Category: Techspeak

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Today's Spam/Scam Brought to You by…

What would my inbox be like without my old AOL account?

How are you doing? I am Anastasya. i look for a gentleman. i commonly am tidy, paint… Reply me email in [email protected] Yours, Anastasya…

That’s great! I am looking for a woman who commonly is tidy, paint…
Seriously, it scares me to think that things like this work as openers to social engineering and Nigerian scams that end up robbing people of not only time and money, but sometimes even their lives. Be careful out there.

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How Much Does an Old Computer Cost You?

Today I worked on the system of a client who reported the computer was crashing. After briefly examining the logs, I found that the system had been reporting hard drive failures… for nearly a year.
The system was crashing with the infamous Blue Screen of Death, and running terrifically slow. Given that the computer itself was 6 years old, slow was to be expected, but this was slow. It took many minutes just to get to the logon prompt, longer to get to rendering a desktop, etc.
So, I had to ask myself, “how much is this costing them?” Let’s do a quick calculation:
An employee uses this PC, and sits at the machine for approximately 4 hours a day out of a typical 8 hour workday. For round numbers, let’s say that said employee costs the company $25/hour (after salary, benefits, taxes, etc.). Let’s also be generous and say that the machine was taking 25% longer to perform all tasks, on average. In reality, it was probably taking much longer, but let’s err on the low side.
So 4 hours at the desk, and 25% (1 hour) of that is wasted waiting for the PC. $25 a day * 5 days a week = $125 / week. Multiply this times 50 weeks out of the year and we can easily make the case that this slowness cost our client $6,250 a year in lost employee productivity.
Cost of a new computer, installed, with a new software suite and employee training? Significantly less.
How much money are you and your staff wasting by not upgrading your old computer?

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Fixing Evernote Internal Database Error on Mac OS X 10.7

Yesterday, Evernote started crashing within seconds of launching on my MacBook Air. Here’s how I fixed it.
First, I searched Google and Evernote’s forum for help. I found this article, which didn’t help. The simplest thing, I figured, was to trash the custom settings for Evernote (in class Mac OS style). These are usually stored in the under my home directory called Library, and then in a folder called Preferences.
My first stumbling block was the lack of my Library folder! A quick search revealed that the Library folder is still there, but in OS 10.7, is now hidden by default. Rather than fiddling with that, I dropped to a Terminal to do the dirty work.
First, I found all of the Evernote data in Preferences,with the following commands. These could be shortened to a single line if you just want the “quick fix,” but these are the steps I took.
cd ~/Library # Go into the Library folder
cd Preferences # Go the next step into Preferences
find . | grep -i evernote # Find all Evernote files.
find . | grep -i evernote | xargs rm # Delete all Evernote files.
No dice. Evernote still crashed. On to the “Application Support” folder.
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support # Go to the Application Support folder
ls??? # Look around, observe the presence of an "Evernote" folder.
rm -rf Evernote # nuke it.
After that, I re-launched Evernote and waited as it re-synced my notebooks with the online version, and has been working happily ever since.

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I'm a GCFE! (GIAC Certified Forensic Examiner)

Today I passed the GCFE exam, making me GIAC Certified Forensic Examiner number 490. From the GIAC website,

The GCFE certification is for professionals working or interested in the information security, legal and law enforcement industries with a need to understand computer forensic analysis. The certification focuses on core skills required to collect and analyze data from Windows computer systems.
The GCFE certifies that candidates have the knowledge, skills, and ability to conduct typical incident investigations including e-Discovery, forensic analysis and reporting, evidence acquisition, browser forensics and tracing user and application activities on Windows systems.

Rock on! Oddly enough, as I was walking out the door to take the exam, we got a support request from a client who just located a stolen laptop and needs us to do some forensics on it to find out where it’s been. Great timing.