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Fixing SFGate.com Readability

February 14th, 2007

Recently SFGate.com, one of the sites I like to read for both local and national news, redesigned their article layout. The new design switches from a sans-serif font to a new large serif font, Georgia, with large spacing between the words and lines. I decided to fix this problem.

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Making Suspend to RAM work with the DFI nF4 SLI-DR Expert

August 16th, 2006

I finally found a workaround to a problem which has been bothering me since I built my quiet gaming PC back in January. Despite the DFI nF4 SLI-DR Expert being touted as “THE overclocker’s motherboard,” suspend to RAM (also known as STR or S3) didn’t work properly while overclocking.

There were two major problems:

1. The temperature sensor readings were wildly inaccurate and the voltage applied to the CPU was increased significantly, beyond any selected overclocking voltage. Not safe.

2. The FSB (HTT) speed would revert to stock, while maintaining my adjusted multiplier. This meant the CPU was running at 1900MHz instead of 2900MHz, lower than the stock non-overclocked speed. The overclocked FSB speed should have been 290MHz in my case.

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login_sentry updated to v2.2

February 2nd, 2006

A couple of users informed me of some minor bugs (thanks!), so I’m releasing a small update to fix them. Some of the pattern matching was also improved to handle log lines from a wider variety of ssh versions and authentication methods.

It can be retrieved here: http://www.lumiere.net/~j/login_sentry/

For those unfamiliar with login_sentry, it’s a small perl daemon that watches a system logfile for bad login attempts and temporarily bans hosts (via tcpwrappers / hosts.deny) that fail to authenticate repeatedly. This prevents those annoying brute force ssh attempts from filling up your logfile. Additionally it can also watch for authentication attempts via a few other services (postfix SASL, dovecot, and pwauth).

I use it to prevent brute force login attempts via all my authentication methods (including via webmail) and also ban access to all authenticated services (again, including webmail). Since it doesn’t require anything besides a standard perl install (no special libraries) and bans via hosts.deny instead of firewall rules, it’s fairly portable too.

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UTF-8 Output Support in Pine

November 21st, 2005

A few years ago I switched most of my terminals and programs to use UTF-8. For the most part I had no difficulties.

pine is my preferred CLI email client. It understands different character sets and can even convert from UTF-8 into several others (such as ISO-8859-1). However for some reason, they’ve never added the ability to convert from other characters sets to UTF-8. I often receive emails in ISO-8859-1 (it’s the default on many email clients) and many of the special characters ended up garbled, despite pine knowing that UTF-8 is my preferred character set.

I recently checked to see if pine has been updated to support converting into UTF-8 yet. It hasn’t. So I went looking for what solutions others were using. I found a few solutions, one of which I’m using now with good results.

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