didn’t know that there was another Netgear LTE device out there for Sprint Spark.

My other issue was with the packing job. Again, it’s a minor complaint because nothing was damaged, but the box arrived pretty beaten up with holes in the top from the antenna mount having poked through. There was no packing material to keep the box rigid, and the antenna and cable were just sorta rattling around inside.

Bear with Me…

Oh, and sorry if I rambled on a bit in the video. If you couldn’t tell from a lot of my other posts on here, I have an aversion to brevity. :)

I’m hoping to get some more how-to and instructional videos out there in 2015, so please subscribe to my YouTube channel!

(Hey, I’m allowed to shill for myself, right?)

Bash “Shellshock” Bug – Quick Vulnerability Test and Patch

Shellshock

This is not meant as a comprehensive guide to the Bash “shell shock” bug, but as a quick reference to test and patch for the vulnerability. First, test your version of Bash with this line: env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c “echo this is a test” If you get the world “vulnerable” in your output then you need to update Bash: vulnerable this is a test If your output contains errors followed by “this is a test”, then your Bash version is not vulnerable: bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt bash: error importing function definition for `x’ this is a test Check to see if your distribution has an updated/fixed version of Bash available in its repository. … Continue reading

Integrating Bullhorn with Exchange 2003 Using Journaling and Forwarding

Bullhorn vs. Exchange

Bullhorn vs. Exchange 2003 One of the companies for which I manage IT uses Bullhorn’s applicant tracking software for their recruitment workflow. That company also uses the now-ancient Exchange 2003 for their email. But, Bullhorn doesn’t officially support integration with Exchange 2003. What’s involved? First off, “integration” is a strong word. It implies that our servers will pass information back and forth and stay in some meaningfully synchronized state. That’s not the goal in this case. The integration simply consists of passing all emails that are sent and received by our recruiters to Bullhorn’s servers. Once Bullhorn receives the emails, they’re parsed and can be viewed in the Activity Center and/or under the contact record to which they apply (using … Continue reading

Netgear LG 6100D Sprint LTE Gateway – Advanced Configuration

Netgear 6100D Native GUI Backup and Restore Settings

Man, oh man! I was getting frustrated with my new 6100D LTE gateway from Sprint. In fact, I posted a very long rant about it yesterday. This post is all about solutions. Really, it’s about one very big solution: http://[Netgear 6100D Address]/index.asp What is that? Oh, not much, just the native Netgear configuration GUI. It has about ten times the feature set of Sprint’s half-baked GUI. Seriously. Already have a problem? This didn’t happen to me at first, but I must have triggered some state within the 6100D that causes this screen to appear when returning to the Netgear GUI after having used the Sprint GUI: If you find yourself redirected to this utterly pointless landing page, just change the … Continue reading

Netgear LG 6100D LTE Gateway for Sprint Review – Bad Device, or the Worst Device?

Netgear Joke 9000

I recently obtained a Netgear LG6100D LTE Gateway from Sprint as a backup for my hard internet connections. The device seemed perfect on paper: Cellular connectivity for the home or business network! I’ve used some bad consumer routers in my day, but this is one of the worst I’ve encountered. Or maybe it’s that it looked so promising at first and then let me down so hard. Update (2014-08-26): I found that you can access the native Netgear web GUI. It has a heck of a lot more features, and solves many of the complaints I have with the “correct” way of configuring this device. Upon logging in the user interface is clean, fairly informative, and I noticed that the … Continue reading