Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I keep a lot of tabs open in my browser. I mean A LOT. Several months ago one of them went weird and it prevented my screen saver from activating, which prevented my computer from going to sleep!

And that really sucked.

I couldn't find the screen that was causing the problem. And like I said, LOTS of open windows! Well, today I'm doing my infusion. Normally that's a Sunday thing, but yesterday was kinda busy - so is today, but that's another story - so I'm doing it today. Sitting in front of my computer doing my nebulizer, reading some news, going to do a bunch of Photoshopping after I finish my news while waiting for my infusion to complete, then meeting my wife for dinner and to go see the new Wreck It Ralph movie.

AND MY SCREEN SAVER KICKS IN! W00TIES!

Previously, I'd still been able to put my iMac to sleep, either by telling it to go to sleep, or by flipping the cursor into the top left corner, which is configured as a hot corner to activate my screen saver, and ultimately it'd go to sleep. But it's nice to know that now it'll go to sleep if I walk away and get distracted.

Not that I EVAH get distracted. No sirreee.

FYI, on a Mac, we have a program called Activity Monitor, there's a similar program for Windows. Ours has a Energy tab that will show us if a program is preventing our computer from going to sleep. Very useful little program. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have any internal diagnostic that'll tell me which tab is hogging resources and causing me grief!

Still, I'm happy that it's resolved.

It's really easy to apply a temporary fix as Apple doesn't have an OS patch yet, but I expect they'll have one very soon now.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/11/macos-high-sierra-users-change-root-password-now/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos-bug-lets-you-log-in-as-admin-with-no-password-required/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/11/28/2135236/macos-high-sierra-bug-allows-login-as-root-with-no-password

They've been available for Windows platforms for several years now, so it was kind of inevitable that one would eventually be made for OS-X. It basically makes it easy for griefers to make trojans, presumably for botnet and similar things. It runs on Windows but has the option of generating binaries for OS-X. And here's some more joy: ""The kit is being sold under the name Weyland-Yutani BOT and it is the first of its kind to hit the Mac OS platform. Basically it's a GUI point & click interface to create payloads that are script kiddie friendly.

Apparently, a dedicated iPad and Linux release are under preparation as well. The Weyland-Yutani BOT supports web injects and form grabbing in Firefox; however both Chrome and Safari will soon follow. The webinjects templates are identical to the ones used in Zeus and Spyeye.""

https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/crimeware-kit-emerges-mac-os-x-050211

There's also some fake Mac antivirus stuff going around: http://blog.intego.com/2011/05/02/intego-security-memo-macdefender-fake-antivirus/

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2120203/OS-X-Crimeware-Kit-Emerges

At this point, the danger is if you open and run the payload, so once again, smarts is what will mostly keep you safe.

When I bought my MacBook Pro almost three years ago, I didn't like the fact that it only had a 160 gig hard drive. The cost to upsize it was formidable, so at that time I let it slide. I tried to upsize it once while I was spending a couple of weeks in Phoenix, but the bozo company that I tried to buy the drive from would only ship to my billing address 'to reduce fraud'.

And I probably could have done it myself, except I bought an extended warranty and that would void it. Laptops are about the only thing I buy extended warranties for.

December of last year I went to an Apple authorized service point in Scottsdale and bought a 500 gig WD drive. They installed it and cloned my old drive over to it. But late December something wasn't quite right. My computer would pause, for sometimes up to five seconds, while doing anything. Eventually I found the SMART status showed the drive was failing. I had to ship it back to Phoenix, and with insurance and express shipping, it cost as much as the original replacement. To exacerbate the problem, they shipped it back FedEx instead of UPS, and FedEx won't deliver in snowy areas and won't arrange alternate delivery. I offered to meet their driver in Alamogordo where there is zero snow, no luck there. Finally I drove to El Paso to pick up my laptop, and I will never willingly use FedEx as a result of my experience with them and their customer service.

Well, now my drive is failing. Again. Six month old installation.

Fortunately I'm going to Phoenix tomorrow, so I'll be able to get it taken care of.

But I'm definitely not happy with Western Digital. I think I'm going to try to get a Fujitsu, I've had excellent life out of them in the past.


And I will say one absolutely positive thing about Mac and their operating system: even with a drive marked as Failed, it's still working fine. I'm making sure my backups are good, but the OS is handling the increasing number of bad sectors quite well. I am VERY impressed.

I haven't gotten deep into it yet, but it looks interesting.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/03/1239211

Trojan. No surprise, it was a matter of time. It starts with an email to try to get you to a porn site, when you click on a video it tells you that you don't have the proper codec and gives you the opportunity to download it. Classic social engineering. And apparently very good engineering of the trojan, also. (Slashdot thread)

Leopard Bugs. Again, no surprises. Which is why I'm waiting at least a couple of weeks to install it until a lot of the early bugs are stomped on.

I checked the FedEx routing and it was in El Paso as of Saturday! It arrived this AM, Russ brought it with her to meet me for lunch so that I could get the initial config and updates done. Tonight I transferred my previous Mac, the poor old thing was all of three months old *sob!* and I just finished reformatting it and it is transferring Russet's old Mac to it, should be done in an hour or so.

The MacBook Pro is a lot bigger than I thought it would be, but still an acceptable size. I have to give up the Tumi slipcover that I used with the previous Mac, so I now have Russet's slip cover and she'll have the Tumi. I bought a FireWire transfer cable when we were at the Mac store in Albuquerque Satuday and it made the transfer wonderfully easy.

I do seem to have a problem with my wireless router, however. It looks like it doesn't like two people using Macs at the same time! So right now I'm cabled in (I moved the router across the room so that I could lie on the couch and plug in an ethernet cable), I'll have to contact Qwest and see if I can get some resolution. Come to think of it, I do have a second wireless router with me, a DLink 524. I could cascade them and turn off the wireless on the Qwest box.

I have only one piece of network equipment here; Qwest provided a DSL router/wireless unit from a vendor called 2Wire. Unfortunately I don't remember the admin password that I set, so I'll probably be doing a cold restart on it soon.

About the only thing remaining to do on the 15" is to copy my Parallels/Win XP Pro/SQL Server 2005 partition back over and to clean up the desktop a bit. I played a YouTube video of Toto's Africa that Grey Wierdo linked: the sound was GREAT! I can hardly wait to watch a movie on it!


Well, off to bed. And BTW, absolutely no regrets about going Mac, especially with all the new crap that Microsoft is doing with their operating systems. There's some new news that if you take Office 2007 for a "test" that it munges up your previous Office install, thus trying to force you into buying the upgrade. That just sucks. As a result, I'm using a five year old copy of Office via Parallels and will use NeoOffice for my Mac (NeoOffice is a nice office suite based on Open Office but the interface has been thoroughly integrated with the Mac OS).

Like I need yet another way to waste time.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/11/1856212

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/computers/0,70604-0.html

It'll be a month or few before they're available, which means that by the time that I can afford to get a nice Mac Intel laptop, they should be stable!

I was pretty confident these wouldn't be too far away once Apple announced their Boot Camp system.