Paul Lockwood's technical blog » Podcasts

SecurAble – is your DEP working

Paul Lockwood — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 08:58:00 +0000

Steve Gibson of GRC fame spits out another useful tool:

It simply displays if some newer hardware features are available on your PC. The screen-shot is verification that the 64bit PC I built almost three years does support DEP.

DEP: Prevents buffer overflows in hardware – this a very big deal. Of course the operation system must support DEP too. Which versions of Windows support it is unclear, but 64bit Vista and XP should support it. Hopefully Steve Gibson will extend his utility to test DEP with an actual buffer overflow
Hardware Vitalization: Hardware support for running Virtual Machines – they should run with no speed degradation

You can see all of Steve’s free utilities at his circa-1995 website:
http://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

After a period of dumbing down his Security Now podcast is again one I highly recommend:
http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm

IPTV: Democracy Player

Paul Lockwood — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:41:12 +0000

Update (2nd July): Since this post I have reverted back to using Juice
Receiver which although not designed for video has fewer glitches. If anyone knows
of a more reliable solution please let me know.

IPTV is about where podcasting was when I started manually downloading podcasts in
the summer of 2004 [i.e. in its infancy]. Within only two years podcasting has made
a small dent in the nation’s listening habits, with high awareness in the high spending
demographics that advertisers salivate over. Will IPTV do the same?Already we have several aggregators; the one I recommend trying is Democracy Player.
It is open source and runs on all popular operating systems, but did not work with
on my install of Vista Beta 2.

Like iPodder Lemon before it Democracy Player installs
with several pre-selected channels, which just like iPodder downloaded large quantities
of utter garbage to my hard disk. I suggest deleting the pre-selected channels, clicking
on Channel Guide and using the iTunes like interface to select from popular listings.
As the following screenshot shows I am trying out ABC news, Ricky Gervis, and TWIT’s
h.264 feed:

This is early days for the software and this player does work perfectly as a media
server. I view the content from xbmc over a SMB share, which works fairly well but
all the media is deposited into one folder with often cryptic filenames. Hopefully
a future build will create a directory for each feed like Juice Receiver does for
podcasts. Finally it is worth noting that Democracy Player uses Bittorrent under the
hood so downloads should be fast – there are no custom port settings yet so I have
temporarily enabled UPnP on my NAT Router.

Excellent Tips on creating a Podcast

Paul Lockwood — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 02:10:43 +0000

It appears Craig Shoemaker’s Polymorphic Podcast is a year old this month. As a side-effect
of running through his year as a podcaster Craig gives out some great tips on how
to start, grow and publicize your own podcast.

This special show is under 15 minutes long and I recommend everyone listen to it. If
you are interesting in achieving a ‘fame goal’; MVP, Podcaster, CEO
of Disney or whatever than take tips from Craig and get yourself noticed:

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/podcast/files/PolymorphicPodcast-2006-01-11.mp3

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/anniversary1/

Note: Craig did mention this blog in this show, but I had already decided to
make this post. Hearing my name on a Podcast is always a big deal to this shy
geek – thanks Craig!