7 Ways to Get Rid of Fireflies Once and For All | Blender Guru.

Interesting article on job quitting/hopping

“The Culture of Quitting” | LinkedIn.

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Tracks: Endomondo, Nike+

Honda has recalled 1.8m cars around the world after a scare over an airbag in another manufacturer's vehicle but made by its supplier Takata.

The Japanese company said the recall covered five models made between 2001 and 2003: the Accord, Civic, CR-V, Jazz and Stream. In Europe 154,000 cars are affected and 45,000 of those are in the UK.

Honda recalls nearly 2m cars in airbag scare | Business | theguardian.com.

Tracks: Endomondo, Nike+

I installed Fedora 20 and gave it a test drive. Whilst I was happy it seemed to run well, the graphics driver appeared to be flaky. Under Ubuntu Studio, I was getting a fps fullscreen using glxgears of around 60-65fps. Under Fedora, I was getting ~45 fps. I then tried Linux Mint Debian Edition, and that also had the same problem. So now, I’m back on Ubuntu Studio. But I might be vanilla Debian a go as well and see if that helps…

Tracks: Endomondo, Nike+

Tracks: Endomondo, Nike+ (No ZR tracks from now on)

Tracks: Endomondo, Nike+ (No ZR tracks from now on)

Some ecryptfs sites for reference, in reference to previous post.

• [bodhizazen.net/Tutorials...](http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/Ecryptfs/)
• [www.makeuseof.com/tag/encry...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/encrypt-your-files-in-linux-with-ecryptfs/)
• [wiki.ubuntu.com/Encrypted...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EncryptedPrivateDirectory)
• [help.ubuntu.com/community...](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory)

In particular, use of the Private directory is the simplest setup as it encrypts stuff inside a known folder, leaving it in a scrambled state when you are not logged in, so that no-one can get at it.

If you only need access to those files on an occasional basis, then using the mount option is better.

Related articles

• File-Level Encryption in Linux Using ecryptfs

After tolerating the instability of ZR3 for a long time, I have finally decided to quit using the app. It has become unusable, crashing EVERY use at least once and causing other apps to force close as Android tries to frantically free up memory for the black hole that is ZR3. Six to Start have not even addressed this issue, even though they acknowledge it is a memory hog.

The resources I have made – the Google Music tutorial page, and the Bitbucket respository, will remain up for now, but will not be updated further. If someone wants to pick them up and continue with them, by all means, do so, and let me know, so I can add a redirect or link to your site.

With the NSA spying scandal, all eyes are on ways to stop the surveillance and protect privacy. Campaigns such as Reset the Net have been used to encourage and push sites and people to amp up their security methods. Disasters such as Heartbleed shows what happens if security is compromised, whether intentionally or accidentally

I used to use TrueCrypt to allocate a virtual hard disk and put my private files in that. One of the benefits of this was that TrueCrypt also supported full disk encryption and Plausible Deniability (e.g. hiding an OS within another OS). However, one of the most frustrating parts of TrueCrypt is that you allocate space and any space you do not use is lost. e.g. if you allocate 10GB, but use only 1GB, there is still 9GB left that allocated to the TrueCrypt volume, but cannot be used by the unencrypted space.

Unfortunately, I recently found out that TrueCrypt shut down, under very suspicious and mysterious circumstances. (check the related articles section below). Sure, you could use LUKS instead, or VeraCrypt (but I haven’t tried VeraCrypt), but considering I only want to encrypt a subset of my files, and not the whole partition, that might be a little overkill.

So, I investigated the ecryptfs. Details can be found on the Wikipedia page, but in short, it allows you to mount directories (it comes with a wrapper to the mount command), but unlike other mount wrappers, you are allowed to mount on top of the same directory. In other words, you can do:

sudo mount.ecryptfs ~/SecuredData ~/SecuredData

And this will take the data stored in the directory and transparently decrypt it when you try to access the directory.

If you copy data into the directory, ecrypt will encrypt it and store it in the underlying directory in an encrypted manner. When you unmount the directory, only the encrypted data is visible. If you combine the mounting process with the optional Filename Encryption, then all you see are files with garbled filenames.

ecrypt supports various encryption methods, from AES and Blowfish, to 3DES and Twofish. Obviously, the higher you choose the encryption level, the slower the access. 3DES encryption resulted in a transfer rate of 7MB/s for me, when copying to the encrypted space, and AES was 16MB/s, so balance your requirement of high encryption vs slow access.

Related articles

• Encryption Tool TrueCrypt Shuts Down Mysteriously, Encouraging to Use Bitlocker
• List of TrueCrypt encryption alternatives
• Here's what you need to know about the sudden and mysterious death of TrueCrypt
• Could VeraCrypt become the next TrueCrypt?
• Open Source Crypto TrueCrypt Disappears With Suspicious Cloud Of Mystery
• In Baffling Move, TrueCrypt Open-Source Crypto Project Shuts Down
• Suspicious TrueCrypt Announcement Declares The Tool Insecure, Development Stopped
• TrueCrypt Too Proprietary to be Secure and Corporate Media Should Stop Blaming Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)
• TrueCrypt: How Did the Worldś Most Trusted Encryption Software Just Vanish?
• The life and untimely demise of TrueCrypt

I dug out my Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet and plugged it into my Ubuntu Studio installation, but frustratingly, I cannot seem to emulate a wheel scroll, which I need for my work in Blender. Sure I can use the keypad +/-, but that isn’t the way I’m supposed to work.

I might switch over to Fedora later this week and see if that is any better. Or maybe even put Linux Mint back on. I know that both have gone through new versions since I last used them. Fedora was at Schroedinger’s Cat / Version 19 and Linux Mint was at Maya / Version 13 last  time I used it.

Now may be a good time to start looking at other distributions. openSUSE seems appealing, but it has caused me problems with restoring from CloneZilla images in the past, especially cross-operating system.

Tracks: Endomondo, ZR, Nike+

Question: How long does it take to clean a train

Answer: Seven Minutes, if you have the Shinkansen cleaning team

www.youtube.com/watch

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Easy Run. Aimed for 8K, but ended up doing a lot less…. :-(

Tracks: Endomondo, ZR, Nike+

Not going to go parkrunning for a while, whilst I get back to distance training to try to get back up to 10K capability.

Tracks: Endomondo, ZR, Nike+

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• Oak Hill Parkrun #3
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Within commuting distance for me, too. :)

Feedly has gone down again, as a result of another DDoS

7:26am PST: We are currently being targeted by a second DDoS attack and are working with our service providers to mitigate the issue.

As with yesterday’s attack, your data is safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will update this blog post as more information is available or the situation changes.

Denial of service attack (part 2) | Building Feedly.

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• Denial of service attack
• Feedly refuses to give in to blackmail demands, gets hit by DDoS attack
• Feedly Hit with a DDoS Attack, Extortion Demands
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• Feedly extortion
• Denial of service attack | Building Feedly
• Feedly, Evernote Hit with DDoS Attacks
• Feedly and Evernote hit with DDoS after refusing to pay ransom
• Feedly Hit With Denial Of Service Attacks

Could this be a sign of an exodus away from Windows-based environments? The cost of having to upgrade many machines to Windows 7 or Windows 8, not to mention support and licensing, or the premium support cost required to continue supporting Windows XP would not go down well at any sensible company’s finance/accounting department.

Linux is free, open-sourced (see this link for a video explanation of what the term “open-sourced” means), and if a user doesn’t like how it works, they can add/remove or tweak it completely to their liking. They can even build their own kernel to handle bespoke hardware if they wished.

It should be noted that HP teamed up with Bell Labs in the past (who developed the original UNIX OS, on which Linux was inspired from), and built HP-UX (source here), so it isn’t like HP haven’t got some *nix-like environment already under the hood. In fact, WebOS  (now looked after by LG, but originally developed by Palm, which was then acquired by HP, then sold to LG) was Linux-based (source here).

HP, which was actually one of Microsoft's key partners in the last decade, is trying to move away from Windows in a move that would clearly turn the company into a direct competitor for the Redmond-based software giant.

HP Stabs Microsoft in the Back: Dumps Windows, Prepares Linux-Based Operating System.

Related articles

• Has Microsoft opened the door to the Linux desktop?

Feedly is up now, but some sites still haven’t updated their articles yet:

Popular note-taking app Evernote and RSS reader Feedly have been hit with major cyberattacks as hackers demand ransom from the latter site to get it back online.

Both Evernote and Feedly, two services that work together, confirmed they suffered DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, a type of cybercrime that kicks sites offline and is meant to disrupt usage (not steal user data). But Feedly, which is still down, detailed in a blog post that hackers are holding the site up for ransom. It’s unknown as of now if the cyber criminals asked for ransom from Evernote too.

Evernote and Feedly Hit by Cyberattacks, Held for Ransom.

Feedly is being hit by a DDoS. Feedly was touted as the replacement to Google Reader when Google decided to pull the plug on it. And a lot of people moved over to Feedly as a result. I was one of them.

Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized

Denial of service attack | Building Feedly.