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monday would be great, it\'s too bad we have to be in so bloody early, we could of gone for real breakfast
 

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Apple VR / AR headset

Posted at 14:00 - 6th, June 2023 by Alex Alex
Apple finally throws its hat in the ring to take on Meta directly.



There are a lot of nice features in this over the Metaverse and the quest, but I think it's biggest issue is that it's not geared at games. Why would I wear this to run my computer and programs when I can just use the screen of my device.

And personally, while the theater aspect of it seems cool and all, I don't see myself watching a movie for hours on end and just sitting there on the couch with a head set on. I have enough trouble doing this for gaming on the quest.

Now, throw me into beatsaber for a couple of hours, no problem at all.

One thing that I don't understand is they say it's self contained, but everyone has a wire going into their pocket. I wonder if it needs an iphone or if maybe that's the battery.

By the way, price tag of 3500US. This screams apple marketing over any real substance considering there are top of the line VR headsets that cost less than this and have more sensors and capabilities.


Favorite things on site

Posted at 14:24 - 5th, June 2023 by Alex Alex
I think one of my favorite things on the site right now is the daily history. It's really interesting to see what was being said back in the day on the site. Things I've completely forgotten about that we had talked about. Or even people who were active on the site like Taylor. Just fun shit.


Super Mario Bros. Movie

Posted at 11:06 - 2nd, May 2023 by andrew andrew

3 Comments
Alex - Oh man, what else could they have put in that movie... are there any chain chomps? ...
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Buying a vehicle in St. Kitts

Posted at 17:45 - 18th, April 2023 by Alex Alex
As you'd probably guess, buying a vehicle is expensive. Now imagine having to do it on an island where the shipping is an additional 4000 - 10000US and then the government hits you with environment/wheel tax, duty and VAT on top of the price of the car + shipping. It's a crazy expensive process here.

Generally for second hand vehicles, cars that you wouldn't look at in North America end up costing thousands of dollars here because of all the additional charges.

Enter companies like japanesevehicles.com and beforward.jp. They sell second hand vehicles in Japan, China, Thailand, Indonesia and Dubai to western markets, specifically central america and the caribbean I think. Their prices are more reasonable, but you're still hit by the government when it comes in and the vehicle will generally end up costing twice as much as what you bought it for.

The whole thing is a scam and is quite infuriating, but I thought you'd get a kick out of the Japan part Andy.

5 Comments
Alex - There are a couple of people selling used cars as a profession here but they know they can...
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WD MyCloud EX2 hit by .Checkmate ransomeware

Posted at 15:43 - 27th, February 2023 by Alex Alex
I've been having trouble finding anything online about this but I think I've gotten to the bottom of it.

First the background of what's going on.
In our little office, we have a WD My Cloud Ex2 as a Network attached storage for filesharing inside the office. It worked great! Swappable hard drives, pretty robust OS with decent web based interface and had vpn capabilities for remote access. Can even do remote back ups and USB backups.

Then the shit started.

Someone found a major whole in their security and was able to push ransomware onto the thing. Not a big deal since we do backups and just erased things with minimal loss and restored from last back up. I updated firmware and thought, that's the last of that. Nope, happened again about 2 weeks later, then another 2 months later. Then WD updated their firmware and killed remote access to certain devices like our EX2. An annoyance but we'll just ftp in. Then we were hit again. So now the device is completely closed to the outside world.

After years of use I decided to upgrade the HDD to an SSD, bought a specific NAS centric SSD and spent the weekend transferring files. I was able to copy all user config from old hard drive to new set up with 2 clicks but had to recreate all shares from scratch and upload data onto the SSD in appropriate shares. Time consuming but not the end of the world.

Everything worked, and brought the EX2 back to the office and this morning, ransomware again.
It's always the same bloody ransomware with the same bloody message. Something called .checkmate. All it does is just encrypts all the files on the share with a .checkmate extension and you cannot access unless you pay the 15000US of bitcoin. I don't deal with terrorist so fuck that.

I think I know how the ransomware got on, but am not 100% certain.
I think it got on through someones computer, not a backdoor or hacking of the EX2 itself. The .checkmate only affects certain shares which leads me to believe it was from a specific users account. I don't think he ever set up his account or used a weak password and that's pretty much how they got in. I can't prove this though, just speculation.

The other idea is that it's infected the OS of the EX2 and that's how it keeps showing up. But the problem with that is that why not infect the entire drive, meaning all the shares?

All I know is that I've had to spend my morning copying information back and forth for a 3rd time in 3 days.

To remedy the situation, I'm erasing the specific shares, copying said info back and will update the antivirus or at worst reformat the offending users pc and see if that makes a difference.

I thought all of this was note worthy because I haven't really been able to find anything that helps online, so maybe someone out there will read this and know what to do in the future.


4 Comments
andrew - I don't know the WD products at all, the Synology NASes are pretty solid, we use these at ...
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Sea of Stars - Nintendo Switch announcement

Posted at 19:20 - 25th, January 2023 by Alex Alex
Tags: Nintendo, sea of stars, trailers, xbox, playstation, chrono trigger, golden eye, quebec
2 Comments
Alex - There's a resurgence of games like this now. Christophe had told me about another, I'll tr...
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Sorry for lack of content

Posted at 14:52 - 17th, October 2022 by Alex Alex
Tags: Personal news, site updates, houses, cars, boats, trains, babies, planes
13 Comments
Alex - A possible solution would be array_keys() which I'll need to look into. Reg...
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Konbini Confessions

Posted at 21:09 - 31st, July 2022 by andrew andrew
5 Comments
Alex - Man, these just keep getting weirder and weirder
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Meeting The Last Member Of A Remote Hidden Japanese Mountain Village

Posted at 10:39 - 28th, July 2022 by Alex Alex
Tags: abandonned villages, hermits, hiking, japan, culture
3 Comments
andrew - haha, if I found something really cheap, I would definitely consider it Act...
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The nightmare of exchanging dollars to Euros in italy

Posted at 12:28 - 14th, June 2022 by Alex Alex
Tags: travel, italy, us to euros, banks, foreign exchange
4 Comments
Alex - Transferwise? Never heard of it. I've been using my an American account I have that...
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Someone has been spoofing my work email

Posted at 9:17 - 13th, June 2022 by Alex Alex
Tags: email spoofing, hackers, funio, email headers, tech support
2 Comments
Alex - It seems like a simple change of password for an account that was on the funio server (it'...
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