A Higgs-Boson walks into a church, the priest says “We don’t allow Higgs-Bosons in here.” The Higgs-Boson says “But without me how can you have mass?”

from fora.tv via reddit

Posted via web from Dave’s Desktop

Steps to enable Google Voicemail on any number:

Step 1: Enable in Settings

The text “Activate Google voicemail for this phone” will show up for any “Mobile” number. If your phone supports call forwarding, change it to “Mobile” in the type of phone number to get this option to show up.

After clicking “Activate Google voicemail for this phone”, it will prompt you for your carrier and then give you directions for enabling answer call forwarding for your phone. For AT&T it will be *004*<GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER>#.

Step 2: Go directly to Voicemail

This step is optional and will only impact you if you have more than one number set up in Google Voice. By default, when someone calls your cell phone and is sent to your voicemail, Google Voice will call your other extensions and try to find someone to pick up that call, and then go to Voicemail. This means there will be a lot of ringing and waiting. To disable this, click “Edit” on your phone number and then “Show advanced Settings.”

Select “Go straight to Voicemail”. This will send callers directly to your voicemail when they ring your phone and you do not answer.

I do however have access to a linux machine on campus. I am familiar with port forwarding using SSH but I had never used it to actually tunnel web traffic using a web browser on Windows. Turns out it is surprisingly easy!

The ssh command to use is:

ssh -C2qTnN -D 8080 username@remote_host

This command sshes to the remote_host, and creates a tunnel on your localhost, port 8080. Note that you need to have private key authentication already set up for this host – it will not work with password authentication.

The description of the switches are (from the ssh man page):

• -C : Compression
• -2 : Use SSHv2
• -q : quiet!
• -T : Disable pseuto-tty allocation
• -n : Prevents reading from stdin (you need to have private key authentication set up, to prevent password authentication)
• -N : Do not execute a remote command (or launch a shell). Just use the ssh process for port forwarding
• -D : Allocate a socket to listen on the local side. When a connection is made to this port it is located to the remote machine. Makes SSH work as a SOCKS server. Only root can forward privileged ports like this.

From here, you set up Firefox or your browser of choice to use a Socks proxy on localhost:8080. The man page says that SOCKS4 and SOCK5 should both work but I had to use SOCKS v4, SOCKS v5 did not seem to work for me.

Posted via web from Dave’s Desktop

Sensor Graphing via Wireless Sensor Network to a Mobile Internet Device by David Drager

Report Sent

Yet another reason to run the excellent Firefox addon NoScript.

Sources: 1, 2

Summary:

Ditching your cable company has never been more viable than it is today. The rise of online, streaming TV shows allows you to save on one of the most expensive household bills if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of the convenience of having either a cable box or DVR. The main question you will need to ask yourself is what shows you actually enjoy watching. Several name brand shows are now available online in free, ad supported formats; if your particular shows are not available then you may be stuck with your cable company, at least for now. More and more shows are always coming online, so keep checking back to see if your favorite show is available.

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The install worked fine, however at the end, it just sort of hung while installing grub. GREAT. I reboot and it kicks me to a (grub) standard prompt.

It took me a while to figure this out, but you can manually boot Ubuntu via the grub prompt. The tricky part is finding out the right commands since your system is totally inaccessible.

You can find your available hard drive name by typing:

> root ( <tab>

pressing tab will list your available hard drives and partitions and hopefully your Ubuntu ext3 partition.

Continue setting the root boot partition. This includes your partition with all /boot files. For example, mine was installed onto the root / filesystem, and not a separate filesystem.

> root (hd0,2)
>

This sets your root that grub uses.

You then need to set the kernel. Use:

> kernel /boot/vmlin <tab>

Tab will show you the available files to use. Also you can use this at any level to explore your filesystem. So for example:

> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-20-386

But wait before you hit enter!

You will get a pivot root error – the kernel doesn’t know where the rest of your file system is. In a file called device.map in your /boot directory, this location should be specified. In my case, it is listed as /dev/sda3. This is important for your kernel. Fortunately, GRUB has a ‘cat’ command you use to get the text output of this file. We also set this to a read-only filesystem – Ubuntu takes care of setting it back to rw when it boots.

So the final kernel line is:

> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-20-386 root=/dev/sda3 ro
>

Now we need to set the initrd file – hopefully you by now know to use to find this if you do not know it off of the top of your head:

> initrd /initrd.img-2.6.15-20-386
>

And finally, type ‘boot’ to begin the boot process:

> boot

Hopefully ubuntu will boot for you now without problems. Again, if you get a pivot root or ‘unable to mount root VFS’ error – you need to check the root=/dev/sda3 line part of the grub commands. This means that the kernel could not find your main filesystem.

Once you are logged into Ubuntu – use the following command to regenerate menu.lst for you. Once this is rebuilt, you will be presented with the normal Grub menu and you won’t need to follow the process above!

sudo update-grub

Part of this problem, I’ve noticed, is that many articles around the web mirror each other – for example when the MacBook Air was announced, every site came out with a news item about it. That means I have to click through so many items in my newsreader to just mark it as read and make sure I haven’t missed anything.

So – what I am looking for is an RSS client which will not segregate each individual RSS feed, but create a mesh of all of them and highlight the important items, and somehow also promote smaller, less popular items that may have been missed by other sites. This would involve somehow analyzing the text and date of the post and correlating the items together. For less popular posts but ones that are nonetheless interesting, maybe create a ranking system based on social bookmarking sites like reddit or stumbleupon.

In a way this is done by some sites – Google News is one example of news sites; and TechMeme is another one for technology related items.

Does anyone know of a program, either online or offline, which will do what I am asking? If not, would you be willing to program it?

By the way, Skype, why won’t you get Caller ID working for US based phone numbers? This is the only thing stopping me, and I am sure a lot of people, from adopting Skype full on. Many people block Unknown numbers, or won’t answer if they see 0012345678 calling them!

On that topic… Skype Journal is a really great blog with regards to Skype and VOIP in general. If you are interested in VOIP, I would check it out!