Posted May 24th, 2013, in: Evil Robots

The Evil Robots are Calling! A new form of spam.
Robots are scanning Craigslist for phone numbers and leaving voicemails that are based merely on the generic category of the craigslist ad.  In this case, it’s the automotive sales section, although I’m not selling a car.  But notice the voicemail is as if I am.  No one read my ad.  As with blog comment spam, if there’s n mention of anything specific to your actual ad, it’s probably a robot.

Here’s the message: voicemail.mp3

Actual Message Transcript:

Hi, My name is Michael and I work for Once Driven. The number here is (855) 844-2646. Uhh, we’ve got some clients who are shopping for vehicles, and I’m going through a list of vehicles like yours. I’d like to find out more about it and, um,  tell you little bit more about what we can do to help you get it sold. Uh, there’s a small fee for the service. It’s well worth it. I’ll tell you about it when you call. We do guarantee the results. So give me a call before 5 today. Uh, the number is (855) 844-2646. Have a great day.

In my opinion, we should penalize companies for using this technique for marketing purposes for two reasons

1. It’s against the craigslist’s code of conduct

2. It’s simply annoying.

So to oncedriven.com, you guys suck for spamming me when you have nothing to offer me and my ad says it’s NOT OK to contact me with other services.  I hope this post effects your SEO and public images in the way you have earned!

Google Voice’s Transcipt (for fun):

Hi, My name is Michael and I work for one street in the number here is (855) 844-2646 we’ve got some clients were shopping for a vehicles. And I’m going through a list of vehicles like yours. I’d like to find out more about it and tell you little bit more about what we can do to help you get it sold. There’s a small piece of the service It’s well worth it. I’ll tell you about it when you call and wedo guarantee the results. So give me a call before 5 today. The number is (855) 844-2646. Have a great day.

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Posted May 23rd, 2013, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Old Macs

Recently helped a friend with redoing the connections to the DC in on her old-ass Mac, a 12-inch G4 Powerbook.

After reassembly, the damn thing beeped three times as if there was bad RAM or “No Good RAM Sockets”

This was not the case.  Actually, there was simply a key stuck.  I mashed all the keys a few times and the thing came back to life!  I have no idea what key or keys caused this.  But before you have yourself convinced you fried your RAM or Logic Board, do yourself a favor and give your keyboard a massage!

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Posted May 18th, 2013, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

Good mechanics are hard to find, not necessarily as far as the quality of the work goes, but in the honesty sense.  Most shops I’ve been to will find some bullshit excuse to strong-arm you into authorizing more work than you need.

Gary at ATA Auto Repair in Santa Rosa has got to be the most sincere mechanic ever.  I took my car in for a DMV Brake and Lamp Inspection/certificate because there’s only a few places in town that do it, and because when I called, Gary quoted me a lower price than the other two shops in the area that do it and he also said that if I fail the test because some little thing needs to be tweaked, he would charge me only a small partial fee to sign off on that bit of the inspection once the issue is resolved.  The other places were really clear that I’d have to pay full price again if I didn’t pass for some reason (like say, I need to slightly tighten my parking brake cable, a five-minute fix).

Anyway, despite thinking I was totally prepared for the inspection, it turned out that one of my headlight lenses was a little too foggy to sign off on and my license plate lights were either out, or had crawled up inside their little holes.  Gary actually called me to tell me that he’d have to buff my headlight lense to get it clear enough, which would cost me $20.  I’m pretty sure most shops would have told me I needed to replace the entire plastic lens piece, a much more expensive way to go.  And I don’t think he even charged me for the license plate light bulb replacement.

He got everything up to snuff, with no surprises and when I was $12 short on the cash to pay him (it’s been a tight week financially lol), he actually told me I could go ahead and take the car if I promise to bring him the $12 another day!  Jeez.  I didn’t think there were people out there anymore that did that sort of thing, especially auto shops and especially since I never met him before.

The shop looks a little bit junky, which worried me at first.  But in the end, I’ve decided that this is my guy.  I’m going to recommend him to everyone I know.  That’s why I decided to post this.  I don’t think they’ve even got a website.

(Hey Gary, if you read this, I’ll build an awesome website for you for practically nothing… That’s what I do for money)

ATA Auto Repair
1540 Petaluma Hill Rd, Santa Rosa, CA 95404
Phone:(707) 575-7316

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Posted May 7th, 2013, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology

toy. You can select any note, and the chord form you want at the same time.

I just spent about two hours downloading and trying various apps that play chords.

I write music.  And I recently came across a cheap toy at a thrift shop that plays chords (Major, Minor, Seventh and Minor-Seventh, a fairly limited election, but impressive for a children’s toy), and is chromatic (it has the letter names, but also has sharp/flat buttons).

This is an amazing tool for writing chord progressions!

If your a musician of modest capabilities, like myself, you’ll find that you tend to gravitate toward certain habits: certain types of chords, certain finger positions, the preferred/easy keys for the instrument you’re working with Etc.

AppliChord. First you have to select the note. Second you select the chord type. Two clicks!!!

With this toy I have, which sounds like total shit, but is in tune, you can randomly explore chord combinations by pressing a note letter name with one finger, and a chord type with another finger. I wrote several beautiful chord progressions with this cheap piece of junk within the first two days of having it.  The ability to explore, guess and find novel chord combinations, despite the preferences and weaknesses of your abilities and instrument, is invaluable!

Anyway, this thing sounds like garbage.  So off to the iOS App Store I went.  After trying dozens of apps, the closest I came to finding a tool that allows musical exploration like my toy does is an app called AppliChord. It gives you a list of notes on the left (chromatic), and a list of chord types on the right.  But here’s the thing:

It doesn’t let you select both at the same time! You can’t jump from Cmin7 to B7 in one two-thumb gesture.  I want to cry.  I want a tool that does this so bad!

AppliChord person/people:  PLEASE help me!!

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Posted April 25th, 2013, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

OK so here’s what the “Manual Settings” page at Bluehost doesn’t say.

You have to go to Account Information>>Outgoing Mail Server>>Edit SMTP Server List…

“Edit SMTP Server List” to change the outgoing mail server’s port to 26

[select yours..."box123.bluehost.com"]

Click on the advanced tab and check off  ”Use Custom Port” and set it to 26. (no SSL)

This is where you set the Outgoing Mail Server’s Port… I’ve noticed that sometimes the Password on this settings page doesn’t stay… So double check that it’s still there if you still are having trouble sending mail.

  Then Quit Mail! and reopen it.

This is how your main Account Information screen should look in Mail’s Preferences

This is how the Advanced Tab should look

…Anyway, here’s what settings are working for me:
Manual Settings
Mail Server Username: name@yourdomain.com
Incoming Mail Server: box123.bluehost.com port 143 (server requires password authentication) (no SSL)
Outgoing Mail Server:  box123.bluehost.com (server requires password authentication) port 26 (no SSL)

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Posted April 13th, 2013, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Technology| WordPress

First off, Here’s Matt Mullenweg‘s blurb about the recent botnet attacks on WordPress sites.  It’s good to listen to him because he’s the “founding developer” of WordPress, and the President of the company Automatic which is behind wordpress.com, among other things.

http://ma.tt/2013/04/passwords-and-brute-force/

From Matt:

supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours)

I’ve been noticing a few popular shared hosting providers have been having infrastructure problems lately.  I thought it was a coincidence, but after attempting to do some work on a client’s site hosted at Fatcow (not my favorite host, but they’re OK), I got hip to the fact there is actually a bit of internet-wide drama going on at the moment with WordPress sites getting hacked, or at least many attempts at this.

Here’s a message Fatcow sent out to its customers.

Important Information about Protecting Your WordPress Site

Dear [customer's name],

Do you have a WordPress account with us? If so, we wanted to let you know about an attack on WordPress sites that started earlier this week, what we’ve done to combat it, and what you can do to protect yourself.

On Tuesday, a widespread “brute force” attack against WordPress started impacting sites across the internet. This attack is leveraging a botnet, which looks to have more than one hundred thousand different computers at its disposal. Its intent is very simple: to find and compromise WordPress sites with simple passwords, likely to use them later to distribute malware (and further increase the size of the botnet).

Over the past few days, we’ve made a number of changes to our network and infrastructure designed to mitigate the impact of this attack on our customers’ websites. Continue reading for a detailed account of what we’ve done »

Also, and we can’t stress this enough, we urge you to check your WordPress password and make sure it’s a strong one. The strong password guidelines in our Knowledgebase refer to your FatCow account password, but that advice is good for WordPress passwords, too!

We head into the weekend in good shape, but vigilant against a returning or altered attack. For those of you who have been impacted by these attacks, or our attempts to combat them, we do apologize for any service disruption. We also apologize for a longer-than-normal response time over the last few days while we’ve had “all hands on deck” addressing this issue. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

The FatCow Team

Bottom Line: Harden your WordPress site a little.

• Keep your WordPress Core software and plugins and themes up to date!
• Use Capitals, Lowercase, Numbers and Symbols in your passwords… Avoid guessable/dictionary words
• If you have a user called “Admin” or “admin,” take a moment to get rid of it.
• If installing from scratch, modify your database table prefix in wp-config.php to something other than “wp_”
• Never use any theme, plugin or hosting provider that forces you into leaving folder and file permissions set to be permanently extra lenient (if someone tells you to change a directory to 777, they don’t know what they’re doing or your hosting provider’s server settings are wack…)
• Stay on top of comment moderation.  If you find yourself with thousands of unmoderated comments waiting for approval, and you don’t want to do the work, perhaps you’re not cut out for participating in that way with the masses, or you just don’t have the time.  Just turn comments off!

There are TONS of free plugins that can help you scrutinize your WordPress install.  I use this from time to time: WP Security Scan.

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Posted March 24th, 2013, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

To the Best of  Our Knowledge makes it nearly impossible to find out about the music they use.

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Posted March 2nd, 2013, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

“Default” on AMOK sounds almost like a NIN song.

There’s nothing more obvious to me in pop music than this.  They are a perfect match, at least musically…

Who knows if they’d get along with each other as people, but who gives a shit.  They could telecommute with each other and prolly come out with one of the most epic albums in rock n roll history!  Press would be easy (two of the most influential people in music right now collaborating)

DO THIS, you guys.  The blogs are telling you to. At least mine is.

I think Thom Yorke would benefit from the Reznor treatment… And I think after hearing how to destroy angels and loving the shot out of it, that Reznor should do more colaborations.

Good luck.  Invite me to the grammy ceremony!

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Posted December 14th, 2012, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology| WordPress

One of my clients has been using a theme by Woo called Delegate for a few years.  We recently encountered an issue where the home page slider stopped working, resulting in its contents just being empty and the navigation buttons only resulting in a # added to the end of the URL.

Here’s what I learned.

1. in the theme’s folder, in /includes/theme-actions.php,  ~line 84, there is a section of code that starts with an html comment <!– Slider Setup –>… This is followed by a script that is set with PHP to only load if the current page “is_home” like this<script type=”text/javascript”>
   <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?> …Now, despite what this sounds like it means, is_home actually refers to your main posts page, so if you have a static front page in Settings>>Reading, this will return false.  Alter this conditional tag as follows to make the slider setup script run on your non-posts-page homepage.<script type=”text/javascript”>
   <?php if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) { ?> …the “||” basically means “or” so now the conditional tag reads ‘if is main posts page or static front page’
2. in the theme’s folder, in /includes/theme-js.php,  ~line 4, there is another instance of the conditional tag “is_home” that loads two Javascript files into the <head> of the html… This also needs to be changed if you’re using a static front page.if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) {
   wp_enqueue_script( ‘jqueryEasing’, get_template_directory_uri() . ‘/includes/js/jquery.easing.min.js’, array( ‘jquery’ ) );
   wp_enqueue_script( ‘slides’, get_template_directory_uri() . ‘/includes/js/slides.min.jquery.js’, array( ‘jquery’ ) );
   } 
3. Since we were using a custom page template that didn’t come with the theme (essentially a copy of index.php, but some modifications), we also needed to update the page template file, copying the new version of the slider’s activation from the new version of index.php<!– Featured Slider –>
   <?php if ( get_option( ‘woo_slider_disable’ ) != ‘true’ ) { get_template_part( ‘includes/slider’ ); } ?>
   <!– Featured Slider end –>

That’s basically it.  Keep in mind that updating the Woo Framework will likely overwrite these alterations, so back them up!!

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Posted December 1st, 2012, in: Evil Robots| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Scam Email Mashups

Enough said.

My friend used prweb to do a press release and was contacted by someone at asseenontvproductions.com and offered a chance to PAY $10, 00o in order to market their product.  BULLSHIT!  This is totally not real.

Don’t make the mistake of believing that asseenontvproductions.com is the same as asseenontv.com. It is not.

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