Posts filed under Annoying

Creating Funny Money

is not as easy (of funny) as it might sound.

Last weekend we a dinner celebrating the 12.5 years of marriage of my sister-in-law. Our gift was a gazillion envelops filled with;

  1. useless paper
  2. 10 euro bill
  3. .....

This way they had something to do when they came home from the dinner. The fourth option was supposed to be funny money; scanned and severely altered euro billet.

The initial idea was to create a euro bill for 12.5 euro's, but that would take too much work, so I opted for a 55 euro bill (just clone the existing 5 on the 5 euro bill).

Posted on December 4, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Personal, Security, Software.

AirDrop Between iOS and OS X Maverick

I got my new AirDrop-capable phone today.  Not that AirDrop was the reason for getting it, but the feature itself is quite nice; being able to send files between devices. No need to use mail or other communication methods.

This evening I shot a video on my phone and I needed it on my MacBook (with OS X Maverick). Both devices are AirDrop capable, so ..... 

And there is I went wrong. After trying for about 30 minutes to get it to work I found the answer online.... Looks like that AirDrop between different OS is NOT supported by Apple. And not supported does mean that it won't work.  

OS X: Can I use AirDrop with my computer?
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4783
iOS: Using AirDrop
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5887 

That is one Epic Fail if you ask me.  

Posted on November 11, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Apple, iPhone, Operating Systems.

Windows 8(.1)... What The Hell Were They Thinking?

Even though I switched to the Apple operating systems and devices in my personal life, I still have some laptops, and virtual machines around for work.  In the almost 15 years, I seen, used, supported and troubleshot(??) basically every Windows operating system around.

If you follow the development of the OS through the years, it's getting better with (almost) every release. There were some bad ones though; Windows Millennium Edition, and Windows Vista were most notorious.... Until now. Now we have Windows 8(.1).

Windows 8(.1) is (in my opinion) a Frankenstein monster that incorporates a tablet Metro desktop and a crippled old-skool desktop.

 

Posted on October 30, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Microsoft, Operating Systems.

Google+ Custom URL

Google+ introduced a new (shiny) feature recently called Custom URL's. Up till now people had to communicate these long URL's if you needed to find someone on Google+. Mine for example is: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105217840082627216167/. Not a real slick way of presenting yourself on the Interwebs. When you log in to your Google+ account you get the option of getting one of those URL's for 'free'. It basically is your screen-name in the URL.

GooglePulsCustomURLOffer.png

Mine would be http://google.com/+GuillaumeRaisonnable/. Would be, because, I'm not getting mine. The reason for this is that you need to leave your mobile phone number with Google for so-called verification purposes. By doing this I would be giving away another piece of privacy for something shiny. Something a lot of other people will be more than willing to do so. Just remember that the NSA never had it any easier since the arrival of social media to violate your privacy.

Posted on October 30, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Internet, Personal, Privacy.

Mail Addressed to 'Unknown IP Address'

The last couple of weeks, I got several mails addressed to 'Onbekend IP Adres' (which is Dutch for 'Unknown IP Address') .

The e-mail 'To:' field contains my mail address with the 'Onbekend IP Adres' as an alias.

How are we supposed to take these spammers seriously? First, get my name right. Then, I'll might think about clicking on these links in the e-mail (NOT).

Posted on July 30, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Personal.

International Interest in My 'Brand'

This week, I found the following mail in my mailbox. Not really sure what the scam is, but I'm sure it's gonna cost me money....

(Letter to the President or Brand Owner, thanks)

Dear President,

We are a domain name registration and protection agency in Asia. I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on July 16,2013 that a company which self-styled"Togh International Co.,Ltd"were applying to register"redelijkheid"as their Brand Name and some domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for"Togh International Co.,Ltd".Looking forward to your prompt reply.

Best Regards,

David Zhao
Tel:+86(0551)63434624
Fax:+86(0551)63434924
Address:HuiZhou Ave 999, Hefei, Anhui, China

Posted on July 19, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Personal, Tips'n Tricks.

Out of Ink? Buy a New Printer

canon-pixma-mg2250.jpg

A couple of years ago, I bought a Canon Pixma IP4500 printer for approx. €80. The reason for buying was that I was able to print documents (concert tickets, etc) and the occasional photo. Generally, I send my photos to a lab, so I don't need an expensive state-of-the-art photo printer.​

Recently, I ran out of ink for the printer. The third time in three or four years. The IP4500 holds separate cartridges ​for each color. This means that I need to invest around €15 for each cartridge. Total costs: >€60.

While I was standing in the store, I saw a new Canon (color) printer for less than €50. This included the ink (for that model). Well, that was an easy decision. Out the 'old' printer and in a new multifunctional printer (Canon MG2250). It prints, scans and copies, while the old printer could only do one thing; print.

There are probably several persons out there that would recommend off-brand inks. Sure, it's possible to buy off-brand, but that introduces the hassle of:

  • removing of chips, and taping them to new containers, and/or
  • drilling holes to inject new ink into the container.
  • Resetting software by pressing 5 buttons with three fingers for 20 seconds to lure the printer into thinking that everything is alright.​ And this can (and will) re-occur very once in a while.

All that to save a couple of bucks.​ No thank you.

Anyway, I have a new printer (with ink), and the old one is heading for the garbage dump.
"Why not sell it", you ask? Well, no person will ever want to buy it (with no ink in it), since they can get a new printer WITH ink for less money. How fucked up is that?

I wonder if we will ever throw away a car, just because it ran out of petrol and buying a new car (with petrol) is cheaper.​

Posted on April 13, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Hardware, Personal.

Cisco ISE: Change of Authorization (CoA) not working

We had a wireless security implementation at a customer site which consisted of the following components:

The setup included a wireless lan for guest access by using the Cisco ISE guest portal functionality.

We started by configuring the WLC's and ISE environment and having done that everything worked as a charm. A couple of days later we we were not able to connect to the wireless network.
The error reported in the ISE Authentications overview was:

Dynamic Authorization Failed : 11213 No responds received from Network Access Device

Posted on April 2, 2013 and filed under Annoying, Security, Tips'n Tricks.

iPhone Stuck At Infinite Loop After iOS Update

AppleInfiniteLoopSymbol.png

The old iPhone 3G got stuck in an infinite restore loop after upgrading to iOS 6.1.2 this evening. As you might understand, the misses was not amused....

The infinite restore loop means that it keeps saying that it needs to be restored from within iTunes, but after doing that several times, you tend to loose faith. After trying it several times on a Windows laptop I tried it on my iMac. While it was restoring for the who knows how many times, I did some research on the Interwebs. The results were not encouraging.

I started gathering information, and some tools (like Tiny Umbrella) to break it from its infinite loop. After the restore the iPhone booted just fine. No idea what made it break its loop. Could be coincidence, could be my iMac. No idea.​

Anyway, the misses is busy restoring the data. She (or iTunes) made a backup just before the backup. So all should be back to normal in a few minutes.​

Posted on February 21, 2013 and filed under Apple, Annoying, Hardware, iPhone.

Cleaning Up Apple TimeMachine Might Take A While

When I bought my Apple iMac about 2.5 years ago, I also added a 500GB external drive for backup reasons. This backup drive is a 2.5" USB-powered Western Digital drive. Small, unobtrusive, and stuck to the back of my iMac.

Now, >2 years later, the TimeMachine process started to complain that I ran out of disk space for (the TimeMachine) backup purposes (4.85MB free of 500GB). I used to think that TimeMachine would warn once, and after that it just started to overwrite old backups, but no matter how many times I clicked OK -> Continue etc. the out of space error kept coming back. Highly annoying. During this period I have no idea if it's actually doing anything in regards to backing up my data. I needed to resolve this, so I had two options;

  1. Get a new / bigger external harddrive (on Christmas eve......)
  2. Or delete the old backups from about a year back to the beginnning.

Since getting a new drive was out of the question I decided to delete some really old stuff on the backup drive. My reasoning being that if I didn't need the extremely old (modified) data back then, there's little chance I need it now or any time soon.

Selecting the data and deleting it was easy, this only 'moved' the data to the Trash. In other words, it's still sitting on that drive. I have the empty the trash to free the actual space on the external drive.

EmptyTrash.PNG

The screenshot was taken while it was still counting the objects that were going to be deleted. Eventually (after 2.5 hours), the counter reached >480,000 items. After this time the actual cleaning of the Trash started. That was over 1 hour ago, and it still needs to eliminate about 350,000 items. This is one of those situations were lightning backup fast drives are welcome. For the other 364 days a year it doesn't really matter.

It's gonna be a long night for the iMac.

Posted on December 24, 2012 and filed under Software, Annoying, Apple.