Category: Featured

OneDrive Unlimited Storage for all, sorta, mostly everyone!

October 27th, 2014
OneDrive (Formerly SkyDrive) has once again upped its storage capacity from 1TB to unlimited storage. The upgrade is rolling out to its subscribers “over the coming months”, but users can try to get theirs earlier by signing up to some promotional ads.

This may be to one-up Google Drive or Dropbox.

So who is eligible and how do I get it?

If you don’t currently have Office365 you can still get Unlimited Storage. This bit of information was hard to find, but after contacting support, I figured that out.
- In order to get OneDrive Unlimited Storage you must have office 365 Home, whether you already had it or not this gives you 5 PCs or Macs and 5 Tablets aswell as Smartphones and Online Office.
- You need an Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscription.
- With that each user gets 1TB each for up to 5 users.
- With that you ALSO get 60 minutes of Skype Calls.
- If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you don’t have to do anything.
- For Office 365 business customers, unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business has been added to the Office 365 roadmap and will begin rolling out in 2015.
- source.
This type of business model must have been well thought out, the reason that I can think of is that users are not reaching their quotas, which makes sense. Google offers a 100GB for $2 a month, but 1TB is still significantly better, and available over 5 users, so 5TB for $10/mo, frankly. I’m sold.
Anonabox – A scam?

October 15th, 2014
A recent Kickstarter anonabox boasted to be developed over four years, aswell as being 100% open source, it was then pointed out that the original project was a semi-finalist on Hackaday Prize (source).

With reddit in uproar, and anonabox’es AMA only receiving over 370 comments, August Germar logged off without any real answer as to why he has essentially stolen the product from aliexpress.

August Germar then verified that he was using the board from aliexpress and was infact simply buying the boards and installing the software. Anonabox also was called out about his version two prototype was infact a board for openwrt.

It seems as though the anonabox, origionally a plug and play type deal was infact not so plug and play, with some of the problems being that
- The project is not original and for $45 from an original $19 thats a huge price markup.
- The box itself is not secure as it took less than 30 minutes to crack the root password ‘on a relatively weak box’
- The box has logging which, when intended for plug and play is not so useful.
- The speed of the device is less than a tenth of some home routers.
- It seems that currently the product is nothing more than some reconfigured WT3020-V1.0
- The kickstarter page seems to have no understanding of how Tor works.
Their 404 page was also interesting

Thank you htilonom
Bukkit has been given a DMCA takedown by Wesley Wolfie. The NEXT steps.

October 5th, 2014
It is currently well known that bukkit has been given a dmca request by Wesley Wolfie, but now that that has happened, we now need to rebuild!

So here is whats happening, the folks over from bukkit are now working on a new modding api, called sponge! currently ‘Sponge will start with Minecraft 1.8, with Vanilla Client Support on Forge.’

Old plugins that were written on bukkit will most likely have to be removed, unless someone finds a way to make them compatible with sponge.

Here is a large extract of what they plan to do.
Our ultimate goal is to create a modding API that is easy to use for owners of small servers for friends and family, owners of large servers, and everyone in between. In addition, we also plan to permit client modding.
- Sponge mods should work across several different Minecraft versions without needing an update from the developer, which means that you don’t have to worry about all your mods breaking between each new major release of Minecraft (1.6, 1.7, 1.8, etc.).
- Sponge will support official interoperability with Forge so you can use both Sponge mods and Forge mods together. We are working directly with the Forge team.
- While Sponge will not be directly supporting Bukkit, community projects have been started that aim to provide complete support for existing Bukkit plugins on top of Sponge
the whole plan can be found here

Good Luck to you all

EDIT, also check out PROJECT RAINBOW, they currently have downloads and plugins up for grabs.
How to setup MMS on O2 pay & Go Go Go

October 5th, 2014

I recently had a problem with O2’s pay and go go go sim, where I was unable to send MMS or group text people, after a couple conversations with O2 chat and some form help, I was able to finally get it working, perviously when I tried to send an MMS or Photo, I would get the message ‘MMS blocked by Carrier’. But this solution should fix it for you, as it did for me.

The first issue I had was that my apn settings were wrong, here is how to fix it, your settings may vary, but essentially you need to get to your ‘APN’ settings menu in your phone, usually it is
Settings > General > Mobile Data > Mobile Data Network > APN
and for Iphones it is
Settings > Mobile > Mobile Data Network > APN
and for me it was ‘Quick settings’, then tap and hold ‘Mobile Data’ and select ‘Access Point Names’, see below.(I have a HTC Desire 610, but this may apply to most HTC’s)

Tap and Hold ‘Mobile Data’

Select ‘Access Point Names’

Do as necessary

Now you have located the menu, you should probably reset your ‘APN’ settings to default, you can do this by pressing the menu button and pressing ‘reset to default’, this stap is technically optional and may straight out fix your problem, so it may be a good idea to check it out. Once you have done that, you should have the following APN; (these may vary from phone to phone)

Name – ‘O2 Pay & Go’
APN – ‘payandgo.o2.co.uk’
Proxy – Not Set
Port – Not Set
Username – ‘payandgo’
Password – ‘password’
Server – Not Set
MMSC – ‘http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk:8002’
MMS Proxy – ‘82.132.254.1’
MMS Port – ‘8080’
MMS Protocol – ‘WAP 2.0’ (2.0)
MCC – ‘234’
MNC – ’10’
Authentication type – Not Set
APN type – ‘default,hipri,dun,supl,mms’
Bearer – Unspecified

Now save.

(Settings may vary from phone to phone, so make educated decisions if you are stuck, or Google your specific phone settings for O2 (Or your Carrier).)

You now need to add a new APN for MMS, note that you should have 2 APN’s one for Calls, texts and Internet, and one for MMS. Give it the following settings;

Name – ‘O2 MMS’
APN – ‘wap.o2.co.uk’
Proxy – ‘http://wap.o2.co.uk’
Port – ‘9201’
Username – ‘o2wap’
Password – ‘password’
Server – ‘http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk:8002’
MMSC – ‘http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk:8002’
MMS Proxy – ‘193.113.200.195’
MMS Port – ‘8080’
MMS Protocol – ‘WAP 2.0’ (2.0)
MCC – ‘234’
MNC – ’10’
Authentication type – Not Set
APN type – ‘mms’
Bearer – Unspecified

Now save.

(Settings may vary from phone to phone, so make educated decisions if you are stuck, or Google your specific phone settings for O2 (Or your Carrier).)

You should now have two APN’s and should now be able to use calls,texts,internet and mms (as well as group messaging and photo sending) on O2 Pay and Go Go Go.
Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger?

October 1st, 2014

Were back! and were faster than ever, well over 140% faster to be precise, out with Xampp on windows, in with Ubuntu Webmin!

Wait… Webmin isn’t that taboo? Well, yes, it is but its got loads of features and is really easy to do otherwise time consuming tasks that could take minutes and turn that into a couple of seconds, for example, adding a virtual host to apache2 would require FTP and a bit of nifty .txt editing, but with webmin, its a couple of clicks away, practical in the long run, but it does have it’s drawbacks.

Plus webmin is easy to use and quick to configure, so Ill be doing a couple tutorials on that soon enough!
Bukkit has been given a DMCA takedown by Wesley Wolfie. what now?

September 3rd, 2014

Recently bukkit has been issued a DMCA takedown because of recent events and the massage below appeared on bukkit’s downloads pages.

451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons.
This content is unavailable as the direct result of a DMCA takedown request.
A copy of the notification can be found at this link.

What now?
well, we don’t know, as far as we are aware Wesley Wolfie is issuing the DMCA notice to Multiplay (who host bukkit and bukkit’s download links (reference)).

I believe that Spigot will continue to update there builds but are in the same boat as bukkit, but that it is ok for them to do so as it is not Wolfie’s Intention to stop the modding of bukkit but to protect mojang from using his code in their develpments of bukkit as he was unaware that mojang had aqquired bukkit and he was no longer working for an open source project and was now working for mojang essentially for free.

To read more, read here!
Coloring Batch Files! – within one file!

July 29th, 2014

I wanted colored batch files and I managed to achieve this with someones solution which I modified and made my own, it is now quite different to his but I cannot find who it was to give them credit, anyway, here is the code!

@echo off SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion for /F "tokens=1,2 delims=#" %%a in ('"prompt #$H#$E# & echo on & for %%b in (1) do rem"') do ( set "DEL=%%a" ) title Startup Assist - Handler call :ColorText 08 "[" call :ColorText 08 "Service" call :ColorText 08 "]" call :ColorText 08 " Startup Assist - HANDLER - RUNNING " echo. call :ColorText 08 "[" call :ColorText 0E "WARNING" call :ColorText 08 "]" call :ColorText 08 " Startup Assist will stop if a server startup file is not found this is because of windows MS DOS functionality, Sorry " echo. call :ColorText 08 "[" call :ColorText 08 "Minecraft Service" call :ColorText 08 "]" call :ColorText 0A " Minecraft Server " call :ColorText 0C " Nexion" call :ColorText 0A " Started" echo. start "launch.bat" "C:UsersNexionDocumentsMinecraft ServersNexionlaunch.bat" echo( call :ColorText 79 "This window will now await user input!" echo. ) PAUSE exit goto :eof

:ColorText
echo off
“%~2”
findstr /v /a:%1 /R “^$” “%~2” nul
del “%~2” > nul 2>&1
goto :eof

which looks something like this

As you can tell, this is for my minecraft server 🙂 (Nexion.co.uk)

and that’s all there is to it! you can use any standard colors that you could already within batch files. (Note: When running without user, i.e. started by another process, the colors requite administrative privileges!)

edit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7290434/how-can-i-make-a-multi-functional-batch-program
Using Hashlib to Securely store user passwords and credentials.

July 1st, 2014

What is hashing?

Hashing a password means that users cannot have their passwords compromised when a database engineer is reading cleartext in user databases (to a degree, the passwords could be decoded, but hashing them makes them illegible to someone who is not doing anything extensive). And also prevents hackers from reading passwords in plain text and can be compromised by collision attacks.

Additionally when hashing a password a salt may be added to the password, this prevents a database from being attacked by dictionary attacks.

Why Hash Passwords?

Storing User credentials in Plain Text is generally as bad practice as it allows anyone who reads the file (or computer) to see the password, username or any other credential without any sort of protection, In some cases it is against the law, such as PCI SSC Data Security Standards which handles debit and other card types. The solution to this is to Obfuscation in the form of hashing. Hashing a password makes a standard password seem completely random.

How hashing works

When a user signs up for a website or any other form that requires secure credentials, such as a password, username, email address or address, that user will fill in a form that will ask these credentials, then the web server will both hash and store the hash, the server will ‘throw away’ the original password and keep the hash. In a more secure environment the user may also be given a salt, this may be unique to the user or unique to the application (The user will not know the salt, the salt is owned by the server and will be kept secret.). When hashing both the password and salt will be combined and hashed.
Raspberry Pi – PHP permission File Problems Solved!

June 16th, 2014
I recently installed php, but when I was unable to save files, I was very stuck, and that’s why I’m posting it here, I want to tell anyone who Googles this problem to find this solution.

The problem was when I used an fopen and fsave within php, the file would always ‘die’ as in the open or die within php. The solution is below

Firstly I looked for the Environment user in phpinfo() in my case it was www-data and then I simply typed this chmod 777 -R www-data /var/www that, in its simplicity is the solution, but I am thankful that I have found the solution!

To create a phpinfo you need to create a file in your root and insert the following code
```
<?php
 
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();
 
?>
```
and save it as phpinfo.php or whatever you choose, I saved it in my root but you can save it wherever you want, then I browsed to the environments section and that gave me the necessary information for me to create the solution.

Why this works

The problem was that php did not have enough permissions to write to the folder. by giving the user www-data full permission i.e. 777 it can now read write and execute without a problem!

here is what php looks like when you do phpinfo

phpinfo() user sample on Raspberry Pi

you can check a file exits and is editable with this code http://stackoverflow.com/a/13297218

Now you’ve finished you can celebrate! here is a song (this is mainly so I can test embedding :P)
Structuring your Harddrive

June 5th, 2014
A habit worth looking into is to structure your hard-drive and here is some notes.
- Your hard-drive root (C:) should just be folders, nothing else, and it shouldn’t have any of YOUR folders that you keep stuff in that your not sharing on a network, thats what your user folder is for.
- Share folders on a drive root. Long names for files will eventually fill the limit and you cant store anything, so I keep all my shared folders in root in organised folders, but don’t clutter your HDD, it should be a thing of beauty, not a baron list of folders and files, just files. (To clarify, I mean you should only have folders on your C: nothing else)
- Have a C:/Store folder and a C:/Drivers folder, C:/Store is for stuff you need but don’t want, like pesky programs that wont live in Program Files. and C:/Drivers is for all the installers for your computer from your manufacturers website.
Why go to all this trouble? Well its good practise I suppose.