I’m writing this post using Lynx, a command-line, text-only browser, just to see how it works out. I feel cool, thrilled, even daring. Lynx is pretty neat shit, however extremely limited. It manages to handle text, links and frames but can’t handle such things as CSS styling, images and all that newfangled fancy shit.

I first installed it as a fall-back if I should ever have a problem with my X server not starting, which is possible since I like to beta and even alpha test shit. This way, even though I didn’t have a GUI desktop environment to launch my usual browser of choice, I could still boot to just a command-line and hit the support forums for assistance using Lynx.

After a bit of tooling around in the options, I configured Vim to run as my default text editor within Lynx, so in an instance where I would need to enter text (like for this blog post), I can launch Vim and start typing away. Vim is a command-line text editor that I’m sorta-kinda-almost comfortable with. It’s one of those editors that at first glance looks ridiculously difficult to handle, but the more you use, the easier it becomes and if you have the balls, you learn the myriad assortment of commands and eventually become the ultimate text wrangling master. You also never get laid again, ever. A geek milestone that I’m not ashamed to aspire to.

Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can effectively post to my blog with a command-line browser, the likelihood that I’ll do so again is pretty much nil. Yeah, it’s cool, old-school shit, but I do prefer the glittery trappings of the WordPress GUI. Still, I think Lynx is a must-have install for situations like I mentioned above when all hell breaks loose and your GUI has shit the bed and died. It’s also a great barometer of how well put together your website is. Fire up Lynx and check out what your site looks like. Like I said before, CSS styling and graphics will not be displayed, but if you’ve laid things out properly, you’ll see a sane and coherent text-only version of your website. If shit’s all jumbled with stuff that’s supposed to be at the bottom running at the top, then perhaps some redesigning is in order.

Share your wit and wisdom. Impart your knowledge to others. Graphically insult your friends and coworkers! Use a text editor like vim to edit /etc/motd.

sudo vim /etc/motd

Replace whatever default text that’s there with your ardent wish that your coworker violently suck their own balls. The next time they shell in to the server, that special message will be there for them.

Yay.

I have a remote server running Ubuntu that I rarely use. I pay something like thirty bucks a month to have it and really only use it as a squid proxy to get around my office’s firewall and in public wifi situations where I might need some privacy.

I’ve been using the anonymous proxy service, Tor for about three years. I don’t use it regularly, but I like having it around and knowing it’s there to use. Every once and a while, I see a reason to use it, but it’s the idea of Tor that has me installing it on all my computers.

So, I decided that I should install Tor on my underused server to give a little back to the service. By installing Tor, my server joins the many others out there, providing anonymous gateways to the web, without leaving traces. I’ve no idea what people may do using Tor through my server—be it shady or innocent, which is good because this lack of knowledge keeps me from being liable for any misuse.

While I was going through the grind of getting Tor running properly, I also decided to install Boinc, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (phew!). I’ve been contributing to the Seti@home project, assisting in the search for extraterrestrial intellignece for about four years with my desktop computers. Since the server is always on, I figured it was a great idea. Trying to run a boinc client via command line is pretty fucking annoying, but once I found a decent howto, I was up and running pretty fast.

I also attached the boinc client on my server to the Rosetta@home project, calculating the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins so that researches can hopefully find some cures for various diseases.

Fun.

So, once again out of a general boredom and desire to up my geekness to the bleeding new shit, I installed Kubuntu Edgy-Eft knot 2. Not even an alpha release. I feel risky, what can I say…I wore a condom.

Of course, my initial upgrade via source list completely fucked my system leaving me unable to boot any kernel. I seem to always have that luck whenever trying to finagle a dist-upgrade. Luckily, I’ve a habit of backing my shit up before doing risky shit like this, so I was cool. I downloaded an ISO and burned a CD on my laptop, wiped my desktop’s Linux partition and reinstalled. The disk install worked fine, booting like a live cd and giving me a little icon to click on the desktop to do an actual disk install. The new installer is fancier than ever and I was up and running in a couple glasses of wine and a nervous cigarette or two.

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This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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I was doing some reading about EXIF data and came across a quirk that I’ve been having some fun fooling around with.

Most digital cameras embed EXIF data into every image, listing such things as the type of camera, date and time the photo was taken and other details as well as a thumbnail of the image so that the file previews faster.

Most of the time, this information is lost or at least updated when an image is edited. However, sometimes the original EXIF data will carry over. Depending on the editing tool or circumstance, an image file that’s been cropped, re-sized, oriented or otherwise edited will sometimes still carry an embedded thumbnail of it’s original state, fresh off the digital camera.

There’s a few tools out there for pulling he thumbnails out of an image’s EXIF data. I decided to use jhead with my Kubuntu laptop (there are OSX and Windows clients as well, but I’ve never used them). After installing, fire up a terminal and type:

jhead -st 'thumbnail-output-filename' 'desired-image.jpg'

If there is a thumbnail embedded in the image it will be extracted to whatever filename you specify. You can then view it with whichever program you choose.

Now understand that there may not be a thumbnail and nine out of ten photos that do have them will be exact miniatures of their parent files. Still, one out of those ten photos can yield some interesting shit. Just take a minute to think of the various and plentiful reasons why a person or organization may need to edit, obscure or otherwise change an image’s original state and you might get the point of this.

To give an example, I took this image from Wikipedia, (mainly because of it’s not under some restrictive copyright and work safe) and after saving it locally, used jhead to extrat the EXIF thumbnail giving me the image below.

If you compare the thumbnail below to the image linked in the paragraph above, you can clearly see that it has been rotated ninety degrees right with parts of two additional statues and a window being completely cropped out of the image.

Here’s a link to a page where someone uses a script to search the internet, checking for and displaying images with EXIF thumbnails whose dimensions are not perfectly scaled (like the file has been cropped or otherwise changed since it’s creation) and displays them for your amazement/boredom.

So many wacky possibilities. Go spend some time on Flickr, Friendster, or MySpace. Try it on documents that have had sections digitally blacked out for confidential reasons. Go forth and be snoopy.

Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

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I was checking out an article about various keyboard shortcuts with KDE and I was blown away by a feature in Konqueror. When viewing a web page in Konqueror, holding down CTRL highlights every link on the page with a letter or number that you type in and hit enter to navigate without having to use a mouse. I don’t know how long I’ve wished for something like this. I hate having to use a mouse and especially with a laptop, it’s a really big bitch.

Unfortunately, I’m addicted to the various extensions that I depend on with Firefox and I just can’t switch over to Konqueror. So, I immediately started scouring through available Firefox extensions on mozilla.org and after a good long while (Mozilla’s extension organization sucks), I finally found the equivalent. NumberFox does the exact same thing. Using only numbers to tag links, the font is a little too small and there’s no options to change anything, but it does the job. On a web page, hitting ALT-w activates NumberFox for both Windows and Linux (APPLE-e on Mac) and you’re off, leaving that mouse in the dust. I find that some links and some pages do not respond to the extension&8212;links in Flash are obviously a no-go, but I find that it works in 95% of the pages I’ve tried so far.

Web filters are retarded. The only times I ever butt against a company’s web filter seem to be when in search of legitimate, non-offensive information. I’m not into breaking the law. I’m not into downloading porn at work. Why penalize me when I try and look up some technical information because an application like SmartFilter or SonicWall considers some geek’s tutorial on getting an Open Source application up and running, “Free Software/Downloads—Forbidden”, even though no actual software or source code is stored on the site? Or blocking a website as pornography because the author of the page has the unfortunate last name of “Dyke”. SmartFilter kind of seems like one big oxymoron. Perhaps StupidFilter is more appropriate. I could give a rat’s ass whether it kept kids away from pornography, all I know is that it often keeps me from accessing harmless, legal and innoffensive information—usually technical in nature. Fuck that.

Sick of being hamstrung by obtuse internet filters I set up a proxy on my server using squid that I tunnel to via SSH. Once connected, I bypass all web filtering wherever I am and as a bonus, all information sent to and from my browser and my server is encrypted and therefore private to anyone snooping on the local network. Here’s how.

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In a fit of impulse geekitude, I’ve rented a dedicated server. It runs Ubuntu Linux, which is what I run at home and am currently writing this post with, so the ground is familiar, however I’ll have to get used to managing things entirely by command line. Something I should be doing regardless.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this website. Davebgimp.com is hosted on a shared server with BlueHost, who are seriously superb webhosts, IMHO. My account is paid in advance with them for another fifteen months, so probably I’ll just leave this website where it is.

For the near future, I’ll mainly be using this new-fangled server as a secure proxy host so I can get around redundant web filtering and also safely use open wifi spots without risking my passwords and data. I have a few other domains registered that I suppose I could move over to it, maybe even set up a mail server, I’m not sure. I’ve never really run a server before, so it’s all new shit to me.