I just finished watching Johnny Long’s “No Tech Hacking” presentation from DefCon 15, and seems to be inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s presentation style.

Johnny starts off by plugging his “Hackers For Charity” movement, which I find very commendable and highly recommend and is a good start if you need some references. Anyway, back to the presentation content.

Johnny goes through showing photos of cars, asking the audience questions about the car owner (exercising your mind, and very interactive). Then he covers badges, shoulder surfing and dumpster diving. To summarize, it’s an hour of your time well spent.

Now when I am back in Sweden I keep switching back and forth between Swedish and English keyboard layout, which is very inefficient and time consuming, and all of this because the Swedish alphabet has 3 extra characters (åäö). It all started out when I was looking for a way to switch keyboard layout on my EEE 900 laptop.

I have had my Cloudbook for about 2 weeks now, and it has worked out pretty well. gOS was quickly replaced with Ubuntu and Windows XP, because frankly the gOS sucks big time. I haven’t finished tweaking it, and hardware mods have been put on hold for the time being as all the equipment is still being shipped to Sweden.

The verdict? So far Windows XP out-performs Ubuntu, mainly because I haven’t got Ubuntu to use the VIA graphics drivers and is still using the non-optimized VESA graphics drivers. In effect that means that video playback works in Windows XP, but not in Ubuntu. If you got a working xorg.conf for Cloudbook using the VIA drivers please send it to me (and if you can make it run at 1000×600 I would be very happy).

I’ve noticed that more and more magazine shops have started to carry “hacking” magazines like 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and today I saw Hakin9 2/2008 at Sim Lim Square (and of course I bought myself a copy - I’ll let you know what I think of it once I’ve got to read it, but the table of contents looks really interesting).

I’ve been starting to record some screencasts, and this is what I used on the Microsoft Windows platform:

CamStudio was used to capture the actual area of interest. It can record the screen either to a avi or swf file, where I always go for the avi format as it is easier to deal with at post production.

For post-production I am using VirtualDub, where I put in my logo as a “watermark” in the image as well as trim out any unwanted parts of the recording (typing errors, getting things in the right position to begin with etc.) as well as changing the frame rate and co lour depth. Once done I save it again to a AVI file (using both Xvid and the CamStudio Lossless codec).

Today I did something new: I gave a 90 minute presentation using only 8 slides without a single word written on them - basically a bunch of pictures only - and it worked out well. The Beyond Bullet Points and Presentation Zen reading seems to have been paying off.

I am wondering if I should upload it on my website or not. To keep a complete record of my presentations I should upload it, but considering the lack of content in the slides I am not sure how useful they would be… Unless I record some voice over. I didn’t record the presentation itself so there is no live audio to put it to. I need to sort out some equipment that allows me to record that stuff live, does anyone have a good (but cheap) clip-on microphone to recommend? If so please leave a comment.

I got tired of providing free advertisement to the laptop hardware vendor where ever I go and decided to do something about it using custom laptop skins (instead of doing something drastic like re-painting your laptop). Sure, you can use a off-the-shelf laptop skin but it isn’t unique and sometimes it’s hard to find a skin that actually communicates your view of the world and you end up with something generic.

The Everex Cloudbook has been seen as a very slow machine compared to the Asus EEE PC. How slow is it actually?

Thanks to the nice folks over at http://digital.xy.hk/ and http://www.umpcfever.com/ we got this video showing the Cloudbook and EEE booting Windows XP side-by-side:

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Actually, if you analyze the video a bit and starting counting the time when Windows starts loading (XP Splash screen) to the balloon pop-up is displayed they are pretty much on pair with each other (the time measured is the time stamp in the video):

I got two older sites (securitytinker.com and proxy.11a.nu) which has some content I want to migrate over to this blog as well as to the wiki (depending on the content). So far the import process has been fighting against me every step of the way, and it seems like Drupal is a write-only CMS with very limited data extraction functionality.  I have been venting out my anger at WordPress before but this Drupal business sure takes the price.

After reading up on the Cloudbooker forum on what other people are doing with their Cloudbooks I found out that the connector for the webcam is a standard USB connector, so I’ll just add a USB hub in there so I don’t need to run so many cables between the motherboard and the lid (just one or two, to power the hub). Much neater, and the USB hub is cheap (S$9.90). I’ve also just ordered a GPS unit for my Cloudbook. That, combined with a Bluetooth adapter and 2 WiFi adapters, will make the Hackbook complete in terms of wireless security testing.