Episode: 1457
Title: HPR1457: Xubuntu, Kali on EeePc, Markdown Stuff, Pogoplug 4, and more.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1457/hpr1457.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:28:48

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MUSIC
Hello everyone, this is Roberto on Hacker Public Radio.
It's February 16, 2014, 1230 EST.
The last time I recorded a Hacker Public Radio episode was about a year ago, and it was
on SSH to fact, their authentication.
Today, I'm going to do a little bit of, I'm going to do something a little bit different.
I'm just going to talk about a couple of things I've done or a couple of things I've been
thinking about, and also some useful links about some general topics that I think most
of us tend to find ourselves sifting the internet for.
So today, we're going to talk about distributions and blogging and hosting little hacks or
projects, and just a useful little tip or kind of a useful tip.
Anyway, my name is Roberto, I'm coming out of Atlanta, and I hope you guys enjoy it.
If you have any feedback, let me know.
It's B-E-T-O at haven't found me.com, and I love to hear what everyone has to say.
The first thing I've got listed on my notes is X Ubuntu.
So I'm a heavy X Ubuntu user, I've been using it on a ASUS X501H, I think, I think that's
the name of this laptop.
But I use X Ubuntu heavily because it was the only distribution at the time that was
lean, and it supported UEFI out the box.
A lot of other distributions I was trying to use at the time, such as Debian and Fedora.
It just would break.
I could go through the install process, but for some reason I'll do a reboot or whatever
and it just wouldn't boot into the OS.
I was like, all right, this is ridiculous.
So Ubuntu 12.0, Ubuntu 13.04 was the distribution I used, I tested this on, but then I just didn't
like the way Ubuntu, I just didn't like the Unity interface, and I didn't like how much
resources that OS was using.
So I only have four gigs of RAM, and I've got a 64 gig SSD on this laptop, it's very
lightweight, it's very lean, it's a 15 inch laptop.
It doesn't have a CD drive, it has like 1 USB 3.0 ports, it's got a VGA, HDMI out, SD
card, and 2 other USB 2.0 ports.
So it's a very lean, very lightweight laptop that I used to do a lot of my work in.
So I came across X Ubuntu 13.04, it worked great.
I installed it, UEFI, the UEFI integration worked great with the laptop, so from there
I just committed to it and I just kept using it.
Now I'm on Ubuntu 13, I'm on X Ubuntu 13.10, and I have noticed some changes, especially
in the power management area, before I could, one quirky thing I'm noticing is that when
I close a lid, like if I set up the lid to, if I set up the computer to sleep when
I close a lid in the past, I didn't have to set it up where I had to lock the screen.
Now it was kind of quirky where I close a lid, open a lid, and the screen doesn't lock.
So I had to go in there and investigate like where I needed to go to enable that lock
on screen or lock on sleep or something like that, but another problem I found was that
even when I locked on sleep, for some reason the computer seemed to be sleeping first versus
locking the screen first, so it was just kind of weird when I opened the screen up and
I'll see my desktop instead of a lock screen, but it'll be a frozen desktop, and then the
computer would then go into the lock screen asking for the password.
So it was just kind of something I was like, oh, it's kind of sucks.
So now I just kind of get, now I just have a keystroke where I just lock the screen,
control shift L, and then close a lid, and then the screen's locked, lids closed, computers
to sleep, have a nice day.
So this is something that I noticed in X of Bones with 1310, where there are some bugs,
lurking in the OS.
Another bug that I noticed, and it's not anything bad, it's just something I noticed in the
wireless list or the network connections list, I noticed that it looks like there's some
problem with the presentation of the icons.
So the applet itself, it looks perfectly fine in the screen resolution, but it looks
like when you expand that, everything is kind of squeezed.
So it's kind of weird, I don't know if it's just my eyes, or there's something else
going on someplace else, but yeah, it just seems like the wireless icon is squeezed
a little bit, so it's just a little taller than what is shown on the applet icon.
So this kind of weird stuff, but that's kind of segues into what I really wanted to talk
about, which is the X of Bones who reporting is caring post that came out on February 14th.
And basically, this is a, basically X of Bones who, on their side, they're just talking
about, they have a measurement, a measure, I guess the topic would be measuring success
or failure, and basically it's that they want more people testing, they want bugs, they
want bugs to be reported, that aren't being reported, and they want more testing to be
done, so that they can knock out these bugs, and they can get the OS a lot more stable
and a lot more pleasing to the community.
So the key topics here or the headings that they have is measuring success or failure, bringing
out your results, and getting started.
So I highly encourage everyone, if you are X of Bones user or you are considering using
X of Bones, I like X of Bones because of the X face environment.
I don't really like, I don't really like the Unity environment, Nome is okay, I was
using Nome 3 in the Infadora 18 and 19, the only downside was that I kind of didn't
like the graphics, I just really like that simple flat 2D desktop environment, so anyway,
so I'll have a link in the show notes, but if you go to X of Bones user.org, slash news,
slash reporting, dash is dash carrying, it's just the breakdown of how to get started,
how to report these bugs, where you can go to be a part of this, and yeah, so it's
pretty cool, it's pretty cool, I'll work more on trying to get myself on the X of Bones
who, you know, reporting or bug list so that I can participate a lot more, so anyway,
so yeah, so there you go, so X of Bones who, it's a good platform, especially if you have
one of these computers that came with Windows 8 and you know, it's got the UEFI loader
and, you know, it works very well, so anyway, all right, so up next, I have a lot of
Cali Linux, my, what I have listed in my notes here is Cali Linux on EPC 1000H, old hardware
revived, so if any of you remember the, the EPC line, I know, I know it's still around,
but if any of you do remember, the young EPC line, the beginning, the early days, you had
like the 701's, and then the 901's, and then they came out with like the 1000's, and so
I have one from, I think 2009, I think or 2008, probably, so it's the 1000H, this laptop
is absolutely amazing, this laptop has lasted me through a lot of things, it's a bit heavy,
it's actually I think the same weight as my 15 inch laptop, and it's a 10.1 inch laptop,
but it's still a great, it's still a great little computer, it still functions well, it's
an atom board, it's got two gigs of RAM, it's got a, it also has a 64 gig SSD on there,
the battery's dying out on me, but still it gives me a good solid 2 to 3 hours of battery
life, it originally had Windows XP on it, so that's just to let you know how old, how
kind of old this thing is, but yeah, I got USB, I got USB 2.0 port, I got 3 USB 2.0
ports, SD card slot, VGA out, and Ethanance, and then I have a dedicated audio dedicated
mic in, so this laptop is really good, it's in really great condition and I love it, it's
just really awesome, I know there are laptops that are thinner, lighter, and more powerful
than this one, it's just, I don't know, there's some nostalgia there, the only complaint
I do have, and I've always had it, and I don't know if it's with this one, yeah, it's definitely
this guy, so the only complaint I have with this laptop is the freaking Caps Lock, you
never know when this thing is on Caps Lock, so you kind of have to, you know, be careful
whenever you're putting, you know, unique passwords in there, so, but anyway, so what I want
to talk about is Cali Linux, so I'm running Cali Linux on my ASUS EPC laptop, I'm running
the I-36 version, or, you know, the 32-bit version of, I'm sorry, 686, 32-bit version
of Cali Linux on the laptop, initially I had downloaded just the network boot, or like
the bare minimum, net ISO boot, or whatever, I came across some problems doing that because
the first problem I had was basically none of the Cali Linux packages, well, a small
amount of the Cali Linux packages were installed, so instead of, it was like a one gig, two gig
installation, but I just didn't have any of the Cali Linux installation files, and then
when I came to want to install everything else, so you basically do like a, it's a Debian,
so Cali Linux is Debian-based, and they're doing a really good job at updating their
development in their development of that OS, but it was very simple, there's like, you
know, app get install Cali Linux, I think it's like Cali, just Cali dash Linux or something
like that, and it'll just install all the, you know, backtrack Cali Linux related packages.
The only problem is that I chose a, I chose a very, I chose to install, I chose to create
separate directories in my installation, so the problem I had was that I don't have enough
space and under root to install, you know, like the eight gigs worth of, worth of packages,
I only had like 300 megs on my root or something like, some crazy low-ass numbers, so, so
yes, so I went ahead and I was like, all right, you know what, I don't want to deal with
this, you know, I've got install Cali Linux after just doing this long-ass installation,
so I went ahead and just downloaded the ISO, it's about three to three point one gigs
or something like that, it's under four gigs and very useful, I burned it, put it on a,
I put it on a, you know, I put on a unit boot in, so I just can boot from SSD card, boot
it up the EPC, it's went through the installation process for Cali Linux, and I normally, whenever
I do my installations, I always use LVMs, I don't, I don't do partitions in the traditional
sense, I'm always using logical volume manager, there's no way I'm ever going to go back to
anything, you know, anything else, because LVM is just, it's a life saver whenever you
really need to expand your, your, your, your drive space or your, or your partition space
in a sense, it's really as a life saver and it's really, really, really easy to work
with. Another, another reason why I use LVM is for the loops encryption, for the, for the hardest,
so, so I usually encrypt on my hard drives, so loops, loops is, it works with LVM, so it encrypts
the whole entire LVM, and the only thing that's, that's built outside of the LVM is a slash boot
partition, it's only has to be like 300 megs, and basically it houses a grub and based, like
and, you know, that's all, it's just so, so anyway, so anyway, so, so yeah, so few problems,
the problem number one that you're going to come across, for some reason, I don't know if it's
in a 64-bit version of the, of the, of the, of the DVD ISO, but I did not have this problem when
I did the net installer, or when I did the, when I booted using the, the slim installer because
when I encrypted the LVM and I booted off on the LVM, everything worked perfectly fine,
but when I went ahead and reinstalled using the, the DVD ISO, the larger image, where I didn't have
to go to the internet to download packages, one big problem occurred, which was that the,
the boot manager couldn't find the, it couldn't find the encrypted LVM, so you would start,
you know, you would, you would boot up and you're like, hey, you know, like, what the hell, doesn't
find, you know, it doesn't find the LVM and it'll just go to Intra and Famess, and then now you
have to like figure out, you know, what the hell's going on, like, you know, you know, the installation
process completed successfully, but when you rebooted, it just didn't boot into the, into the system.
So, I've got some, I've got some links on my show notes, I had to fix this. Basically,
what's happening is that the SDA crypt is, is trying to decrypt the wrong, it's using the wrong
partition, it's using the wrong SDA crypt to decrypt the SDA 5 partition, and the SDA 5 partition
is where the LVM exists. So, it's basically trying to do an SDA 1 underscore crypt to decrypt
the SDA 5 partition, when it's supposed to be SDA 5 underscore crypt to, unencrypt the SDA 5
partition. So, anyway, that was a simple, that was a simple fix, you just had to get yourself
booted back into the system, and once you did that, you know, you can, you can configure,
you can edit the configuration file related to that, related to that command, and once you did that,
you were good to go. So, I have a, I have a link in the show notes that explains how to do this.
One, one thing I highly recommend is that, if it says SDA 5, and then you see like, for instance,
decrypt the partition, you have to do like, crypt setup, loops open, slash dev slash SDA 5, which
is the partition to the LVM, space SDA 1 underscore crypt, you're going to see that everywhere.
What I found was that it has to be SDA 5 underscore crypt, because you have to, you're decrypting,
you're using the SDA 5 underscore crypt to decrypt the SDA 5 partition. So, just remember that,
you know, just remember that, just keep that in mind. So anyway, so anyway, so sorry if that was
crazy technical, but I really like LVM, I really like Luke's, I really like encryption, and security
is of the utmost importance nowadays. So, enjoy you guys, so that's Cali Linux, and another problem
I found with Cali Linux, and this was specifically for the EPC, this was specifically for the EPC
that I have, the 1000H, was the mousepad. So, basically, when the touchpad, when Cali Linux boots
up, that being boots up, it automatically tries to determine the trackpad, and it automatically
tries to determine the module needs to run the trackpad, and since it's using the synaptics,
basically you have to tell the kernel, hey, I need you to, don't do auto, and don't do, I forget
what the other options are, but I forget what the other protocol options are, but anyway,
you've got to change the protocol option from auto, or whatever the other options are to IMPS.
So, I've got another link here, and it's basically touchpad synaptics tapping issue,
and what happens is that when you boot up, you can't left click, you know, you can't basically like,
you know, select something, and click on it, you can't click on something, you can right click,
and you'll have, you know, like, if you right click on the desktop, you'll get, you know,
your desktop options, create a folder, create a file, whatever, but you can't, you know, left click,
and, you know, say, okay, I want to go ahead and create that folder. So, in order to do that,
you have to use like the super key T, open up a terminal, myprobe-rpsmouse, and then myprobepsmouse
protocol, or proto equals IMPS, and there's other protocols, you can look in the man pages for that,
and I forget, I forget, let's see, let's see, I forget where to, I forget where I found that at,
but yeah, so, so yeah, so you can look up the different protocols, or the different options,
you'll also have to make that static. So, in order, that's only going to work by executing
modprobe-r, which is removepsmousemodule, and then modprobepsmouse proto equals IMPS, which loads
the IMPS protocol into thepsmousemodule, if you do that, that's only for that session. So,
in order to make it static, you have to create a file, a configuration file under
Etsy slash modprobe-d, and then there you just put in your optionspsmouse proto equals IMPS,
and then from there, every time you boot up, it'll just be, it'll just be persistent, there you go,
persistent. So, so yeah, so, so that's the one, that's the one real downside I saw in the EPC
1000H, another one that I had, which was impacted when I was just doing the net installer,
was the wireless drivers. I had to, I had to blacklist, when I did the net installer,
I had to blacklist my wireless driver, and try to reload. I had the fix, but I don't know where,
where I put it, but it was, I had to blacklist the wireless driver, it was like a real tag 2800,
or something like that, because it just wouldn't, it just wouldn't, it just wouldn't load the drivers
for it. So, so when I blacklisted it, and I reboot it, I had to, I had to install a new driver,
but when I did the install with the ISO, the, the, the full DVD ISO, everything worked out fine,
like I didn't have to do any crazy ninja stuff. So, that's just something, that's just something
that I, I, I noticed that I was like, okay, you know, that was a plus side in using the, the ISO
for, for installation. So, so yeah, so, so just, um, just keep that in mind, if you do have an old,
you know, an, an old laptop or something like that, you know, just keep that in mind that, you know,
you, you have, you know, you can, you, you still have options, you know, you don't have to toss them,
and if you want to do awesome, hey, you know, toss them, whatever, but, uh, yeah, I'm using Backtrack
on, on that, on, on my EPC, or I'm using Cali Linux on my EPC, and, uh, it's working out great,
I mean, it's a, it's a great, it's a great tool to have, um, and, you know, it's just, it just,
it just works out, it's just, I just like it, um, circling back, some other the protocol options are
auto, bear, IMPX, or exps, raw, and base, um, I don't know what the, uh, the bear, I remember that, uh,
the bear is just, I don't know what these are, I don't know what these are, but, uh, I'll keep a,
uh, I'll, uh, I'll put this in, uh, in, in the show notes so that, you know, people can look at this and,
and, and whatever. So, um, so yeah, so that's Cali Linux on the ASUS EPC, and, uh, all right, up next.
So I've got blogging in Markdown only, um, I just want to just kind of change that, I don't want to do
only because it sounds a little pretty bad, because I might end up blogging in another method,
but blogging in Markdown, just general blogging in Markdown, um, recently I, I was working somewhere
where they supplied me a MacBook, and, um, I was having to do documentation. Uh, I really did not
want to use, uh, word, uh, as my, like, platform for documenting, uh, policies, and, and, uh, guidelines,
or practices, or whatever. So I kind of thought outside the box, I was like, all right, you know,
I want to use something that's going to allow me to conduct, like, that's going to allow me to
utilize revision control, um, and also just be able to, be able to simply write in, in, in some,
in a very clean format and use any type of styling to present the, to, to present the documentation,
however I want to present it. So there was one app that I really enjoyed using on the Mac,
and it was called the Moo app, M-O-U-A-P-P, um, and, um, this app was fantastic. This app is absolutely
fantastic. Uh, you basically can, um, you, you basically, it's a two-paint window, uh, so you have
your Markdown on the left and your, uh, your formatted, uh, documentation or your formatted style on
the right, and you would write in Markdown on the left, and on the right-hand side, you'll see
what you're writing in whatever style sheet you choose to have it presented in. And, uh,
what I like the most is that you can, you can, um, you can add more style sheets. So it was really
awesome to have disability to have, you know, one method, one, one format of writing on the left,
and has many different style sheets, or as many different formats of presentation on the right,
depending on the style sheet. So the Moo app.com is the site, and I really wish this was on,
I really wish with this was on Linux. Um, unfortunately, there isn't, there isn't an option
like that one on Linux, but there are some alternatives. Uh, so the first one that I've,
that I've, uh, that I came across was RedMine or RedMine. I think it's RedMine or, or RedMine,
and let's see, uh, let's, yeah, RedMine. So RedMine is pretty good app. I tried it on, on, on my,
on my X-abon to machine. Um, it looks cool. It's very simple. Uh, it's Markdown on the left,
presentation on the right, but it didn't have that, you know, that sparkling effect like on,
like I was like how I was using the Moo app on the Mac. So it's just, just something to think about
what, uh, when you are working on Markdown. But anyway, um, so RedMine was a good editor.
There are some Python tools that take HTML and convert it to Markdown. Um, but again,
what I'm looking for is an ability to write on the left and present on the right. And, and that was,
Moo app was, it's, it's the best. It's out of everything that I've tried. It is the best. Now,
that was from a desktop app perspective, um, or, uh, uh, a standalone application. Uh,
some other options that I found, which were pretty useful, which was a ghost.org. Um,
I have a, uh, we'll talk about hosting services next, but I have a hosting provider that provides
the ghost.org installation scripts, uh, for your, for your hosting service. And you can deploy it,
and you can have a ghost, uh, a ghost site up instantaneously, like within 10 minutes. Um,
ghost is probably the best, the best platform for Markdown, uh, either, um, static content,
or just regular blogging platform. I mean, it's just, it really is, it's really is pretty good.
It came from a Kickstarter, uh, it came out of a Kickstarter funding, and I think the guy came
from WordPress or whatever, um, or the team came from WordPress or a variety of other blogging areas.
I think one of the ladies is from Tumblr or something. But anyway, uh, ghost.org, really good stuff.
Um, I think if you go to the site, there's, uh, you, there's a, like, you can pay for it.
It's just similar to WordPress, but then you could also, there is the open source version.
And, uh, with the open source version, you know, you can install on your own system and,
and do whatever. Um, but yeah, it's an MIT license, uh, which I kind of like, um, I was like, okay,
I don't, I wonder why, um, because they, they kind of do explain in their videos, like, oh,
we're MIT license because, you know, you can use it and do whatever you want with it. I was like, uh,
okay, uh, uh, uh, okay. Yeah. I won't speak too much about that. But ghost.org,
really good blogging, uh, blogging platform with markdown in mind. Um,
basically what I like about it is that on the left hand side, it has a tube, it has a,
it has a, it has a two pane window. It has on the left hand side, you write your blog on the right
hand side. It presents to you what the user's going to see. And you can write an HTML on the left
or markdown on the left or just regular text on the left. Um, and it works, it works pretty good.
I had it up and running on one of my sites, uh, but for some reason, it broke. I don't know what
happened. So, uh, since it's on a hosting platform, I'm just going to say that I got hacked and then
that's it. So, but anyway, ghost.org, it's really good. Um, and I, I highly recommend you try,
especially if you do like that, how red mind and move app function or you have like that two window,
so that one window, two pane, uh, scenario. Uh, so just, just keep that in mind. Um,
all right. Uh, there's another platform that I like. Um, and, uh, I want to, I want to use
the correct terminology here. And it's like a static. It's like static site generator. Thank you.
So static site generator. Um, I have a list, I have a website I came across from Stack Overflow
about static site generators. Um, but anyway, uh, script a gram. Uh, it's SCRIPTOGR.am.
These guys are really cool. Uh, what they do, uh, which is pretty interesting is that you can
connect your Dropbox folder to their service. And then they, uh, and then I, I don't know if it's,
um, I have not signed up for these guys, but I've read their documentation and it looks pretty good.
You can set up kind of like a publishing timeline where it pulls from your Dropbox folder and
publishes the, whatever content is there. So basically does like a, you know, like a, a cron job
and it says, are there any files if there are publishes? Move on forward. Um, so what I like about
them is that you basically can have your desktop application of where your desktop markdown editing
application and you, uh, you know, you write it, you save it to your Dropbox, your Dropbox gets
pulled and the SCRIPTOGR.am pulls from the Dropbox, it presents it on your website,
better being by boom, done. Uh, you can take your scene name, uh, you take a scene name record,
point it to SCRIPTOGR.am and then, you know, it's www.yoursite.com and that site comes up and it's a
markdown site, uh, and it's very rich, uh, and it's very good. Uh, so do look into that if you're
interested and just kind of like, you know, you still want, you still want the originals basically
because on ghost.org, the problem with that is that you're based, you're, you're writing your,
your, um, your posts on the web server. So, you know, if your web server is toast, then the web
server is toast and everything is gone with it. Um, with SCRIPTOGR.am, it's pulling from your Dropbox.
So it's a static site generator and it's just pulling from your Dropbox and it's presenting
from your Dropbox. That's really cool. I think that's a much better implementation. Um, of course,
the problem is you're using Dropbox and, you know, then you get into the security layer and then
then you have to kind of look at, okay, you know, what's the licensing structure like and what is
it cost? And so it's just, you know, there's, there's caveats there. So look into that. Um,
the last one that I want to know, that I want to know and, and I just want to mention it just
because like, it's worth mentioning and they've been around for a while and they are a better
alternative to things such as Drupal and WordPress because Drupal and WordPress are literally
overkill if you're just trying to do a block. Uh, in my opinion, they are literally overkill.
Um, and plus what I'm trying to do is mark down only. I really like working with markdown and
it's very simple. It's very clean. It's very effective and you're, you're going to get work done.
You know, you're just going to type away, you know, hashtag hashtag, uh, bang, bang, whatever it is
you want to do. You know, it's strong. It's very simple. You don't have to write no crazy ACML
codes to make things work, uh, work, work in your, um, in your favor. But in the Moo app,
when I was using it on the Mac, I noticed that you can publish directly to script program or Tumblr.
Um, so that's just something to think about is that with scriptogram, you were able to publish
your Dropbox and then scriptogram, pull from your Dropbox or you were able to use the Moo app
to push that into scriptogram, you know, associating your, your scriptogram account to your Moo app
on your Mac or to associating your Tumblr account, um, to the Moo app on your Mac. So Tumblr for
somehow, some way I have not used this, but Tumblr somehow some way uses markdown. I don't know how,
I don't know where, um, the only downside with Tumblr is, you know, Yahoo. It's just Yahoo is taking
over and, you know, who knows where that's going to, who knows where that, that's going to end up.
So, you know, that's kind of like the, the plus to Tumblr is that it's, yeah, it's good stuff,
but, you know, it's like, who knows, who knows what's going to happen on that. So,
anyway, so yeah, that's my, my, my, my two cents on blogging and markdown. If you haven't tried
markdown, try it, use it for blogging, use it for documentation, use it for creating PDFs,
presentations, use it for creating policies if you're in a, if you're in an officiating position.
You know, use it, uh, use it like as if, you know, use it as if you want to, you know,
conduct revision control on, on your files, because you can't, like, you can, you can, we can
argue that, yeah, you can use it, you can do revision control in, um, in LibreOffice or open office
or, or Microsoft Office. The only problem with those three options is that one, with Microsoft
revision control is going to be a nightmare. Any single little change in the formatting of the,
of the word document is going to be taking you as a change. Even if you just, even if you just
enter the space or, or enter the space and backspace or remove or, or, or change the formatting
of text, I mean, it's just, it just gets really painstaking. Um, I've done it in LibreOffice where
you save LibreOffice to an XML, uh, output, or I think it's od, I think maybe ODT might be XML,
but you save, you save it in a format in which, uh, like, Git or Mercurio or Bizarre, whatever,
it can see, you know, the individual text changes, um, but it just gets, like, it just gets me
not in this because it's like, oh my god, so many changes have occurred here. It's ridiculous.
Like, why am I even doing this? You can use Dropbox as your revision control, but it's only
going to give you, you know, the change from yesterday and it's not going to give, not going
to help you really do a diff in any, in any event. Um, so that's why I'm, I'm committed to markdown
because I can diff things. I can, you know, I can, I can, I can sift through it easily. I can read,
I can read the lines of text easily. You know, I'm not going to call it code. It's just markup
language. So, so it's just, it's a lot easier to work with in my opinion. So, um, so yeah, so
if you haven't tried markdown, give it a try and, um, and let me know, you know, let me know.
All right. Next up, uh, hosting services. Uh, so low-end VPSs and hosting services, um, for like,
like three or four years, I mean, we, we've all done it. Probably we've used a dream host. We
use the go daddy. We've used the domain.coms. We've used, you know, the, uh, I, I don't even know what
the other ones are out. I don't even know. It's like, uh, uh, hostgator or something like that. I
don't know. We've used them all. We, we, I've tried a lot of them. Uh, hostgator, I have not tried hostgator
and I have not tried dream host, but I've tried go daddy. I've tried domain.com. Um, I've tried like, uh,
I can't remember now, but anyway, so, uh, there's two of them that I use personally. Um,
one of them is RVIX or ARVIXE. These guys are really cool. Um, if you sign out with these dudes
and you get, uh, just regular, uh, website hosting, not low-end VPS stuff, but just
regular hosting, um, shared hosting. You get a free domain. Um, as long as you get the hosting,
you get a free domain. So, I mean, Squarespace, I've used it. It's cool. Whatever. I don't really
have that much control. You know, that's, that's the one downside to it. You know, I want a box
I can access to. I want a box that I can deploy multiple sites to. I want a box where I can do,
whatever the hell I want to do. Um, uh, this RVIX or ARVIXE, really cool people. Um, another site is
Prometheus.net. These are, this is an Italian-based service. Um, if you are, you know, I don't know,
if you are security-minded or if you are, uh, I don't know, I don't know. Let's just say, you know,
this is, this is Italian-based. It's paper. It uses PayPal that, what else can I say? They,
they do low-end VPSs and it's very cheap, affordable and it's, it's usable. So, all I can say is that
anything that uses PayPal and anything that's, uh, allows me to feel a little secure and, and,
and use, use it, use things based on a dedicated IP, I'm very happy with. So,
so just keep that in mind. Um, so just, just to try to, try to set, set goals whenever you're
purchasing, um, hosting services, um, because especially, uh, especially buying domains, um,
you got to be very careful where, you know, like domain.com, you buy domain, they charge you for
domain privacy. It's like, come on. Seriously, like, you're going to charge me for domain privacy.
Like, that's ridiculous. Or, or, or domain locking or something like that. So, you know, so just
keep that in mind, you know, where someone who's trying to like charge you for like, you know,
oh, email forwarding. Like, seriously, like, you, you're going to charge me for email forwarding.
Like, I just paid you this much for domain and email forwarding is, is nothing. You're just,
that's ridiculous. You know, it's just keep that in mind. Like, it had some expectations or talk
to somebody who's had a domain before and, and ask them, what are some of the pitfalls when buying
a domain, especially from like, go daddy or, you know, these big wigs that are, that are trying
to extract as much money out of you as possible. Um, so anyway, uh, so next up, uh, Pogo plug,
version four with arch Linux, simple, cheap and extensible. Um, I came across this blog from 40-something
geek.blockspot.com, uh, 23rd, forward slash 2013, forward slash 03, forward slash Pogo plug,
dash series, dash four, dash arch Linux, dash review, dot HTML. Sorry about that. Links will be in
the show notes. But, uh, there's another link, uh, arch Linux arm, dot org slash platforms,
slash arm, V five slash Pogo plug, Pogo plug, dash series, dash four. Um, these two links are
going to provide step by step instructions for converting a Pogo plug series four into a full
blown arch, uh, server. Uh, it's going to be headless. There is no, there, uh, on a on a Pogo plug
series four, uh, okay, let's rewind back. Pogo plug series four, very cheap. It's just an alternative
way to set up a Pogo plug in your home, connect a three USB 3.0 drive, uh, uh, uh, a SATA, um,
a two and a half inch hard drive or a USB 2.0, uh, device and share and basically have storage
on your land where you can do the only, the LNA sharing or upload or whatever you want, um,
in your home, you can use the my dot Pogo plug dot com cloud service where you can remotely access
the Pogo plug and do whatever you need to do there. So the pluses, uh, the pluses that this device
from the Pogo plug site, whenever you buy this thing and register it, you can enable SSH.
So you don't even need to hack it. You just, you can from the site itself, you can say, okay,
you know, I want to enable SSH, boom, SSH enable. Downside is that a lot of tools aren't really
available on the, uh, on the, uh, in the Pogo plug build. So the next thing is how do I hack this
thing? I want to put Linux on it. I want to put, you know, a full blown version on it. So arm, uh,
this, these two links from 40 something geek and archlinics arm.org, they provide the step by step,
uh, the step by step guidelines to install arm on a USB stick, plug it into the Pogo plug,
reboot the Pogo plug, kill the HDM service, I think it's called or HDD, yeah, I think it's like
HDM, which is the Pogo plug web service, reboot it, boot into this freaking arch version of
archlinics, SSH into the, SSH into the, into the device, boom, you've got a Linux server for 20 bucks,
I think I think on Amazon, this thing is going for like $25 or something like that. So, uh, it uses,
it's got, it's got, it only has ethernet, uh, connection and you can only use the, the, um,
the two and a half inch SATA port or the two USB 2.0 port that are on top of the device for the
installation or the deployment of Linux. The USB 3.0 ports are still usable. It's not that you
can't use them, it's just that you can only boot bait on the two ports that are above the device.
I don't know why, but it's just, that's all, that's the only thing you can do. But once you got
the device booted up, you can plug in a USB 3.0 device on the backside and, you know, go from there.
So, once you install arch, once you got arch running on this thing, you know, you're, you're in the
mix. You're good to go. You basically have a full-blown Linux installation and you can do whatever
you want. So, if you don't want a low-end VPS and you don't want to pay for that, you can pay for
$25 pro plug device, put it on your land, open up some ports, deploy, deploy arch Linux on it,
and boom, you've got a low-end VPS at home. So, my thing has been running for like over a week and a
half with no issues. Some problems you will come across if you don't pay attention to what you're
doing in installation process. Well, actually post installation process, changing of the root password.
If you change the root password or you start enforcing more strict SSH rules, such as like a lot of
groups, do not permit SSH, please, please remember to test before you reboot. Please remember to check
inspect what you expect because you don't want to end up in a situation like me where I went ahead
and I misspelled something in the SSHD config file, rebooted the device, and the SSH server is
not coming up. There is no display port or there is no video port that you can plug into so that
you can view this thing on a monitor. There is no output port for graphics. This thing has no
graphics. So, if you mess up, you're going to have to do one to one of two things, a complete
reinstallation, or do as I did and use your X1-2 laptop on one end or your Linux laptop on the left,
plug in a keyboard to the Pogo plug on the right and reboot the device, let the device get to
the login page or to the login prompt, and how would you know it's there? Just wait, just wait
a good amount of time. If there's no activity on the USB light, then you're probably at the
at the at the login prompt. You type in root, you type in the password blindly, so there's nothing
to look at. You just have to do it blindly. If you remember the root password, if you do not
remember the root password, then you're in really big trouble. But if you remember the root password,
so type it in, now you should be logged in. You don't know this, but you should be logged in.
Now, how do you know if you're logged in? Okay. What you can do is you can try to ping out
to the internet and check your firewall and to see if there's an ICMP session going out to the
internet. If you see like, okay, I'm seeing from this IP address, which is the Pogo plug because
that's the MAC address for the Pogo plug, and I see that it's going out to the internet, and it's
pinging to, you know, 8.8.8.8, we're good to go. Control-C, and that stops the ping. All right,
SSHD now. Like, let's say you fucked up SSHD. You have two options. One option is to install.
One option is to try to repair the SSHD file. If you know what you messed up, then go ahead,
VI, space, forward slash, AT, forward slash, SSH, forward slash, SSHD, underscore config, enter.
This is all blindly. There's no monitor involved here. This is all through your touch and feel,
you could say, you know, then you can say forward slash, you know, whatever it is that you messed up,
or you can do the, you know, you can do the sad replacement, you know, you can do percentage S,
you know, you colon percentage S, forward slash, whatever it is, you want to replace forward slash
with the correct version, forward slash G, enter. That should correct it. Save the file, reboot the
device, SSH to come up. This is if you messed up SSH, if you messed up other stuff, you know,
hopefully SSH is still running. Now, let's say you don't know what you messed up, and SSH is just so
backed up, you just, you don't know. The alternative is to install Webman. So you can install Webman,
and there's a tutorial. I'll have to find it, but there, I've, you know, there is a tutorial to
install Webman on Arch, follow the tutorial, and, you know, you should be good to go. And let's see,
let's see, yeah, yeah. So I've got a site here, and this guy was installing Webman on an older
version of a Pogo plug with Arch, but this should, this should work just fine. Anyway, install Webman,
you install Webman, you should be good to go. Once you install Webman, you can, you know, you allow,
you allow, you know, whatever it is you need to allow, and that's it. You can install Webman,
you can configure the SSH file, you can do a whole bunch of stuff after that. You can, you can
administer the entire Arch, your entire Pogo plug after that. So remember, there is no, this is
a headless server, and it will be headless, you know, indefinitely, unless, you know, unless you
can get one of those USB to VGA connectors and then enable the, the, the module and, you know,
disable, or I think it, I think they're blacklisted originally, but the USB to, the USB to VGA
connectors or display adapters or whatever, unless you get one of those, then you should be in the,
you should be okay, but just remember, do not fuck this up. That's, that's, that's the, that's
the only thing I can tell you is don't fuck this up, pay attention to what you're doing, make changes
slowly, inspect what you expect, and check before you reboot. So yeah, so Pogo plug version four
with Arch Linux, it's a definite buy if you've got the 20, 25 bucks, do it, buy it, work with it,
play with it, whatever. Give it to a gift to someone, I gave it, I gave one of those as a gift to
someone for Christmas. So I hope that person is listening and I hope they're, uh,
hope they're hacking away. So last thing I've got is Gmail web clips. So I, I was on Gmail the other day
and I was like, wow, you know, this is really cool. Uh, I usually block, um, ads in, in everything I do,
I have script, I have a no script running and I have ad blocker. So most of the times I have a lot of
the ads in my Gmail inbox blocked, um, but one day I was using a, uh, one day I was using, um,
Gmail on, um, I think it was on my word computer and I didn't have ad blocker and no script running.
So I just saw something on the top, on the top bar where the ads usually used to be or usually are
and it's some, it didn't say why this ad, it said web clip and then I was like, web clip and I'm
reading this thing and it's like, oh, okay, it's like a quote of a day or like some current event topic
or a news item. It was just, it was just interesting. It was just like, wow, um, this is really cool.
I just kept hearing their little refresh button and Google and the Gmail box and it would, I just
was going through like 10 or 15 of these until I got an ad and I just thought that that was really
cool. I, I never, I've never seen it before I guess because I always have it disabled, um, but
just something to check out if you guys are interested. Um, if you go under your settings in Gmail
and you go under web clips, there is a column there. You have a check mark. There should be a check
box that says show my web clips above the inbox. Um, and then there's a thing here that says,
due to low usage, we've removed customization of web clips in Gmail. Your current setting would
be maintained and you can still see your feeds below. So I don't, I don't know what happened
with this thing, but I think it's pretty cool. Uh, it's just something that, you know, if you just
want to kill some time, you can sometimes set a reading ads. Um, so anyway, so, uh, that's pretty much it.
Uh, uh, I hope you guys enjoy this. Uh, I hope this was a resourceful and I mean, uh, actually,
I do have one more site and it's something I got from the Risky Biz podcast. Uh, it's a security
podcast and, uh, let's see, uh, it's a, it's a, it's a place to get a, it's, I think it's creative
comments, the music here. Um, so let's see, let's see, let's see, let's see, is this music creative
comments? I do not know. Um, I do apologize. I don't know, but the site is called triple j unearthed.com.
And, um, and yeah, it's a pretty good site and, uh, they've got a lot of good artists and most
of this stuff that I noticed is from Australia, uh, or maybe, uh, what's the other place down under,
uh, New Zealand. So it might be New Zealand and Australia, but what I noticed that a lot of these
guys accents sound Australian. Um, but, uh, I don't know if you guys are going to be able to hear this,
but, um, yeah, so anyway, uh, yeah, so check it out, triple j unearthed. Uh, one of the artists I
enjoy on there is called the pilot or called pilots and, um, they've got a song called coast to coast
and it's pretty cool. It's, uh, so yeah, so I hope you guys enjoy, um, and if you do want other
music that I don't know if this is creative comments, I apologize, um, but other music available out
there or other music sites available out there are gemendo and I think it's like creative comments
music.org maybe. Um, so, you know, just check those out and, uh, you know, enjoy and have a great day.
Thanks again, everyone and let me know if you have any questions, uh, it's B-E-T-O at havenfoundme.com.
You can find me on Twitter at havenfoundme.com. I'm also on Identica. I haven't been on there in a
while, but I got my account there. It's having family. Um, I'm sorry, it's at havenfoundme on Twitter.
It's at havenfoundme and, um, and yeah, so if you got any questions, hit me up, send me an email,
send me a tweet. I'm also on Google plus. Uh, you should be able to find me on Google plus as well.
And, um, yeah, uh, thanks again for listening, appreciate it. I encourage you,
create it, um, make a, make a episode on Hacker Public Radio, um, and also, you know, have a great
month. Take care. Bye-bye.
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