I’ve eaten this twice in the last while, nyom. You can either do it the lazy way and get the Knorr quick meal thingies (red sachets that you just empty into a pot, add water and boil for 5 minutes) or make it from scratch.

To make from scratch:

• Cook some pasta like normal until it’s just slightly harder then you’d normally eat it. Very slightly. Pour the water off but keep a cupful of it, and throw the cupful of water and the pasta back into the pot.
• Grate a large handful of parmesan cheese.
• Empty about 3/4 of a small jar of pesto into the pot (I’m not sure how big the small jars are – they’re about 2 inches tall).
• Put the heat back on and stir it in. Throw on the cheese and stir that in.
• When the water has mostly boiled off and everything’s mixed fully, it’s ready.

Goes great with garlic bread. Never thought I’d put cooking guides up here.

The word I wanted to use was removed for search engine optimisation purposes.

I just tried to buy a copy of an album online, because it’s fairly decent and I know the guy who wrote it (I’d mention the name of it, but I don’t want it to come up in a Google search for “lying cheating thieving bullies”). Unfortunately, PayPal have still got my account blocked (apparently my moderately generic name showed up “on a list” – shocking). Also, they won’t allow my card to be used without logging in. So I can’t buy anything through PayPal. I also can’t close my account with them. Not until I send them some photo ID, some household bills at my billing address that aren’t phone bills/bank statements, and probably the rights to my first born child. Ignoring the fact that I don’t actually have bills going to my billing address that aren’t phone bills or bank statements, who do they think they are?

This isn’t the first tale of woe I’ve heard bout them. There’s an entire community of people who are in the same boat (Google for it), and I’ve heard accounts of them (or rather, their hired goons) showing up on peoples’ doorsteps demanding debt repayments because they (PayPal) made a clerical error.

Someday I hope to have something worth selling to the internet. It won’t be through PayPal (or their parent, Ebay, which I used frequently up until this happened). They’re nothing more then a bunch of thieving, badly regulated bullies.

You let them out of the cage for five minutes, and they start documenting your every move.

Ceiling Budgie

A while back for a forensics assignment, I had to complete a task that involved analysing a VirtualBox disk image. I wrote a quick script that converted the VDI image to RAW (.img) format by just stripping out some headers. I knew at the time that it wouldn’t support split images.

It turns out that it only works for really small images too. Apparently larger images (I tested the script with 20MB images, today I had a 20GB image) are compressed in some strange way. Today, after a Windows VM decided to eat four hours of work on me, I wanted to try using Sleuthkit to recover the data, so wanted to get the raw disk image. After examining the image with xxd (and Sleuthkit throwing errors) I concluded that something wasn’t right, and then realised that the 20GB disk image was only a 10GB file. Something was not right.

It turns out that the correct way to do this is to use the VBoxManage tool:

VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW original_file.vdi new_image.img

This trick was found at this guy’s blog (thanks!). It took an age and made my laptop cry while it was working, but in the end Sleuthkit saw the filesystem and I could continue my (eventually futile) quest to recover the data. (Really, if you actually wanted Windows to delete a file that cleanly, it wouldn’t have done it. There was no sign of it on the image. Not even searching the entire thing with strings and grep returned any trace of it. Screw you Windows.)

I just noticed my tag cloud after making that last post. Site has been up less then 24 hours and it’s already got “entrepreneur online business” written in giant letters in the sidebar. The shame ;_;

Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been looking at the state of get rich quick schemes on the internet over the last few days. I’m slowly beginning to realise exactly how the internet went from being a proud resource, with some major high quality resources… (who am I kidding, was it ever that good?)… to what it is now. Every second one of these guides that I seem to read points in the direction of “generate lots and lots of spam and plaster it with ads”. I’m not sure how these can even make that much revenue.

There was one system that mentioned automatically generating blogs. Not blog posts, but blogs. I’d link it, but I get the feeling that GoogleBot might crucify this poor site if I linked to that sort of shameless junk. The approach sort of makes sense from a ruthless capitalist perspective – even if a new blog only gets 10 hits a day, that’s 10,000 hits per day if you have 1,000 of them. That’s a good start if you have an easy way to spit out 1,000 automated blogs. I’d even be tempted to try it if I had any faith in an automated bot’s ability to produce good English, but alas I don’t. Also, I’d have to shed a part of my soul.

First post on what will undoubtedly become a fascinating insight into the contemporary world. Or at least it’ll seem that way to me when I’m as awake and lucid as I am now (not very). Sorry, I’ve been watching QI reruns and Stephen Fry’s influence still hasn’t left my mind.

Something I’ve noticed over the last few days (while desperately stuggling to find ways to make some extra money off the internet) is that a lot of these “build an internet empire for under $20 worth of investment” don’t take into account that time is valuable too. Even the slightly more well written ones that don’t scream “scam artist”. Yes, it might cost most people less then $20 (it’d cost me nothing in monetary terms, I’ve already got access to nearly unlimited hosting infrastructure and a stupid number of domain names), but if it takes me 10 hours of work to get up and running (and significantly more time to maintain and generate content), that’s an expense too. Anyway. Time for sleep.