Safe ads: “Just come cut the door off, need concrete saw, only after 11:30pm”

2 minutes, 14 seconds

I was thinking about getting a safe for the house. Or, maybe, if you’re a thief reading this and as well as my facebook page, I should say I’m thinking of upgrading my safe! So, first I checked out a few on Amazon. OK, $150 gets you a nice safe. But wait! Wouldn’t craigslist be the way to go instead? If it hasn’t been broken into, isn’t a used safe just as good as new safe? In a word, yes, but there’s a few interesting tidbits.

First off, the word “safe” doesn’t really get you much when you search at craigslist for it. Second off, there’s some probably-legit-but-very-shady-looking ads for safes. It’s these ads that prompted this post. The italics text is mine, added for what I think is missing from the ad:

SAFE DOOR -33 x 66 – $4000 – $5,000.00 — OR BEST OFFER — SARGENT & GREENLEAF SAFE DOOR — THE SOLID STEEL DOOR IS 33″ WIDE X 66″ HIGH X 5″ THICK.– You remove and haul away.– Fork lift available to load it onto your truck.– If interested, we can talk about the door caseing, that would need to be saw cut out of the concrete. We don’t have the key and we don’t know the owner, so it is Probably best if you don’t look in the safe when you cut off the door. Please be able to cut the door off in less that 8.18 minutes.

Also, which is it $4000, or $5000 to haul away your door?

Deposit Safe – $400 – Amsec security deposit safe, in great shape. Safe has an electronic combination pad. the safe is locked and I have not had a chance to have my lock guy figure the combo yet. I may be finding more of these safes I also don’t know the combo to, nor know what’s in them. I’ll be selling them by how loud they rattle.

Finally, this last actually looks pretty legit as well as cool. If I had a lot of space, a bigger budget and a big-ass truck, I’d consider it. However, the “when to pick it up” part set off my shady alarm. Use of “recently penetrated”, “I turn over [safes]” and military time, no inline bolding needed:

SAFE FOR SALE – $300 – I am a locksmith and safe tech in the San Francisco Bay Area – and I am always coming across used safes that I penetrate and turn over.

Along those lines, I recently penetrated an old Herring Hall Marvin safe that is down in San Francisco.

I cannot remember the exact dimensions, but as soon as I get them, I will update this post. But this I can tell you, the inside shelves and upper compartments are completely removeable, and the INSIDE HEIGHT is approximately 35″ inches tall.

The safe is on the ground level, and you can park right in front of the place when you come to pick it up. The catch is that it is a restaurant, so you can only pick up the safe BEFORE or after business hours, which is approximately 2330 hours. (11:30 PM).

On Bart signs

0 minutes, 54 seconds

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Check out this BART sign. Recently, I think, they added then bike status (none bikes during rush hour). Super handy!  However, what is not so handy is the rest of the sign info. A bit ago the signs started to show when say the next two Fremont trains we’re coming :

Fremont  1min, 21min

This is not helpful. What is the use case of you standing on the platform and needing to catch a Fremont train but not the very soonest one? Right, none really, or edge case at best.

I think what would be useful would be to always have the next train arriving at the bottom of screen. Even better would be to go all CNN and have a news ticker style of the next trains. This would alleviate waiting for all the “cameras are not a guarantee against crime ” messages to scroll by while you wait to see when your training is gonna arrive.

I spent a few minutes under a sign trying to count how many pixels there is to work with, but my train came too soon. I did see that there is about 9×5 per letter at the smallest font size. Any designers out there wanna take a crack at a redesign?

404er Legit and WordPress community kudos

0 minutes, 30 seconds

Remember way back when we posted 404er? Well, good news! We jumped through the hoops and now our plugin is officially on the WordPress site. Clearly the readme needs to be updated so the page is a little more full featured.

Soon, when we’re indexed, you can search for us by name at your nearest WP admin control panel. Here’s a ‘recently changed’ listing showing the 404er:

Noteworthy is that WordPress.org has really gone above and beyond to help developers. We get a full SVN environment, lots of PR on their site, detailed yet easy to read docs and best off, a really rich code base to code against. Thanks WordPress!

Lifehacker on Passwords

1 minute, 34 seconds

As a fan of security and strong passwords, I read with interest Lifehacker’s article about how easy it is to hack passwords. In general the article is right on the money and I agree with it’s message. However, I took issue with the article on two points.

The first point they’re talking about how easy it is to either guess or brute force your passwords. Guessing and forcing passwords can be done over the Internet with out needing to compromise your (the victim’s) computer. However, the last step is “simply” to get at the cookies on your local machine:

But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)
– Lifehacker Mar 30, 2010

For me this is crossing the line from informative into fear mongering. Yes, once you have logged into some one’s computer as the user they surf the internet as, it is indeed trivial to read cookies. No, this can not be done over the Internet. No this is not a simple step to make.

The second point (now that I’m not drafting this on my phone and am using a real computer) I see that the original article was published in 2007! Just about all the info in the original article still holds true 3 years later, but I find awkward when the article on Lifehacker has items like this in the article:

EDIT: You might also want to listen to my interview on Connecticut Public Radio about password security.

Which made me think it was a Lifehacker edit in 2010, but was in fact an edit from John Pozadzides in 2007. Speaking of Pozadzides, his blog looks pretty right on and I don’t really have any beef with him (in that totally anonymous Internet beef kind of way), but I mainly take issue with fear mongering, especially when in comes to cookies.

Update: This article seems to be making the rounds on a lot of sites.

Update 2: There’s a great comment from Wangston below.

Old Tools, Loved Tools

0 minutes, 43 seconds

Though I’m trying to be less and less attached to my material possessions, I do have some that I love having. Two that come to mind are some of the first tools I ever got. They’re nothing fancy, they’re beat up, but I love them and every time I use them I think of all the things I’ve fixed, built and destroyed with them. I also like that the screwdriver is a bit melted from the time I learned about electricity. Pow! There goes the fuse and a chunk of my screwdriver. A few singed eyebrow hairs and I was fine. I think my fave are the dikes.

The sun was setting the other day and I had just used these two guys. I threw them down on the cement and did an ad hock photo shoot. You can see I used the screwdriver as a third leg to get a close up of the jaws of the pliers.

Jolicloud OS is just Ubuntu Netbook Remix

0 minutes, 24 seconds

After seeing a post over on Engadget about the new Jolicloud,  I decided to check it out. It quickly became apparent that it is just Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) with a different skin and a nice Jolicloud app.  Looking at some forum posts and the comments on the above Engadget link, my opinion isn’t too novel or new. What is dissapointkng is that Engadget fronts like this is something more amazing than UNR’s latest release, which I run and like.

Me? I’m waiting for Meego 1.1 which is expected to drop in October.

Google: gmail, mail and calendar sync with Meego Netbook (Google Apps Too!)

0 minutes, 36 seconds

Recently a reader inquired about how to set up Meego to sync with gmail mail, calendar and contacts based off me mentioning I got it working.  I use Google apps for mail hosting at plip.com, so this applies to both gmail and Google Apps (domains that use gmail for their email server).  Settings are based off IMAP settings for Thunderbird.

Here’s the steps I took for a clean install of Meego (see matching screenshots below too):

  1. Launch Mail for the first time
  2. Enter your Google Apps or Gmail login info (per google IMAP or thunderbird )
  3. Choose IMAP (again, per google IMAP or thunderbird )
  4. Configure SMTP (again, AGAIN per google IMAP or thunderbird )
  5. Confirm and make sure contacts and calendar are checked
  6. Mail Works!
  7. Launch Calendar and Contacts
  8. Contacts synched!
  9. Calendar synched! (no screenshot :( )