N.A.S Incorporated!

As the story goes… Suzqueeky Swiftchino AKA “The Tick” came home with me today, she is sweet and puurdy but lacks even a radio. So I am going to introduce her to my best little buddy, Pee Ess Pee. They should get along so well it will be a great match. Gray and Yellow sweet and mellow.

I think the Playstation Network is at war with the Xbox Live Network. I will be happy when my psp uploads achievements and things like Live does, that would be cool.

I bet you read a lot of emails, news reports, web pages, and so on about how virus’s are going to eat your PC and I bet most of the time you pay no attention. After all you have your system up to date and you have a virus scanner. You dont even think twice about sharing files via CD or USB Sticks. Well you shouldnt, after all this wont happen to you….

My daughter borrowed my USB Stick to take some homework to school, a week ago or more and I thought nothing of it. But then I started seeing AVG pick up some virus’s, this is strange for me because I NEVER have any infections and Im usualy very strict as to what I allow to run. So I did some research into what was going on, and this is what I found and how I fixed it.

The USB Stick had a recycle bin on it, not something you would even think twice about if you were not looking, but it was called “RECYCLER32″. It had no files in it, but I was suspicious. So I stuck the stick into a Linux PC I have at home and sure enough it was no recycle bin but a very well camouflaged folder hiding a file and a desktop.ini file. This was the installer, taking advantage of the autorun feature of windows set to run by default.

So I knew it was now on my PC but where? After looking at all the usual places I turned up nothing. So I went looking on the net and found a virus scanner that would finaly detect it, but the thing that got me was it was the only scanner that even knew about it, and they were boasting about it. Very suspisious to me if you know what I mean. I wont tell you what scanner it was, but if your smart you can work it out.

Using this scanner I was able to locate both the file as well as the registry setting that was running it. And this is where I had to stop, it seemed. For two nights I struggled to work out how to stop this thing, it was loading on logon and I was stuffed on how to stop it and I tried many many things.

Eventualy I booted into standard safe mode. As the virus tried to inject into the explorer shell process it crashed it. I was able to load windows explorer navigate to the recycler folder on C, get into the massive folder in there and shift delete the file Winmap32.exe and it didnt complain because finaly it wasnt running. I then hit the registry and did a search for the file name and deleted every entry with that in it, and then I did a search for Recycler, and got rid of any entry with that in it too.

Reboot, and presto, all is well. I dont know if I can call that skill or luck, but either way I removed it with no impact to the system.

Last thing was to download TweakUI and stop all autorun’s on USB drives. I did this to every PC in the house and now I feel a little safer… for now…

I have once again given up my addiction to WOW, after weeks of not playing it I actualy canceled my account. At my therapists advice, I have taken up playing XBox. Mostly playing Dirt! I have won the champion level and only have one race left to win, so I am now looking at other games to get addicted to. Its the only way I can distract myself from real life….

I am going to try out Fallout 3 between my power studying.

I have changed some of my sidebar, adding my Xbox profile over there -> at the top and my avatar picture down the bottom of the sidebar. They will change as I change my Avatar on the Xbox which is kinda realy cool. 

Ill upload the latest version of Screeb as soon as I get to it, dont hold your breath though or you might die.

Well I had some success with this tonight, had to post it.  You have to just love little spaceships that blow each other to hell. This is NOT a safe application to run, it is not even considered beta yet. Dont assume the 1.2 version number means its anywhere near release testing. This is purely a development version, its debug, its not stable, its not going to delete your files either though. Remember if you do download it, it is a windows application and you press ESC to close it. I will give it a page of its own soon, but its far from finished so I would rather spend the time working on it, than on a web page. 

screeb v1.2

Have fun!

Well I have needed a new PC for a long while. I spent a LOT of time looking for a notebook that could replace my desktop and my EEEPc. But every option left me frustrated and beating sales staff around the head in many shops. Eventualy I decided on an option that was cheaper than the Notebook, and way more flexible.

I went to the local PC shop, support the locals, and purchased enough parts to build a new desktop deck. Something with expansion options that are unlimited. Although I went with bare bones to start off, I have plans to make this an awesome file server in the end. Also got a reasonable graphics card that plays WOW like I have never seen it. I set up shares for all the other PCs in the house and went around uploading my music and videos that had been stored on all the other devices I have. So now I have a central storage location.

Then to combat the portabillity issues I went out and got myself a new EEEPc. A 1000h, 10 inch screen. Its not the smallest, but its keyboard is definatly touch typable, and its screen is big enough to see everything on. I have installed all the crap software I use on this, including visual studio and my audio editing stuff. This means I can take my coding anywhere and my desktop stays clean and fast. So Im real happy with the choice and the EEEPc so far handles all the shit I have put on it with ease.

My only gripe is the amount of time it took to remove all the preinstalled software, and there was so much of it. Once that was done, everything was sweet.

 

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