Year: 2012

Be Forewarned

Posted on by josh

At Friendly, we’ve been seeing a lot more viruses lately.  And on top of that, they seem to be coming in the form of fake FBI warnings – typically asking for money.  Here are two examples of exact variations that I have seen:

As you can tell, there is somewhat of a believable appearance to these messages.  Especially when you’re browsing MSNBC headlines and suddenly everything familiar to you disappears and these messages take over your entire screen.  Some of them even gain access to your webcam and have a section of the page labeled as “Camera Recording” or something to further scare you into believing this lie.

No, you weren’t looking at child porn, or illegally downloading some new movie (or were you???) — these are just points to scare an unsuspecting person into believing the last part of the page: how to get your computer back in your control.  It’s simple, just give these people falsely claiming to be the FBI roughly $200 and you can have it back.  Yeah…right.  How long till the bank account is dry?  If you see this message ever, the best thing to do is shut your PC off immediately and take it to a professional.  If you’re not concerned with your data, or you know for sure your data is backed up and easily restored, you can usually use your system restore CDs/DVDs to get your system back to factory settings (ixnay the virus).  However, I have seem some restore CDs/DVDs either not work, or were never created by the owner so therefore can’t be used.  There’s more steps involved at this point, but that’s why I say take it to a professional, like me!

Have you seen anything like this personally or have you removed this for someone else?  Let me know your story and thanks for reading!

Bandwidth Caps Are Ridiculous

Posted on by josh
So I was just sitting here thinking to myself, I wonder how many hours Suddenlink allows us to utilize given our speed and extreme data download (not including any upload usage)?I pulled up the ol’ trusy Windows Calculator [side: easily available by using the Windows Key + R keys to bring up run prompt and typing calc)] and did some calculations.

We get 12Mbps (or Megabits per second) here at home.  This is 12 Megabits, not to be confused with it’s equal measurement of 1.5 Mega Bytes.  So let’s work with 1.5 Mega Bytes here and I’ll use MB to be simple.

Suddenlink allows us 250 GB total usage (download + upload) per month.

250 GB (Giga Bytes) = 256,000 MB

So to figure how long 256,000MB will take to download at 1.5 MB / sec, we’ll do some old school math conversions:

256,000 MB            1.5 MB
————-    =      ——–
X sec.                    1 sec.

In case you’re not following my math, we could figure this on a calculator like so:

(256,000 x 1) / 1.5 = 170666.67 sec.

So now to figure out the number of minutes:

(170666.67 sec.) / (60 sec. per min) = 2844.44 min.

And now minutes to hours:

(2844.44 min.) / (60 min. per hr.) = 47.41 hr.

And finally, let’s simplify that down to days:

(47.41 hr.) / (24 hr. per day) = 1.98 days

So Suddenlink is telling me that I get less than 2 straight days of full-speed service that I pay monthly for.

How does this make any sense at all?  Granted most of the time we aren’t pulling 12 Mbps straight through, but still.  Give or take some bandwidth, regular users can easily use up 250 GB in a week without intending to.  It’s just funny to see the numbers broken down to the point of realizing that I have to pay extra for more than 2 days of full use of their service each month.

Who else is getting capped by their cable internet providers?  Thoughts, comments on this topic? Thanks for reading.

Finally Completed

Posted on by josh
I started my Hackintosh project last week (Friday night).  I’ve been working almost nonstop on this project.  I just finally completed doing a complete installation from beginning to end with all the required patches and fixes in between.  Been tweaking and trying to find the best method for the last week.  Now I have full graphics support (Diablo III seems to play OK with High Graphics) with QE/CI enabled (equivalent of Aero in Windows Vista/7), Sound (although no sound in D3 for some reason), and USB & USB3.0.  I also got the system booting straight from the hard drive without the use of the CD.  Time Machine seems to be working alright, though I don’t have enough space to use for it really.  I have been able to succesfully use iTunes & Mac App Store with my iTunes account.  So far, so good.  The only bug I have really is that when I shut down, the computer turns off and back on as if it was rebooting.  Once or twice earlier it shut down properly.  Not sure what to do for that fix.  But oh well.  Was a fun project.  Look forward to playing around with OS X Lion now for development & repair purposes.

OS X Lion on my PC

Posted on by josh

I’ve done it before, and I’m at it again.  Can’t resist the pretty-ish OS X Lion interface.  Can’t really afford to go out and spend $600+ on a system that is built to run it, so I’ve spent the last week working on this.  I am nearly finished.  I finally have my PC booting and nearly fully running with OS X 10.7.1.  For some reason, the 10.7.4 Combo Update is taking forever to download.  My graphics are halfway working at the moment, but according so some posts should work natively once I get update to at least 10.7.3.  Will post more once I get further.