My experience with the Lenovo G505 and Windows 8.

So recently I bought a new laptop, A lenovo G505, a fairly strong box for a price that leaves one wondering what was wrong with it.

A quick look at the specs:

• AMD A6-5200M Quad-Core-processor
• AMD Radeon HD8400G
• 1 TB HDD
• 16 GB RAM @ 1600Mhz

So all in all it's a good laptop, some of the (small) flaws with it is that it has no indicator when num lock is on, no power indicator on the actual power button and a few other minor annoyances.
Hardware wise the biggest annoyance is the lack of a 3.5 mm jack for a mic.

Software wise tho.. I've got a few bones to pick.
It comes preinstalled with windows 8, something I knew going in but I had no idea it'd be so hard to get rid of.
Since I'm very familiar and as far as windows OS go very fond of Windows 7, I of course want to switch to it. However since I have no recovery DVD I want to maintain the recovery partitions in order to be able to factory default it when it needs a trip to Lenovo HQ/nearest service station.
When I try to install windows 7 it gives me an error regarding drivers, my guess SATA drivers I am lacking.

From what I've read from those that HAVE installed windows 7, there are a few things that just don't work well since the drivers are hard to find/non existent. Things like media keys and such.
Not something I can't live without but still a plus if I'd had it.

So in my attempts at tweaking windows 8 to my liking I can't help but feel as if the whole OS is designed to gather information. Everything that before was simple and local now feels simple and clouded. Everything that is a basic feature of windows 7 and earlier seem to need a microsoft account connected to it, with seemingly no option to do local stuff.
I've noticed that my Chromium shortcut on the taskbar just doesn't work, neither does it work on my start menu.. Windows keeps telling me to define a default browser but won't just let me browse to an executable, it demands I use an app.

Games takes me to an xbox like marketplace rather then local games.
Video requires a login, etc etc..

It's not all doom and gloom tho as I do LIKE some stuff that windows 8 does.
Probably one of my favorites is that the theme changes based on the wallpaper, that one is kind of neat.
Metro, while I still think it looks out of place on a non touch screen device is visually appealing and the transition animations are smooth.
Another nice improvement is the WIN+TAB behaviour, instead of having the kind of useless alternative to ALT+TAB it's now something that I wish my Win 7 machine did, it shows an ALT+TAB like menu but on the side of the screen, keeping it from cluttering up the screen like ALT+TAB does.

That's all I've got to say about it for now, I'll probably write more as I go through it and find more annoyances/niceties.

Getting around country restrictions - Hola Unblocker

Today I figured I'd make a post about getting around content filtering.

If you've ever wanted to view a video on Youtube or any other video hosting website and received a "Video is unavailable" or "This video is not available in your country" message then this post is for you.

I personally don't understand why these kind of restrictions even exist but I suppose they are yet another symptom of an overly controlled internet.
The error messages that you get might differ from one page to another but this little Chrome/Firefox Addon should be able to help alleviate some of the annoyance.

In short how it works is simple, you install the addon, you open the video you want to see and click the button to select which country you want it to think you are in and after a quick refresh the video should be playing like a charm.
The way it does this is by making configurable VPN's available.
As the site itself says:

"The Hola Unblocker is a free, configurable VPN service, similar to many such services that exist on the Internet.
It is useful for seeing how a web site looks like from a certain geography, for overcoming government censorship (e.g. seeing Facebook from a country that blocks it), for overcoming your corporation's Internet site blocking, for seeing a site in its native language (e.g. seeing the Spanish news site as it appears to Spanish users), etc."

Privacy is a growing concern for a lot of people, including myself so I made sure to read their FAQ and as far as I can tell they do nothing funky that I don't want.
Some notable Questions from the FAQ:


Does Hola share any of my personal information with the rest of the Hola community?

No. Hola handles your HTTP requests exactly like HTTP web proxies do according to the HTTP RFC standards, and in a similar way to how ISPs do it in the normal course of your browsing. That also covers 'Cache:' public/private HTTP headers and the correct handling of them.

How can content owners make sure that a piece of content doesn't get cached by Hola?

Easy: They can use HTTP's standard 'Cache-Control: private,no-store' in requests/responses, and Hola will not cache this information.

If you are interested in learning more about the service and it's privacy policies I suggest you read on their website at Hola - Privacy

Now for a quick guide on the setup.

For Chrome, browse to the Chrome Web store and download it or simply press this link: 

Hola Unblocker For Chrome.

For Firefox use the corresponding Addon repository. 

Hola Unblocker For Firefox.

After the installation you will be presented with a configuration page with a few services preloaded.

You can find other scripts on the net (https://www.facebook.com/HolaUnblockerScripts) but typically you can just press the button that Chrome/Firefox has added on any page and pick a country.

I've tested the service myself and I can say that I feel no delays and it bypasses both bbc and youtube content blocks with no problem.

I hope this will help other people with overcoming another a rather stupid problem.

(This Addon also allows for bypassing for certain corporate filters, use on your own volition at work!)

How I'm reducing the info google has on me.

With all the news of PRISM and Googles involvement, I've decided to reduce the amount of information Google gets on me.

For those of you who don't know exactly how much Google actually tracks, here is a quick list:

(List assumes a smartphone is also used)

• Search history
• Social Media sites used
• Videos watched/Uploaded to youtube
• Android devices owned (includes IMEI, register dates etc..)
• Blogs (yes even this one)
• Contacts
• Emails
• Play Store purchases
• And the list goes on

Needless to say, the list is substantial and if you are like me, that is quite a bit of information to just hand over to any one company especially knowing where they send it.

Now since I, just like many other people have learned to become very dependent on the internet giant that is Google, I need ways to be able to continue to use their services while minimizing the amount of data they get.

This is not easy of course but with some tweaking it's possible to reduce it at least a bit.

First thing I did was to make the switch over from Chrome to Chromium.

Chromium is the Open Source origin of Chrome, so all your addons and account data will still be usable without any problem.

Because Chromium is Open Source, anyone can look at the code that makes up the browser, making it much harder to hide tracking services and backdoors in the browser without anyone knowing about it.

This step reduces the information the information Google tracks at least a little bit.

Second step I did was moving away from using google.com for my searches.

Since Google is still the worlds leading search engine tho, I can't afford to not use the service at all so I use a site like Startpage or Duckduckgo. These are sites that search google for you, cutting out any log for them that YOU did the searching. Extra added goodness is that both sites work purely over HTTPS meaning that any sniffing of what data you are sending to google is also (nearly) impossible.

As an added step to make life easier for my self, I also changed the behavior of Chromium's main address and search bar (Omnibox) to automatically use startpage.com.

A third step that I don't use that much but I have put in place is that I no longer send personal correspondence in plain text. I use a software like GPG4Win or similar to encrypt my data using a public/private key system. ( Check the about section of my website for my public key )

While this only works with people who actually know how to use it, my personal correspondence is so few that it isn't a huge problem. If I could get companies to use my key for encrypting my mails I would be a happy paranoid man.

While none of the above guarantee a data-less Google, they help at least reduce SOME of the stuff they get on a daily basis. The fight against systems like PRISM is something we must all pick up, in whatever way we can. That is why I decided to make this post and I hope that anyone at all finds it useful.

A New Website!

So I've finally gotten to making a new website and I have to say I am LOVING the way it's looking.
I tried to go with a soft look and I think I got that down pretty well.

I've been inspecting a lot of other pages with the "Inspect Element" feature of Chromium and it's quickly become indispensable to me. The function made it very easy to pinpoint a particular part of the website and what CSS rules were used to make it look the way it did.


Later I will write a post concerning some of the resources I have used in order to make this spiffy new page!


EDIT: I just realized that I had not actually linked it here.. http://www.kaizokuden.org

My Home - A series of posts. Part 2

In my previous post I started by talking about my media setup in regards to audio and video.

So today I figured I would write about my gaming setup. (This is probably the least developed part of my setup)

General setup

TV: My TV is a Luxor 32LD507, 32" LCD, a lot of my friends would find this too small but coming from a 32" CRT.. This TV is a vast improvement.

Audio: Sadly for now I remain listening to the TV's speakers.

Video Input: Since I have a couple of consoles, my TV lacks enough connections to connect them all.

To give myself some more options I have bought an RCA Switch for about 200 SEK. Picture below-

Xbox360 (left), Playstation 2 (middle), Wii (right)

As my desktop also serves as my media server (XBMC), it too is connected to the TV using a HDMI cable.

Consoles

As of right now I have four consoles hooked up to the TV.

• Playstation 2 Slim
• Nintendo Wii 
• Microsoft Xbox 360
• Sega Megadrive 2

I also have a Commodore 64 and Sega master system in storage, these are not hooked up as I either lack the cables or some other reason..

PC

Most of my gaming happens on my desktop as it's my favorite way to play single player games and since it has the strongest hardware so I can play current games.

I will give a complete listing of his hardware when I write up a post about him.

That is about it for my gaming stuff right now I think ..

My Home - A series of posts.

Introduction 

So I've been meaning to write up a few blog posts about my setup here at home as I am starting to get pretty happy with things and I think it's about time I write it down.

Ever since I first saw Iron Man, like many people around the world, I wanted a smart house much like Tony Stark's house but as I lack the funds Tony has I have been settling for piece by piece constructing a apartment tailored to my desires.

In my quest to convert my apartment into a veritable geek cave, I have succeeded in setting up a few systems that I quite fond of that I will talk about a little in the course of this post.

All things mentioned in this and any following overview post will likely have a specific post about them.
If you want me to go into specifics for anything in particular send me a PM or comment on the overview article.


Media

The crowning piece of my setup right now must be my media setup, a system that has been redone at least three times so far, either to tweak settings, do a clean upgrade or something else.

The general setup is as follows:


Video: For video I use XBMC Version 12.0 (Frodo) with the aeon MQ4 skin by MarcosQui (I think)
I use the skin because I find it very modifiable and it's default look is also great looking.

Controlling XBMC I do from my tablet (Cube U30-GT Mini) using the official XBMC remote.


Audio: My Audio setup is actually twofold, a local system and a remote system. I will start by talking about the local system.

For my local setup I use my preferred music player; Winamp. To this day I can find few music players I like as much as winamp.
Winamp's configuration is pretty much default as of right now with the exception of one plugin.

When at my computer I use winamps own interface to control the music that's playing.
When I am elsewhere in my apartment or even closely outside I use my phone or tablet to control it using an android app called poweramp, this is where the plugin comes into play, for poweramp to work the ajaxamp plugin must be installed and configured.

Remotely I use a server software called subsonic for streaming music to my phone that I dont have locally on it. On occasion I will also use the web interface for subsonic if I am on my laptop.





That's all I will be writing today, It's getting late and I'm not sure what more to add.
Next article will likely go into what I use to control various other areas of my life, this will include my schedule, managing my files, phone management etc...