Archive for the 'Work' Category

Accessing Blocked Sites & Doing it Right

Throughout our professional lives, there are many a time when we wanna visit a site which, lets just say, isnt exactly premitted by the man upstairs (not talking about god, none of these tricks will save ya there), but your boss and maybe even the IT department may not have a clue ! Below are several techniques to access restricted or blocked sites weather this be at your end of the connection or theirs !

1. Use IP address – This is the simplest way to bypass domain name based access restrictions. Instead of the domain name such as www.webstuffscan.com use the direct IP address. To find the IP address use one of the free host to IP online conversion tools such as this.

2. Use Google cache – If you are not bothered whether the content is latest on a site, Google cache is best. Do a Google search for the site and then click on the cached link below the search results.

3. Use an Anonymizer – In this method you access a third party site which in turn routes your request to the required server. Some services provide URL encryption also. The problem is that most of these servers are no longer free. Do a google search for the latest list as this is a very dynamic area Following are some services which still works. Some example of such sites are Proxify, Block Stop & Anonymouse.

4. Use Online Translation Tools – In this method, we can use the translation service as a web proxy. Some of the more common sites which offer this service are Google Translate Altavista Babel fish.

5. Use Google Mobile searchGoogle mobile search works, but output may not be optimal. This is very similar to using a Web proxy.

6. Use a public Proxy server – There are many free proxy servers out in the Web. Note that in order to use these you have to change internet connection settings in Internet Explorer or whatever browser you use. This is one such list.

7. Get web pages via email – This is useful if you need a single Web page. Obviously accessing large files is not possible. Given below are some examples.

9. Use Tor Distributed ProxyTor is an advanced proxy server using multiple anonymous servers for a single Web request. This requires an application to be downloaded and installed.

8. Your own proxy server – This is an advanced technique and is probably the best. This requires your own proxy server hosted either at your home or at a hosting service provider. You can enable SSL encryption and prevent any snooping on the content as well. Also put some access control, otherwise someone can find the service and misuse it.

10. Use alternate content providers – When everything fails, you can use alternate service providers. For example if Gmail is blocked at your place, you can take another obscure mail address and enable email forward at Gmail.

[SRC - WebStuffScan]

MarsEdit… Is it True, Blogging offline, against the laws of nature !

MarsEditIcon128.jpg

Well, finally the day has come where i dont have to even bother going to the WordPress admin section of my Blog to submit new content to this site, a marvellous discovery in for the form of ‘MarsEdit’ has come this way.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog’s web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.

Well thats the sales speech anyways, but so far im quite impressed, its managed to upload pictures, submit content and quite seamlessly integrate with WordPress, overall the only downside to this app is the price, im not totally convinced its worth the $29.00 they claim, after all, when it comes down to a description its basically a notepad editor with a submit button instead of save as ! but the convineience is there and im happy to take advantage of it for the 30 day trial… so ask me in a month and ill let ya know if i shelled out the £15 for notepad 2.0 lol !

Logitech Io2 Digital Pen

Took me two years to get around to buying one, but i finally got one of the Logitech Digital Io pens, revision number 2 of course lol. This brilliant little piece of kit, which isnt all that much larger than most modern fountain pens, records every single thing written on the logitech pads.

Granted the concept of using a proprietry pad isnt greatly appealing, but 3 pads only sets a bank account back around £8 and each pad holds 128 pages of A4 printed paper !

The pen requires the use of the special logitech paper due to its method of working, each page of the pads is not just a plain piece of paper, but has millions of tiny dots printed on it which appears to the human eye as just off-white paper. The pen itself contains a small camera, located underneath the ballpoint nib which interprets the pens writing location based on these dots (unique to each line and page in the pad).

Once you have finished writing your notes for the day, its as simple as placing the pen into the Dock station and waiting for the transfer to complete (matter of seconds, depending on how much text is stored). The pen can hold upto 40 pages of solid text in memory and has a battery life of 25 pages of use). The battery life is somewhat a pest, strange that it wasnt designed to do 40 pages of text and 40 pages of battery, i can well imagine this becoming a slight problem for some people in a busy work environment.

The pen software also uses a technology called IoTags, which allow the user to use special symbols on the page as they write to catagorise their writing, for example, writing an ‘E’ with a circle around it, followed by the subject and the content underneath will instruct the software to automatically convert this wrting to text and place it into a new email ready for your review and sending ! This technology is also customisable, I for example am a heavy user of Microsoft OneNote, which is an extremely powerful program which no educational student should be without. With a small customisation to the Io software, tags can be used to instruct the immediate transference of notes directing into OneNote !

Text Conversion is also something which has come along leaps since the last time i played with it (prob 1997 lol) but with a little training, around 3 pages of A5 writing, the conversion is virtually seem less (and iv got appalling handwriting). Ready for review and exporting to your important documents/reports.

Id strongly recommended this is to anyone in need of real world to digital notes conversion, im amazed more people in firms such as lawyers and secretary’s don’t use these, especially now the price of the entire kit is sub £100 and even cheaper if ya shop around.

Iv attached a zip file with some high res pictures of the pen and dock station, but also check out the logitech site for more details on the specifications and Io Software !

Images

Example of Page Dots Pattern Here

Asterisk & FreePBX Install Guide

Okay, iv been promising a few people some kinda guide for installing Asterisk and FreePBX for a while, so here it is. Its a mashup of a couple of guides I used (each of which was about half right, or had half the right files).

This guide is intended for usage with CentOS version 4.3 (thats the best iv got it working on) i tried the installation on a version of CentOS 5 and had a few dozen strange errors that wern’t worth looking into, 4.3 runs very stable and has been running my VoIP server for the past couple of months without any problems glitches or heart attacks.

A few weeks back I posted another entry on the configuration of the SIP.conf file for use with VoIP Cheap as an outbound VoIP carrier, just type ‘free’ into the search box and it should appear somewhere in the list.

Download the Guide from Here. any problems feel free to contact me through the contact page on this blog, and ill see what I can do…

Magical World of Asterisk !

Right, been meaning to play around with this for ages now, just another one of them little projects which iv never got a spare machine lying around for.

Asterisk, for all those who don’t have a clue, is a Open PBX platform for Linux, allowing users to create their own home, or business phone system (Great Fun). Iv been running my VoIP number though a friends server for the past year, whic worked fine while down in the deep south, alas Virgin Media and their wonderful internet connection dont seem to have very good links between the midlands and london (big surprise), as a result, phone calls sounded like i was talking to the HAL-9000 while he was having his balls cut off !

This was my chance, Asterisk here i come… thanks in no small part to the Aussievoip wiki page for documentation and guides, I managed to get an Asterisk & FreePBX system up and running in a day. (it should be noted that there are much easier routes to be taken than the one i took, asterisk now has a version called trixbox and AsteriskNOW, which are full Linux ISO disks which install everything for you, i just prefer to know what its doing).

The FreePBX platform hasa multitude of additional modules which can be used to enhance its uses, including Music On Hold, Calling Queues, etc… which makes it a perfect (Free) application for home users and businesses, sorry BT but someone makes cheaper ones than you lol ;-)

Due to some small issues with NAT (our helpful ‘lack of public IP’s’ solution) i had to add a few lines to my sip.conf file, which now reads;

; Note: If your SIP devices are behind a NAT and your Asterisk
; server isn’t, try adding “nat=1″ to each peer definition to
; solve translation problems.

[general]

bindport = 5060 ; Port to bind to (SIP is 5060)
bindaddr = 0.0.0.0 ; Address to bind to (all addresses on machine)
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
allow=alaw
; If you need to answer unauthenticated calls, you should change this
; next line to ‘from-trunk’, rather than ‘from-sip-external’.
; You’ll know this is happening if when you call in you get a message
; saying “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the
; number and try again.”

;context = from-sip-external ; Send unknown SIP callers to this context
context = from-trunk
callerid = Unknown
tos=0×68

externip=Dynamic.dnsalias.com
externrefresh=60
localnet=192.168.8.0/255.255.255.0
nat=yes

; #, in this configuration file, is NOT A COMMENT. This is exactly
; how it should be.
#include sip_nat.conf
#include sip_registrations_custom.conf
#include sip_registrations.conf
#include sip_custom.conf
#include sip_additional.conf
Basically, making sure that the signaling between my PBX and the outside world was working right, a few extra lines were needed to make sure it could resolve the path back to me ! the problem i was having before this was quite a-typical of NAT issues, callers who dialed in were not audable, they could hear everything i was saying, just nothing was coming from their end, also after 20 seconds Asterisk decides that due to lack of messages from the outside world that this was a spoof, and gave up (nice eh). Problem Solved now… yay

Right, now its all working perfectly, time to break it lol ! nah, im gonna keep running my own box, but im using my old exchange server atm as a test machine for this, so for the full install im gonna be using;

Wall Mountable Micro ATX Case

VIA EPIA ME6000 Fanless Motherboard

2GB IDE Flash Module

All in all, a silent, nicely powerful PBX server for under £150 !

Stay tuned for updates on cheap sip carriers (currently using VoIP cheap, but looking for better !)

——–

P.S just to keep informed, the current version of FreePBX is 2.2.2, version 3 is rumoured to be feature packed and coming shortly to a Linux machine near u !

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Welcome to Fluxbox, im afraid we have no affiliation with the Linux window manager, so if your looking for that, turn around now.

Fluxbox is now the combined effort of a group of former University of Plymouth students, who use this site to document their IT endeavours and general random rants, we invite you to join or world, where everything is in a state of flux !