G.I. Joe : The Rise Of Cobra

Too late for reviews and nothing exceptional for a summer popcorn flick. Kudos for going to hell with the plot and story, this type of movie shouldn't even bother about the plot, just go for stylo fights and you have a winner. Michael Bay you hear that, screw the storytelling and focus on fights, yeah?

Exo-suits' screen-time too short and too meh, they should've scrap it altogether and kept them for any upcoming Crysis movie. There were only 2 good duels, both over too soon, which is real shame.

Reasons to watch:

• Ray Park as Snake Eyes
  
• Sienna Miller looking all stylo in leather.
• Shirtless Lee Byung-Hun (Storm Shadow). I found his spoken parts pretty good too, way better than some other non-native English speaking Asians.
  

There will be a second G.I. Joe movie, its a no brainer. They better give Snake Eyes more screen time especially the duels and bring back Lee Byung-Hun.

First Attempt At Soldering

Success, except for mixing up the position of two different colored LEDs. Ah well, at least it still worked. Will need to pick up some solder wick next time, couldn't remove a small but significant amount of solder from the incorrectly soldered LED(s). And one LED wasn't working...

Pardon this newb here going all hooha over soldering, but it's a new thing to me. It felt like brain surgery, you gotta keep a steady hand when feeding the solder wire to the iron. Oh, and the melted solder, LIQUID METAL!!!
I think I was supposed to have done soldering in Living Skills (Kemahiran Hidup) aeons ago, but being the lazy student I was(WAS!), I skipped class and left the solder parts in its packing collecting dust in some obscure corner of my room. I certainly regret throwing the whole packet away, now I have to buy them with mah own dough.

The ugly, and amateurishly soldered back of the circuit.
It's a flip-flop circuit, whatever that is. While I recognize the components, I have no idea how a bunch of resistors and a couple of capacitors & transistors work together. The LEDs form a heart shape and blinks. Need to redo another set to display in my car and room door. And, also understand what & how a flip-flop circuit works.

What I learned:

1. Tie up hair - My soldering iron has severely burnt hair on it.
   
2. Ventilation - I hadn't realized this until I left and re-entered my air-conditioned room, naturally it reeked of solder fumes.
3. Wet sponge and thinning the solder iron
4. Clear/Neat table - Bro very nearly touched the hot solder iron. *gasp*

DEFCON 17

Was held from 31 July to 2 August in Las Vegas. Makes me sad all the interesting stuff happens in places I could never go, would've been nice to attend the speeches, though it wouldn't be of much use to me since I have no hack skills, code or otherwise. Hopefully I'll have the time (and the discipline) to learn C-prog before the year ends.

A bit sad I missed the dates, assumed it was in mid-August or something, had planned to follow updates. Something always happens there.

In case you were wondering, Defcon is an annual tech & hacking conference. It has its own set of really unique events (eg coffee wars?) , but the main draw to me would be the guest speakers and badge hacking, and the occasionally 'happenings'(this year's was a fake ATM in the hotel spotted by a con-goer, among others).

July to August

I shall have to content with oogling at the TopGear calender since my main computer has been down for the past 2-3 weeks, courtesy of Virut. Missed 4 episodes I think, and there's no one to leech from =( Good handling pwns drag-racing anyday, L-Ferrari Scuderia & D-Dodge Challenger.

Gadget Woe : iPod Touch 2G

Said gadget is starting to freeze regularly, giving me an assortment of freeze sequences and patterns, very unlike computers that have specific symptoms. First started when I tried to play a video on low battery, then it kept getting more frequent. Not jailbroken, only music and minesweeper. Multiple hard reboots(sometimes it takes a handful before it finally works again...), restore imminent. Probably time to spring-clean my apps, music & videos anyway.

iPod-kun, don't die on me yet. But if you do, please do so before my warranty expires, kthxbai.

Very Much More Computer Woes

I shall wait for holidays to commence in a weeks time before attempting to restore that infected PC to working condition again. Reformatted, reinstalled, only to find out that my installers were infected too. PC has bricked, again. Maybe I'll just move on to Ubuntu since that PC is only used for web browsing & torrenting. Meanwhile, plugged in on rig instead.


Opened case, lots of HDD connecting and disconnecting. Careful not to spill chilled barley drink.

Keyword : Virut

Much More Computer Woes

I've gotten OS working on another partition, but its still infected, though haven't gotten the fatal explorer.exe error, which will be so sooner or later. This virus starts from , its found in the Windows>system32 folder. From what I've read, this virus variant modifies .exe programs, saved webpages and screensavers. Even goes through zipped/compressed files. So far I've managed to nominally block net access for it and 1.exe through a firewall, but I can't get netstat to stay open long enough to check my connections.

Here what happens, reader_s connects to net, downloads more malware. Your temp folder in Windows will be filled with illegible files(each prolly meant to send out spam), and multiple copies of InternetExplorer and svchost.exe show up in the task manager processes. But that's not all yet, since it modifies any ***.exe, its just a matter of time before it gets to crucial OS executables, then you'll have a corrupted OS. In other words, (as someone put it) a glorified lit-up brick.

Hopefully the computers stays in working condition until my hols, infected or not. Will try cleaning the registry in Safe mode without networking, if not then there's only zero-fill(HDD) left. Till then I just hope it doens't gain the ability to infect media files. Will also get Ubuntu asap.

ARE YOU INFECTED?