Blog posts tagged "geek" – Posts 21..25 of 44 posts found:

If, like me, you grew up in the 80's and 90's, you know that there's only one thing that can follow the words "Duck Tales" and that's "Woo-oo!". You can probably even sing along to the theme song. Apart from the highly popular TV show, there have been several video games about loveable old miser Scrooge McDuck and his three nephews. Very much a product of the time, the NES version of this was a platform game. It is considered by many to be among the best such games ever made. Now, more than 20 years later, WayForward Technologies has updated the iconic game for the modern age. Is that a good thing? Let's find out!
Read more

For more than a decade, I've run my own BIND-based DNS server, using FreeDNS for a free secondary DNS service. There has been quite some to do about a large-scale DDoS attack perpetrated against Spamhaus recently. One significant aspect of this attack was that the DDoS used so-called DNS amplification. This makes use of misconfigured DNS servers ("open recursors") to greatly increase the amount of traffic sent to a victim. One fellow server administrator wrote about this and it made me wonder about being an open resolver. Fortunately, my own server was properly configured and could not be used as an accessory in such an attack, but what if it had been? That's where CloudFlare comes in.
Read more

This weekend, I posted a brainteaser, promising to pay $100 to whomever solved it. Although the decoding algorithm has not yet been discovered, Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, who found my puzzle through Reddit, did manage to figure out what the second landmark was. He generously suggested that I donate the prize money to Doctors Without Borders. That is an excellent destination for the money, so I was only too happy to oblige:
Read more

For years I've had an idea in my head about a way to hide some information in a bunch of numbers. I actually got around to coding an implementation and figured I'd run a competition. The first person who figures out what the famous landmark is described by the second set of numbers below and posts the correct answer in the comments wins $100.
Read more

With some free time and a spare laptop on my hands, I figured I'd try out running a Linux desktop installation once more. Although I've used Linux on servers for more than a decade, all of my regular desktop machines have been Windows and Mac OS. Now, most people running Linux on the desktop seem to be using Ubuntu. I fully intend to give that a try later on, but for now I went with the distro I've been most familiar with for the past 12 years, which is openSUSE. Although I've been able to set things up to the point where it's viable as a proper workstation for me, I'm sorry to say the experience fluctuated between pleasant and dreadful. Here's some of the stuff I encountered and what I did to get things to a usable state.
Read more