Another day, another site hacked
I got this email this morning. Seems LinkedIn got hacked again. According to another site, the 117 million accounts were comprised. Although Linked-In recommends changing passwords, I fail to see how changing our passwords would prevented 117 million counts from being stolen in the first place or stop any future hacks. For any online presence, everyone should at least have a strong password that is unique for EVERY site. Praying also might help.
LG Cloud, I barely knew you.
I've been using a LG G4 Android phone for a months now. One nice app they included is the LG Bridge app. On Windows, it allows you to backup and restore the data from your phone to your PC. It also allowed you to backup your phone data to the LG cloud. The main reason why I never used it is because I thought backups would probably take forever. It already takes 10 of minutes to backup to the PC via a USB cable. The other reason I didn't use the app is that I thought LG would eventually discontinue the service. Its not like they are making money hand over fist like Apple. Why would they give away free space?
In less than a year of owning the G4, I received this letter from LG. As of Sept 1, 2016, LG plans to turn off cloud storage of backup data and delete all my data. Not surprised. They should have never even bothered offing this service anyway. When will companies learn?
Which is an indispensable utility in Unixes. For years, I wondered why Windows doesn't have a similar utility. Found out today, it does. Its called where. Man I feel stupid.
I've just started playing with Python again. Figured I update all my tools, including PyCharm which happens to be an excellent IDE BTW. I noticed the checksum for the PyCharm executable but never knew of any Windows program to generate checksums. I did some Googling and found out that Windows already has a tool built-in: certutil. Wonderful.
To generate a SHA256 checksum for a file, all you need to do is is use -hashfile give it the file name and then specify the hash scheme. For example:
d:\certutil -hashfile pycharm-community-2016.1.exe SHA256
SHA256 hashof file pycharm-community-2016.1.exe:
3c b3 39 66 02 aa 0c 57 06 48 9e af 16 6b 4f 52 be 78 5b d7 17 da d5 49 21 20 f3 e4 de 25 91 cb
CertUtil: -hashfile command completed successfully.
Kill me already.
Been cleaning up my hard drive and came across a strange problem. No matter what I did, I could not delete some directories. The "Item Not Found" box kept popping up. I can rename the files but I couldn't delete it. I tried chkdsk with many, many options many, many times but it couldn't find the problem. The only thing that worked was a little tool called DelinvFile. I don't know how it works, but it just works. If your are stuck in a similar problem, try it out.
Building a "Drone" is fun and easy once you get the basics down. This is the first episode in a series with the goal to build a general purpose "learner" quadcopter in the FAA registration exempt 250 gram class.
Drone Building 101
If you own a Roku box and ever searched around for content, you've probably come across the Revision3 channel. Other than the Ben Heck Show, I never watched any of the shows like Hak5 because of the super silly names or the boring "me too" tech reviews. Recently, I rediscovered Hak5 on my podcast player and I couldn't be more wrong.
Many of the shows really contain nuggets of useful information on interesting topics like software defined radio and virtual machines servers. Recently, they are doing a series of episodes on scratch building drones. The first episode discuses the overall process while future episodes will focus in on specific components. Enjoy!
My brand spankin' new Toshiba X300 5TB drive.
I've need more storage for my computer. Currently, I have two Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives in a software mirror configuration for my vital "data." I figured having a level of redundancy would buy me some time before needing backups. Unfortunately, its been reported that Seagate Barracuda 3 TB drives have been failing like crazy. Although I don't own the same exact model reported but what happens if both my drives fail because of a systemic manufacturing flaw? What to do? Go to Micro Center!
I picked up a Toshiba X300 5TB drive for $139.99 which includes a $50 discount. Amazing. I don't think you can get a better deal than that at this moment. I paid $103 for my 3 TB Seagate a little over a year ago.
How well does the Toshiba drive perform compared to my Seagate Barracudas? Pretty darn well. In single queue and thread reads, the Toshiba does well. On multiple queue and threads reads it does worst. On all modes of writes, Toshiba is killing it. Its 62% faster on single queue and thread 4K writes. Toshiba is just killing it.
How well does this Toshiba drive perform against my Intel 730 Series SSD drive. Not well at all. That's to be expected.
Toshiba X300 5TB drive
Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive
Intel 730 Series 480 GB drive
Waste of money.
I finally completed the MOOC from Columbia on Machine Learning for Data Science and Analytics and received my verified certificate. I didn't mention this in my past post, but in the end I did decide to register for the verified course. I was hoping it would improve. As you can see, I think it was a total waste.
This was by far THE worst and THE most expensive MOOC I've ever taken. There was no math or any programming. I did learn some information on interesting topics like genetics and depression etc but that's about it. Nothing that was discussed about machine learning went beyond the superficial. No a single formula on linear regression or logistic regression. Not even a discussion on the differences between SVN or Neural Networks. This was really a waste of my time. I regret paying $99.