How to think Analytically

One of the hardest things in being a defensive security analyst is being able to think with your analytical side of your brain. Training your self to think analytically will greatly help you be a great defensive security analyst.

Flagship Smartphone Specs 2015 - OnePlus 2, Galaxy S6 edge, HTC One M9, and Nexus 6

I am not a big fan of comparing specs on things though I figured why not do one anywho. 

What I been up to

So what have I been up to recently? I haven't really had a huge amount of time to write posts on here like I would like to be able to do.

Things to Do Online

Recently I have been getting very board with online in general. I left Facebook a while ago and don't really care to be spammed by their ads (special feed adds). So here are a few things that may help pass the time on the web.

New Computer Build-AMD FX 8350 with 16Gb ram and

I have recently built a new computer for home to run my stuff. This is one of the first builds I have done for my self. I have build quite a few for customers.

Here is my build:

Win-Win: Hulu's custom clips fight piracy and enable fans | Common Sense Tech - CNET News

Win-Win: Hulu's custom clips fight piracy and enable fans | Common Sense Tech - CNET News:

Like many people, I often want to share a television or video scene with others. Unfortunately, finding quality clips of want you want can be hard. The good news is that Hulu has been making my life easier.
For example, The Office recently did a hilarious sendup of what it would be like if the fictional Sabre company tried to have its own stores like Apple. There was a great scene in which Dwight Schrute explains the importance of bloggers to the store's success on launch day.

Removing Google Plus Hot Topics from Stream

Google has gotten annoying that they removed the ability to collapse the hot topics. So now by default your not able to hide them. which is kinda annoying to me who really only wants to know about my own interest not. hugh jackman's being happy that it is the weekend. So for those that don't already know how to hide them I will show you how.

This is what you will need

Either chrome or firefox with the adblock plus extension installed.

Chrome
For chrome you will need to right click on the adblock plus button in the address bar on the right.
go to options. Make sure your on "Add your own filter" then add
plus.google.com##.Wbhcze.Te.ch
This is the current class name that they are using for the hot topics as of 2/17/12

Firefox
Under firefox I used the element hider tool.
if you click on the down arrow next to the adblock plus it will bring you to a drop down menu and you will select "select an element to hide" and it will highlight the page. make sure you highlight the whole of the hot topic post. it will try to block by default the update id which is not what we want. We want to block the class. if you click on the class the element hider helper will show you what the page would look like if that was done. then just add the rule and then your done.

I hope this helps you guys out there remove anything that annoys you on pages.
We are supported by ads on this page though I understand if they annoy you. So we would apreciate it if you did not block ads on our site. If an ad location is very annoying let us know about it and we will try to remove them from that position. last thing we want here at local tech repair is to annoy our readers just to make a little bit more money.

Thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Please share if you find this useful.

Browser benchmarks Chrome 18, Firefox 12, Firefox 13, opera 12

I always like to see how well browser do benchmarked against each other. So here are some results for some of the developer editions of some of the most popular browsers. Yes I know Internet Explorer 10 is not on the list. this is because I am running these tests from Ubuntu linux.

i am running browser mark test from rightware.com

Firefox 12.02a scored 378428
Firefox Nightly 13.01 scored 304586
Chrome 18 scored 415066
Opera 12 scored 503701

Higher is better



Now i ran peacekeeper benchmark
Firefox 13 scored 1785
Firefox 12 scored 1775
Chrome 18 scored 1239
Opera 12 scored N/A

Over all I am actually kinda surprised that chrome did not so well on the peacekeeper compared to firefox. Sense on the test page it states that chrome is the king of the hill currently. That is a significant difference in performance between the firefox and chrome. I am also surprised that chrome does not have theora playback capability sense it is a open source standard for web video playing. Though Opera crashed while trying the peacekeeper test. though after restarting a few times got the test to finish. Though one positive for Opera it seemed to move faster finishing the test than both chrome and firefox.



As all these test are just purely just test results not actual using the browser results. This test don't take in to account design of the browser and other features that the browsers have. but none the less they are fun to see how browser progress and the competition between browser.



do you have some test results you like to share. post them in comments.



-Local Tech Repair Admin



here are some details on peacekeeper test
detailed results for Firefox 13
Suite
Result
Rendering
41.93
renderGrid01
130.28 fps
renderGrid02
102.63 fps
renderGrid03
5.16 fps
renderPhysics
44.81 fps
HTML5 Capabilities
6/7
webglSphere
Yes (60.78 fps)
videoPosterSupport
Yes
videoCodecH264
N/A
videoCodecTheora
Yes
videoCodecWebM
Yes
workerContrast01
Yes (5942.33 ops)
workerContrast02
Yes (5944.49 ops)
gamingSpitfire
Yes (54.39 fps)
HTML5 Canvas
23.75
experimentalRipple01
37.40 fps
experimentalRipple02
15.08 fps
Data
29954.75
arrayCombined
10959.50 ops
arrayWeighted
81873.00 ops
DOM operations
8399.53
domGetElements
463270.00 ops
domDynamicCreationCreateElement
11006.50 ops
domDynamicCreationInnerHTML
18469.50 ops
domJQueryAttributeFilters
3449.00 ops
domJQueryBasicFilters
1088.00 ops
domJQueryBasics
2557.00 ops
domJQueryContentFilters
1949.50 ops
domJQueryHierarchy
4476.00 ops
domQueryselector
26393.00 ops
Text parsing
72346.98
stringChat
76962.00 ops
stringDetectBrowser
250906.00 ops
stringFilter
3252.00 ops
stringValidateForm
380207.50 ops
stringWeighted
83012.50 ops


detailed results for Firefox 12

Suite Result

Rendering
42.13
renderGrid01
131.02 fps
renderGrid02
98.85 fps
renderGrid03
5.10 fps
renderPhysics
47.68 fps
HTML5 Capabilities
4/7
webglSphere
N/A
videoPosterSupport
Yes
videoCodecH264
N/A
videoCodecTheora
N/A
videoCodecTheora
Yes
workerContrast01
Yes (5690.08 ops)
workerContrast02
Yes (5855.09 ops)
gamingSpitfire
Yes (50.00 fps)
HTML5 Canvas
24.20
experimentalRipple01
38.53 fps
experimentalRipple02
15.20 fps
Data
30297.56
arrayCombined
10992.00 ops
arrayWeighted
83510.00 ops
DOM operations
8240.98
domGetElements
433425.50 ops
domDynamicCreationCreateElement
10769.00 ops
domDynamicCreationInnerHTML
18281.00 ops
domJQueryAttributeFilters
3408.50 ops
domJQueryBasicFilters
1107.50 ops
domJQueryBasics
2498.50 ops
domJQueryContentFilters
1953.50 ops
domJQueryHierarchy
4383.50 ops
domQueryselector
25439.00 ops
Text parsing
69123.35
stringChat
79031.50 ops
stringDetectBrowser
215015.91 ops
stringFilter
3053.00 ops
stringValidateForm
367707.50 ops
stringWeighted
82722.50 ops


Chrome 18
Suite
Result
Rendering
30.33
renderGrid01
165.69 fps
renderGrid02
160.48 fps
renderGrid03
25.52 fps
renderPhysics
1.25 fps
HTML5 Capabilities
5/7
webglSphere
Yes (244.83 fps)
videoPosterSupport
Yes
videoCodecH264
Yes
videoCodecTheora
N/A
videoCodecWebM
N/A
workerContrast01
Yes (4080.16 ops)
workerContrast02
Yes (3821.75 ops)
gamingSpitfire
Yes (1.00 fps)
HTML5 Canvas
1.21
experimentalRipple01
1.22 fps
experimentalRipple02
1.20 fps
Data
54259.16
arrayCombined
9821.00 ops
arrayWeighted
299771.50 ops
DOM operations
10744.02
domGetElements
483184.50 ops
domDynamicCreationCreateElement
10612.00 ops
domDynamicCreationInnerHTML
14633.50 ops
domJQueryAttributeFilters
5180.50 ops
domJQueryBasicFilters
2115.00 ops
domJQueryBasics
5065.00 ops
domJQueryContentFilters
2950.50 ops
domJQueryHierarchy
6301.50 ops
domQueryselector
24640.00 ops
Text parsing
136171.10
stringChat
89803.50 ops
stringDetectBrowser
314176.00 ops
stringFilter
30553.00 ops
stringValidateForm
520622.00 ops
stringWeighted
104323.50 ops


Opera 12

Our Advertisers - Commission Junction, Amazon, Adsense

It has been a while sense I have talked about the advertiser that help make this blog what it is. Well maybe not that much mostly just me ranting. But besides that let me explain why I use these different advertisers and why I don't use others.

My view on advertising is not for a huge money making website. If it was I wouldn't be writing a tech blog instead I would be writing about how to make money off your website, how to loss wait, or even running a porn website. But sense I am not in this for the money which would be nice if it did support that though. So sense I am not in the game to bombard my users with advertisments hoping that they will view them and click on them. For instance i don't use popup windows, I don't just a banner ad, I don't use ads that i feel take away from the content of the page.

So This is why I use these ad generators.
First and foremost is Amazon. I tend to prefer product based ads because ads that are based on commision. Not because I feel that they make more money but because I feel that they can add to the content of my posts. For instance if I was talking about the Kindle Fire like I have been lately. I would add a link to amazon which sells the Kindle Fire or give a graphical ad that shows the price also so that you don't have to leave the page to see how much it cost. These types of ads I feel help the user get information that they are looking for and also possibly earn me some money in the mean time. For me Amazon does an amazing job for these ads. Sense I can select specific ads based on what I am writing about and link directly to the page that that product that I am reviewing is located on. I also feel that this has a better turn around. Not only does amazon provide direct product ads they also allow me to provide a store which I can select which products and/or categories that i want in there. For instance in Local Tech Repairs store you will notice a Featured page that shows things that I feel will be useful to my views. All in all Amazon I feel gives me the best targeting of any of the advertisers I have used.

Second is a click based ads also known as Pay Per Click (PPC)
This you may notice on the is on the left side the only flash based ad on the site. and others are text based ads that try to blend in so that they do not distract the user from reading what I feel is important information. Though these are not as targeted as the amazon ads but they do bring something to the website as they treat the users that are looking for information. If I can't provide the information that they are looking for maybe maybe the ads on the side of the page may give some indication of were they may find that information. For instance if a viewer was reading a review that I did on anti virus software they may not like the product I reviewed but they may notice a Norton or AVG ad on the side of the page. And go there to see if that is right for them. I am not a huge fan of this type of ads sense many sites do take this method way to much and fill their pages with flash ads everywhere. Which is why one of my first articles on this site was how to block ads. Which I am perfectly fine with you doing on my site I understand. Sense this is not a job for me yet I tend to not mind if people block them. Though if you do find the information useful I hope you pass it on to your friends.

The third is Commission Junction
The only reason why I use this is because both bestbuy and newegg are advertisers with this company. So sense I write about tech I want to give my users the best prices and options to find. For instance if I am reviewing a hard drive enclosure or some other electronic device I want to lead the user to the best priced item so that they can save money and not have to work as hard shopping around. Though the problem with commission junction is that they don't have much product placement ads like amazon does. Amazon I can go to any page in their website and create a link to that exact page. Where with Commission Junction I have to work within the confines of the links that each company posts on their page. Along with this each company I need to apply to be a representative for. So for instance I was denied by Carbinite online backup. This maybe because in my article on Online backup for Business I was very critical of how expensive they where compared to their competitors. But o well doesn't hurt me at all.

This is why I use these Advertisers. So far I have been very happy with them. Not to mention I love amazon not to mention they pay out the smallest amount. $10 if you select amazon gift card.
I have looked into other companies and other methods just to see how they work and what not.

I looked into payperpost
what turned me off about pay per post is just the thought of giving up my ethical responsibility in looking out for my viewers just to make a buck. This turned be off very fast. Not to mention that I had a hard time ever getting any offers. I know people don't mind just filling up their pages with paid posts but I am proud that almost 100% of my posts are original. Yes there is one that is copied which is about kindle shortcuts. Other than that my website is almost all 100% original writing. which probably shows.

Another is InfoLinks
I tried this for a little while but never found that the pay was good and that the links where deceptive. I don't like misleading my viewers just to make a few cents on a click. I prefer to keep my viewers engaged in the content that I am writing instead of distracting them with a whole lot of links. Not to mention that InfoLinks did not give reliant information on the content I was writing. If they had done better than adsense I would have been happy to switch. But because of the ads that they where showing compared to the content I was writing about I found it distracted more than it added to my content.

Thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

If you have any opinion about these advertisers or others let us know. If you had a bad experience or a good one I love user comments.

My Christmas Wish List 2011

I never do wish lists. Though I thought I write out what I am hoping for in my Christmas boxes this year.

well on the top of the list has to be one that I know will giver me hundreds of hours of enjoyment. This has to be Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I personally want the PC version more though sense my computers don't really meet that recommended requirements (which hopefully changes here soon) I also wanting the xbox 360 version because my wife I know will actually play it if it is on an xbox 360 instead.

Though the reason I prefer the PC version is because of the huge modding community that made oblivion amazing I know will make skyrim even better.

Next thing would have to be another Toy. The Kindle Fire granted that this is a low end tablet though this low end one is very much connected to everything amazon which i love. I can't wait to get my hands on one of these things and just play. Right now I keep taking my wife's tablet and playing on that. I am sure my wife would be happy to not have me keep on taking hers. For the most part this thing is a entertainment power house. Music, movies, tv shows, book library, and much more.


Next thing I would definitively have to go with the kindle would be Amazon Prime right now I still have a free one but i am hoping to get a paid version to get all the pluses that come along with it. Like instant watch, kindle library, and what not.

Sense I like cooking so much and saving money so I can by more electronics. A Chest Freezer is on my wish list so I can help feed my growing family.
Frigidaire FFN15M5HW 14.8 Cu. Ft. Chest Freezer - White

And Obviously parts for computers. And nothing is more fun than new GPUs. And who would ever turn down the fastest GPU out there. this baby has 1024 CUDA cores. I can just imaging the work this thing can do for science and fun.

well i guess that may be wishing to much though having 2 of these would also be nice.


granted not as fast though still fast.

I will be adding more to this later.

If you buy any of these or click on adds they help me get my christmas gifts. ;-)
-Local Tech Repair Admin

Black Friday Deals Online - 2011

Some companies are hitting off to an early start to their Black Friday deals. For instance amazon has started their count down and started marking different goods off every few hours and having daily deals. We will try to keep this post updated with other sites and deals around the web.

*Update*
Its the week of Black Friday and Amazon is starting their week long sales.
Shop Amazon's Black Friday Week

*update*

To start if off lets look at amazon. if your looking for a deal they generally are very good at prices though here is their special deals page and their count down for Black Friday.
Shop Amazon's Holiday Countdown Store

Amazon is having daily deals. For instance so that you know what i mean by deal. Today's deal (Nov. 5) is Stuhrling Original Mens watch that is normally 345 dollars but now is only 59.99. This is a 83% savings on the watch. This watch looks very nice, so if your in the market I grab this deal before it ends I just wish i knew about this before I bought my watch a month ago.
Stührling Original Men's 107EM.331531 Classic Delphi Omega Stainless Steel Automatic Skeleton Watch Gift Set

Some of the deals they have on their page aren't that great for example Gears of War 3 xbox360 game is 54.63 which is basically 5 dollars off the retail price. So some of these deals so far aren't that nice but keep an eye out for those good deals the ones that are 50%+ off.

I am going to try to go through most these deals for you so that you don't have to and update this post with current deals and ones that are those hidden gems.

Though amazon is not the only one that is having deals Newegg is having deals the link below will take you to their sales page. I will update the link when they have their Black Friday page up.



If you know of other sites that are having amazing deals post them in comments so that we all can benefit from them.

thanks,
Local Tech Repair Admin

happy savings... PS if your having trouble seeing some of these links it is probably because adblock is blocking them sry for it blocking that.

ps. Update on some more deals for black friday.
it looks like newegg is doing some of the same deals per day as amazon.

I had found 16gb of ram for ~50 bucks which is extremely cheap. if your building a computer or just looking to upgrade your parts these deals are hard to pass up.

amazon is still doing their right now is firefly at 70% off if you haven't seen that series it is a good one.
Firefly Black Friday deal


Update:
Amazon is doing a Buy One Get One Half Off for video games.
If your going to be buying video games for your kids for christmas or just want to buy them in general you can save $30 on the games. which is a huge amount. Follow the link bellow.
Buy One get One 50% Off

Update 2
it looks to be that best Buy is doing a deal a day up to Black Friday. Check out there deals with the link below
Black Friday Deals at BestBuy

Cheating Khan Academy Point Counter in watching videos.

So recently i been little competitive with a few friends in points on Khan Academy. So to get ahead of my friend i figured i watch more videos while i do exercises. i know cheating get points for not even watching videos. though that was little to much work for me. i wanted to get more videos done faster so that i could get some of the larger badges. so i digged in to the inter-working of their javascript to figure out if i could get the points for the videos faster.

so This is how i can watch more than an hours worth of videos in drastically less time.

right now i am in the chrome browser doing this.
the first step is to load the page of a video you want the points for.
next is to right click on the page and hit inspect elements

this will bring up a work space on the bottom of the browser.
go to the network tab like in picture bellow

this shows the network connections coming from the page. once you start the video and get your first points for watching you will notice the logvideoprogress script send out a get request. which is wonderful. we right click on that and get copy location

next we open a new window and paste the location and go to it.

once your on the page just refresh the page till the video_points goes to 750 it won't go pass that.
once your done with that you should have 750 points well before the video is even done playing.

do this for a few videos and you will get a picture like this on your progress page.

just a warning if your using this for a class your teacher may notice that your watching more minutes of videos than there is in that hour which is not possible less you can slow down time.

well i hope you enjoyed.
-local tech repair admin


ps. if someone cares to write a script for this their more than welcome to do so and post it on here to show people

Listening to Music online - GrooveShark

Listening to music online and downloading sometimes is been a popular thing that is changing the music industry. Music radios like pandora, last.fm, itunes and many others are gaining a lot of users with premium fees or allowing you to buy musics off their services. Though sometimes you can't afford music becaues you have to pay bills or what ever reason and your looking just to listen to a spacific song. Generally I used to turn to youtube for people uploading music but it was always a pain because the bandwidth it used playing a video and the quality was poor for the music.


Recently I found out of a service called GrooveShark.com which is basically a youtube of music instead of videos. They focus on quality of their songs. Sense it is user driven they can't be held liable for Copy Right infringement as long as they comply with the law. And every one knows that people used things like download helper to download videos off youtube or services that would download only the audio from Youtube so it is only natural that someone would provide the same time of thing for grooveshark which has also come out in different forms. I use firefox so i am able to use a addon called groove shredder which gives a little button on their website to download the song.

So how can this be Legal? well this article explains it a little https://torrentfreak.com/who-needs-limewire-open-source-groovejaars-in-town-110831/. I would suggest you check out the service GrooveShark and just see how much bandwidth difference that this service works and looks better than YouTube also you can make playlist on there. this service may get attacked by the record labels but so far it is a very nice service and even if you don't use it to pirate that i am sure people will do it is a great website and I personally prefer it more than Pandora sense i don't have to get bombarded with ads during listening to music.

Thanks and keep listening,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Dvorak keyboard - Learning Day 4

I have been learning Dvorak Teyboard layout recently and now on day four. I am still much slower than I was before but my brain hurts less as it does when it trys to revert to qwerty. I do most my typing on ubuntu because there is an easy switch between the to layouts.

I have been doing some research on if Dvorak is truly faster than qwerty and I have found a few good sources.
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/Dvorak/

http://atri.misericordia.edu/Papers/Dvorak.php

to learn how to type faster I have been using a typing program called dvorak7min also been using online typing tests like
http://www.powertyping.com/dvorak/typing.html

I hope by the end of this month to regain my typing speed. though that may be hard sense I use qwerty at work.

I will try to keep this with updates every so often.

thanks,
local tech repair admin

Dvorak keyboard - Learning Day 2

I may not be writing much for the next week as i am trying to learn Dvorak keyboard layout so my typing right now is slow. if you do not know what Dvorak is check out this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

I am on Day 2 and this post took me 7 mins to write

thanks
local tech repair admin