dakospace

For almost a month now I am a proud owner of Google`s Nexus 4 smartphone. I had to switch from the stock Email client to K-9 Mail application. What really bugged me up was the dog-envelope icon K-9 developers had chosen. In my thinking it was not appropriate for an email client at all. So, I was looking for a way of how to replace that icon, and ultimately ended on APK Multi-Tool web site, which tool, among other things, may replace APK`s icon, and do it proper. Basically you have to do this:

1. Download and extract APK Multi-Tool in a folder of yours choice, and run its Setup script and follow the instruction;
2. Copy K-9.apk from your phone and put it under “place-apk-here-for-modding” sub-folder of the above location;
3. Run the Script script, and choose option one – Extract for K-9.apk (the extracted files shall go under “projects” sub-folder);
4. Go find them and replace the file icon.png in both “res\drawable” and “res\drawable-hdpi” sub-folders with a new icon;
5. Make sure your phone is connected in Camera mode to your PC`s USB port and all drivers have been installed;
6. Go back to the Script window and choose option 7 – Zip, Sign, Install. The modified APK will be sent to phone and installed.

NB! Make sure the original application is uninstalled in advance because APK Multi-Tool shall generate a different signature of the apk file and installation shall fail. You don’t have to do this again for any subsequent uploads, i.e. would you like to test some other icons as well.

Here is what my new K-9 Mail application`s icon looks like — ahh, much better:

No Comments »

I have been looking for a CPU upgrade for some time, but since my Mobo is quite old socket AM2+ I was quite limited in what I can get. The best option was AMD Phenom X6 1100T, which is running at stock 3300GHz speed, and also supports Turbo-core at 3700GHz. Going beyond that would have required that all Mobo, CPU and RAM change. So I decided to stay with my current set up and find out that 1100T AMD CPU.

All went well just until I realized that these CPU-s are end-of-life and very hard to find. Not a single one here in Bulgaria, not available in Amazon UK and Amazon DE, and some second hand offers in Amazon US. At that moment I started considering alternatives (as AMD 960T one). I got 965 Black Edition AMD 4-core but still I was looking for 1100T 6-core one. Eventually I found one and bought it for $200 at Amazon.

GPU upgrade is coming…

No Comments »

Have you got a nice graphical card (and expensive one too) to put it in good use within your computer, which turned out not to be so good for gaming after all (hint, hint Crysis at max settings.) Then you decided to see yourself with a second identical card just to enable SLI / Crossfile and (theoretically) double the GPU performance, and at the end of the day what you see is that the perceived result is not so good as you had expected. And even it is worst compare to single card setup! Why so? Ever heard of phenomenon known as micro-stuttering? Welcome to the club!

Until today it was not so easy to measure the micro-stuttering effect you might see. Just released (as a pre-release) the GPU MIST tool can do that and produce a percentage number (a science bit analysis output) which shows how much your framerate is being affected (read degrade) from micro-stuttering. Download after the jump.

No Comments »

Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of space-time and learn the scale of things along the way! Learn the size of the Pillars of Creation and marvel at the minuscule scale of a neutrino!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

No Comments »

Well, I bet you know what a SPAM e-mail message is, so I am not going to explain it to you. I will show you rather how to fight SPAM. One of the most powerful tools against SPAM to chose from is the Greylisting. And it happens that the last day there was a SPAM storm attack against a server running this tool, which is a perfect example how it works in real world. Take a look at the following picture:

I will explain it step by step:

1. Greylisting will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender it does not recognize (putting it in Pending queue – represented by the blue line).
2. If the mail is legitimate the originating server will (after a delay) try again, and provided a sufficient time had elapsed, the email will be accepted (moving it from Pending to Verified queue – represented by the green fill).
3. If the mail is from a SPAM-er, who is being sending many SPAM emails to thousands-or-more recipients, it probably would not be retried, thus time out (timed-out entries are deleted from Pending queue).

In the above example, which is using real data statistics, almost 1000 servers have tried to communicate to that particular server in timeframe of just 4 hours, each of them probably trying to send 100-or-more of SPAM emails. Imagine what amount of SPAM has been filtered out by just implementing a simple Greylisting implementation. Good job, right?

Edit: The issue had auto-resolved in 24 hours (timed-out entries deleted), as it’s visible from the picture below:

No Comments »

A friend asked me why in one of my programs I am counting transferred bytes in KiB and MiB-s; why I am not using easy-for-read Kb, MB, GB prefixes we all are familiar with? And the answer is… because it is just NOT right! More detailed explanation after the jump:

http://lpar.ath0.com/2008/07/15/si-unit-prefixes-a-plea-for-sanity/

“Everyone knows that 1MB is 1024KB, unless you’re talking about DVDs, or reading manufacturer specs for a hard drive, and that’s just the hard drive manufacturers being stupid. Everyone knows that ‘K’ on a computer means 1024; except for speeds, where it means 1000, except for file download speeds where it means 1024, except when it’s the speed of your modem, when it’s 1000. Everyone knows that. What, are you stupid?”

1 Comment »

Well, you will have to see it by yourself (aha, deja vu) to believe it. Yubiii Preview has been posted at 5Group. Already looking for it?!… (:

No Comments »

Since I just received my Yubikey from Yubico I was eager using it, so I decided to start with my WP blog. It turned out to be an easy 2-step process once I’ve installed YubiKey WordPress plug-in:

1. Enabled the plug-in and entered the yubico API key info from here;
2. Entered my Yubikey OTP in my user’s account settings, and that’s it!

The latest Yubikeys firmware supports 2 configurations – one is preloaded from Yubico. Both can be re-programmed to have two independent and separate configurations, including any two of the three alternatives:

• Standard YubiKey 44 character pass code;
• Up to 64 character static pass code;
• OATH-HOTP 6 or 8 digit code identity.

The result: From now on, I will need to provide my username/password and Yubikey OTP in order to login to my blog. Yubiiiiiiii!…

1 Comment »

Hacker “sp33k” for leet, or elite. Originating from 31337 “eleet”, the UDP port used by Dead Cow Cult, a hacker group, to access Windows 95 using Back Orifice, a notorious hacking program.

Okay, so what /is/ 1337 in the first place? 1337 means Elite. The point of 1337 is to replace all the letters with symbols, and is quite fun to play with. 1337 was first created by some people would wanted to talk in a forum without any outsiders barging in. Some outsiders may have figured out the language and started using it as well. Eventually, 1337 became famous all over the internet. The original use of 1337 is hardly practiced any more, but it survives because many of peope use it for fun.

It takes a long time to translate between regular English and 1337 even if you know all 26 1337 secrets, unless you’re very skilled at it.

Here are the 26 1337 secrets.

S0m3 p30ple 4r3 700 l4zy 70 wri73 7hin65 in fu11 1337, r3su17ing in a 53n73nc3 1ik3 7hi5.

Quotes source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=1337

No Comments »

Hi there! Again, Overclocking day post. Its has been a while since my last OC day, but I have great news for you:

First, ASUS had released new BIOS versions (for various boards) with improved OC features which refine AMD Core unlocking! Yes, indeed, my AMD Phenom X2 550 processor was recognized as X4 with 4 cores working and unlocked. Pity, Windows always stopped with BSOD no matter what I did. But ASUS did their job well, and in BIOS settings under Unleashed more, you can specify which cores to be unlocked. In my case the faulty core was #3 (starting from zero). So, I was able to boot and load in Windows successfully with 3 working cores: #0, #1 and #2.

Second, I needed a better OC tool to stress the 3 cores. It happened that Orthos is running on 2 cores only, and Prime95 I don’t like since it downloads some data chunks to process, then uploads results. So, a new OC tool was born, and it’s named FFT-z! You can see it in action on the screenshots bellow, next to CPU-z, HWMonitor, FurMark, K10stat and TaskManager applications. FFT-z is not released yet officially, but you can grab a public preview release from here. Expect some new cool features added to it In the next releases.

3 Comments »