Sunday, 28 September 2008

Replace WiFi card and HD MSI Wind / Advent 4211

Replacing the WiFi card and the hard disk in the Wind / Advent is straight forward.

After undoing all the bolts on the bottom, and easing off the bot
tom case, you will see the bolt that holds the WiFi card in. Undo it and the card slips out. Remove the aerial leads, and to put in a new card, do it all in reverse.

To replace the hard disk first of all remove the WiFi card.

You need to do this to get access to the retaining bolt for the HD.
With the WiFi card removed, you get access to the HDs bolt, undo and pull the HD out.

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

OSX Hackintosh - You Need to restart your computer

I installed 10.5.5 on my hackintosh, but it crashed, and I had to hold the power key down to shutdown and then restart.


On restart I got the message "You Need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button for several seconds or press the Restart button".

When you do this you get the same message all over. If you look at the top of the screen in the boot messages you'll see "Unsupported CPU \n" and "AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement".

Whats happened is that the updater has installed the kernel extension (kext) AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext so you need to remove it.

To do this boot from the DVD.

On my MSI Wind / Advent 4211:

- hold down F11 on boot
- select 'boot from DVD'


after the usual whirring away you'll get the start of the installation.

- select you language. I selected English
- click 'continue' at the welcome message
- click Agree when asked

At the 'select destination screen' go to the Utilities menu and select Terminal.

When the terminal window opens type:

cd /Volumes/HardDisk/System/Library/Extensions
rm -rf AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext

Quit from terminal
Quit from the installer and click restart.

Thursday, 11 September 2008

Opera - sends all queries to sitecheck2.opera.com

I don't generally use Opera, and I also I use a web filter service, the rather excellent ScanSafe, I feel fairly safe against web based threats.

If you have a similar service you may not need the free service from Opera that sends all your DNS queries to a 3rd party, Seattle-based Haute Secure.


The Opera Fraud Protection can be enabled/disabled from Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Security by checking/unchecking the box marked "Enable Fraud Protection."

You will see the protection operating by querying your firewall for requests to http://sitecheck2.opera.com.

The Washington Post has an article about this, and also some weaknesses, like sending the query clear text, having a weak HMAC so you can reverse engineer the process, or, if you are a malware / phishing 'vendor' querying to see when you need to change hostnames.

It seems performance is not very good. The report says that on a sample page with nearly 3 dozen bad links, the browser blocked just two.

Friday, 5 September 2008

Sharing Google Sites outside your domain

Previously I wrote about one way to do this. Having experimented, I've found another. You start by sharing your site.


The person gets an email with the link in it


If they do not have an account, and the presumption is they don't, then they need to create one, so they click the 'sign in with a different account link'.


On the next screen they click 'create an account now'

This takes them to the new account screen. Fill in the details - use your own email address, the one the invite was sent to

do the captcha and it takes them to the Site

Future Logins

When returning to the Site, the visitor does not need to create an account, they login by clicking 'sign in with a different account'. Even if you share multiple Sites with them, a single login only is required.



Also, if you have shared multiple Sites with the same person, they can navigate around by clicking the 'Sites' link at the top right



which takes them to a summary page