On Jan 9, 2009, Hal Roberts reported that 3 three of the circumvention tools sells user data. The only one that I reviewed and recommended is GPass, and as I reported, it wasn't really working recently.
I'm not surprised as I never trusted anybody. These guys are the least trust worthy; just one step up from some anonymous person having some server capability hosting a CGI script. I am a little surprised that they publish aggregate data freely on partner websites, and even openly offer to sell confidential data for a fee, and only if you pass THEIR strict screening. This is sad as nobody even have a privacy policy on their websites.
The other confirmed sad news is that they actually store individual user logs, which by law they don't have to. But since they do store, by law LE like FBI can request for it, and they had been cooperating. The advantage of US freedom is again lost. In contrast there are Data Retention law in most EU countries.
Nothing important is lost, as I never use them alone, and I never invite the attention of FBI.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Long Term Practical Proxy Report
All are totally free, not free trial, some with optional paid services.
Hotspot Shield is ad supported with a banner on top. But it's pretty easy to get rid of it. A sure thing is to use encrypted connection such as https with your bank. You can also use any of the other proxies as they are all encrypted. The advantage of using another encrypted proxy is that, Hotspot Shield knows my IP, but it doesn't know anything about where I'm visiting and the contents. I have successfully use bittorrent for a couple of hours without disconnection. A BT client which hide the BT protocol helps. The speed is decent even that other peers cannot initiate a connection to you.
I use all the other proxies because their speed varies a lot, and sometimes fail. So the necessary Firefox add-on is FoxyProxy. Forget about the fancy options, just add a proxy, give a name such as ultrareach, and then the host and port. Set leftclick option to cycle through the proxies.
Apart from the German JonDoNym (and Hotsport Shield), all are American proxies aimed to bypass Chinese censorship. The software is not open source. You don't know who is behind the software or individual servers. So use it at your own risk. Possible funding sources are Voice of America, Fulong Gong. Most are detected as virus, malware or spyware. I can assure that they are not destructed virus (so far). But I don't know if they spy on me or not. But with Hotspot Shield running under, they don't know my IP. Also, if your anti-virus or anti-spy scanner cannot set to ignore them, it's a bit inconvenient. You may have to pause your anti-virus shields momentarily when you start them. They say the Chinese report them as malware on a large scale so they are detected as such. Some malware detectors had taken them off the list but there are too many detectors.
Ironically, all the Chinese censorship bypassing proxies have heavy censorship in varying degrees. Porns are out, but it's a good thing, otherwise the servers will be a lot slower. Anti-virus companies are out if they don't take them off the virus list. They also protect surfers by disallowing websites with dubious privacy policies, even Google. That's why you need slower proxies but with less censorship.
UltraSurf is very fast most of the time. You can even watch youtube with decent speed. Censorship is heavy. Supports only http protocol.
GPass is pretty decent until recently. May be it doesn't work well with Hotspot Shield. It supports many protocols via socks, such as email clients, IM, streaming video players. It can also route through Skype, so when you are browsing something forbidden, it appears to spying eyes that you are making a phone call, or other Skype users are making p2p phone calls routing your PC.
GTunnel is currently decently fast. It also supports Skype. It's the most often detected as malware.
FreeGate is not free anymore for non-Chinese users. Phoenix is another free VPN, but the Chinese interface makes sure that non-Chinese cannot use it.
JonDoNym is pretty slow part of the day. However it's reliable when it works and censor free. But with German data retention law, it's the most traceable by court order.
TOR is only useable in a small window around UTC 8 am. But it's nearest to be untraceable.
That's what I use on a daily basis.
- Hotspot Shield (VPN)
- UltraSurf localhost:9666
- GPass localhost:8000
- GTunnel localhost:8081
- JondoNym (German) localhost:4001
Hotspot Shield is ad supported with a banner on top. But it's pretty easy to get rid of it. A sure thing is to use encrypted connection such as https with your bank. You can also use any of the other proxies as they are all encrypted. The advantage of using another encrypted proxy is that, Hotspot Shield knows my IP, but it doesn't know anything about where I'm visiting and the contents. I have successfully use bittorrent for a couple of hours without disconnection. A BT client which hide the BT protocol helps. The speed is decent even that other peers cannot initiate a connection to you.
I use all the other proxies because their speed varies a lot, and sometimes fail. So the necessary Firefox add-on is FoxyProxy. Forget about the fancy options, just add a proxy, give a name such as ultrareach, and then the host and port. Set leftclick option to cycle through the proxies.
Apart from the German JonDoNym (and Hotsport Shield), all are American proxies aimed to bypass Chinese censorship. The software is not open source. You don't know who is behind the software or individual servers. So use it at your own risk. Possible funding sources are Voice of America, Fulong Gong. Most are detected as virus, malware or spyware. I can assure that they are not destructed virus (so far). But I don't know if they spy on me or not. But with Hotspot Shield running under, they don't know my IP. Also, if your anti-virus or anti-spy scanner cannot set to ignore them, it's a bit inconvenient. You may have to pause your anti-virus shields momentarily when you start them. They say the Chinese report them as malware on a large scale so they are detected as such. Some malware detectors had taken them off the list but there are too many detectors.
Ironically, all the Chinese censorship bypassing proxies have heavy censorship in varying degrees. Porns are out, but it's a good thing, otherwise the servers will be a lot slower. Anti-virus companies are out if they don't take them off the virus list. They also protect surfers by disallowing websites with dubious privacy policies, even Google. That's why you need slower proxies but with less censorship.
UltraSurf is very fast most of the time. You can even watch youtube with decent speed. Censorship is heavy. Supports only http protocol.
GPass is pretty decent until recently. May be it doesn't work well with Hotspot Shield. It supports many protocols via socks, such as email clients, IM, streaming video players. It can also route through Skype, so when you are browsing something forbidden, it appears to spying eyes that you are making a phone call, or other Skype users are making p2p phone calls routing your PC.
GTunnel is currently decently fast. It also supports Skype. It's the most often detected as malware.
FreeGate is not free anymore for non-Chinese users. Phoenix is another free VPN, but the Chinese interface makes sure that non-Chinese cannot use it.
JonDoNym is pretty slow part of the day. However it's reliable when it works and censor free. But with German data retention law, it's the most traceable by court order.
TOR is only useable in a small window around UTC 8 am. But it's nearest to be untraceable.
That's what I use on a daily basis.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
TrueCrypt - virtual encrypted disk
TrueCrypt looks and sounds complicated, but actually it's pretty easy to use. It is not only a file or data encryption, but provides file system encryption, which makes it usable on a daily basis. I never had the patient and discipline to maintain encryption files, but now most of my secrets are encrypted on a constant basis.
All the default options will give you safe and secure encryption - you create a fixed size file that becomes a virtual disk with a drive letter (on Windows), protected by a password. When the file is mounted, you can see an additional disk drive that you can access like any others. When the file is dismounted, via TrueCrypt or by pulling the plug, the file remains an encrypted file with no known backdoors. You can exit the TrueCrypt user interface anytime while the encryption engines run in the background.
There are some actions that you may want to perform. One is under[tools], [refresh drive letters]. For some reasons, after you mount or dismount, the drive letters are not always updated. The other action is under [volumes] , [store volumes as favorite] and [mount favorite volumes]. I also put TrueCrypt into my start menu, and set it's preference to Mount favorite volume when started. So basically whenever I login to or boot up windows, I also have to login to my most used virtual disk.
The most useful feature I use is to encrypt all my surfing activities by encrypting my Firefox profile. I worked in competitive or secretive companies before. When someone quit or being fired, they may be escorted immediately by security guards out of the door. You don't even have time to erase your private bookmarks or caches. This is more real than being raid by the FBI, NSA, or US Secret Service. Smashing the harddrive is too late and hardly effective. With TrueCrypt you just need to pull the plug, or dismout gracefully when you have time.
To bring up the FireFox profile manger, edit the properties of any FireFox shortcut, find the target in the form of
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
and add the option
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager
Create a TrueCrypt drive and mount it as say z. When you create a new profile, you can pick your own profile directory to be in the z drive. The default profile directory is where your current profile is at, so you can find it and copy it over if you need to.
If you have multiple profiles, you can edit any FF shortcut to go straight into that profile:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P profileName
The other useful FF option is -no-remote, so different profiles can be used at the same time.
FireFox stores everything in the profiles, history, bookmark, encrypted passwords and cache etc. So when the profile drive is not mounted, all your data are encrypted, and FF can't even run. Most add-ons also store data in the profile directory. But if you are using some extensions that handle secret or private data, you have to check.
If you use encrypted virtual drive continuously, as in using it as for FF profile, you have to avoid automatic force dismount under some circumstances. If your drive is force dismounted while in use by some application such as FF, the drive letter is not available anymore, and you have to reboot to clear it up. For security reason, drives are dismounted after certain time by default, when the screen saver is on, or other power management features.
In the pass, I had major inconveniences during upgrade of OS, either by choice or by force due to hardware replacement. I am wary of compression and backup utilities that uses proprietary formats. TrueCrypt is open source, use standard encryption, and I stord a copy of the software just in case.
TrueCrypt is safer and more secure in many ways. There is no decrypted copy at anytime, so you don't have to worry about magnetic traces on the physical devices. You can pull the plug anytime once you finished updating something - they were encrypted on the fly.
Will you lost the whole file or whole virtual disk due to hard disk corruption? Firstly, disk/file corruption doesn't happen anymore nowadays. Secondly, I don't think you will lost any more data than what you lost if the file is not encrypted. The encryption unit will be file sectors. There are redundancy to ensure that the volume can still be accessed when error occurs.
DVD's and CD's are more tricky. There are redundancy in DVD's to ensure that data can still be recovered when there are errors, comparable to hard disks. But you don't touch or smash hard drives. I would test DVD's for recoverable errors yearly or once several years. Most DVD burning utility comes with test scans. If these error occurs, it's time to make a new error free DVD. Again I don't think you will lost more data than if the disks are not encrypted. But since the encrypted file sizes are larger, you are a tiny little bit more exposed to disk corruption.
All the default options will give you safe and secure encryption - you create a fixed size file that becomes a virtual disk with a drive letter (on Windows), protected by a password. When the file is mounted, you can see an additional disk drive that you can access like any others. When the file is dismounted, via TrueCrypt or by pulling the plug, the file remains an encrypted file with no known backdoors. You can exit the TrueCrypt user interface anytime while the encryption engines run in the background.
There are some actions that you may want to perform. One is under
The most useful feature I use is to encrypt all my surfing activities by encrypting my Firefox profile. I worked in competitive or secretive companies before. When someone quit or being fired, they may be escorted immediately by security guards out of the door. You don't even have time to erase your private bookmarks or caches. This is more real than being raid by the FBI, NSA, or US Secret Service. Smashing the harddrive is too late and hardly effective. With TrueCrypt you just need to pull the plug, or dismout gracefully when you have time.
To bring up the FireFox profile manger, edit the properties of any FireFox shortcut, find the target in the form of
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
and add the option
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager
Create a TrueCrypt drive and mount it as say z. When you create a new profile, you can pick your own profile directory to be in the z drive. The default profile directory is where your current profile is at, so you can find it and copy it over if you need to.
If you have multiple profiles, you can edit any FF shortcut to go straight into that profile:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P profileName
The other useful FF option is -no-remote, so different profiles can be used at the same time.
FireFox stores everything in the profiles, history, bookmark, encrypted passwords and cache etc. So when the profile drive is not mounted, all your data are encrypted, and FF can't even run. Most add-ons also store data in the profile directory. But if you are using some extensions that handle secret or private data, you have to check.
If you use encrypted virtual drive continuously, as in using it as for FF profile, you have to avoid automatic force dismount under some circumstances. If your drive is force dismounted while in use by some application such as FF, the drive letter is not available anymore, and you have to reboot to clear it up. For security reason, drives are dismounted after certain time by default, when the screen saver is on, or other power management features.
In the pass, I had major inconveniences during upgrade of OS, either by choice or by force due to hardware replacement. I am wary of compression and backup utilities that uses proprietary formats. TrueCrypt is open source, use standard encryption, and I stord a copy of the software just in case.
TrueCrypt is safer and more secure in many ways. There is no decrypted copy at anytime, so you don't have to worry about magnetic traces on the physical devices. You can pull the plug anytime once you finished updating something - they were encrypted on the fly.
Will you lost the whole file or whole virtual disk due to hard disk corruption? Firstly, disk/file corruption doesn't happen anymore nowadays. Secondly, I don't think you will lost any more data than what you lost if the file is not encrypted. The encryption unit will be file sectors. There are redundancy to ensure that the volume can still be accessed when error occurs.
DVD's and CD's are more tricky. There are redundancy in DVD's to ensure that data can still be recovered when there are errors, comparable to hard disks. But you don't touch or smash hard drives. I would test DVD's for recoverable errors yearly or once several years. Most DVD burning utility comes with test scans. If these error occurs, it's time to make a new error free DVD. Again I don't think you will lost more data than if the disks are not encrypted. But since the encrypted file sizes are larger, you are a tiny little bit more exposed to disk corruption.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
How to Erase a DVD Completely and Securely
If you have a RW DVD, there are utilities to erase it, or you can overwrite it with something. Like hard disks, there may still be magnetic traces. If your DVD is +-R, write once, you can't soft erase it.
The best so far is to get a DVD shredder. I opted a while ago for the paper only shredder because the cost didn't justify the number of discs I may have to shred in the future. Also, for paper you need those cross shredder that is a lot harder to put the pieces together. For DVD there's no such fine shredding. As long as you can see a piece of silvery metal, you may be able to recover a large chunk of data or video from it. Are they real in CSI?
I have seen the microwave destruction video, taking only 5 sec. But there is a danger of harming your microwave because of the electric sparks. And there is bad smell. The metallic disc broke down pretty evenly, but the fragments are still large.
Here's what I tried, which didn't work, and don't waste your time. With a small craft drill you can destroy the surface easily using the right sander tip. But it is only skin deep. I don't even think that the plastic layer was penetrated.
I used pure sulfuric acid, which didn't do a thing because of the plastic layer protection.
It dawn on me that I have a plumbing torch. I fired it up outdoors, but surprising the DVD's are very hard to die. The plastic doesn't melt away easily, and it didn't burn. You have to melt the plastic until the inner layers are exposed, then there's a little flame and no more.
Here's the result, before I cut them up and put it in the trash a few pieces per collection day. Now, the superior part, after the torch treatment, the discs are, similar to the surface of the French desert made using the same technique, very crispy. You can crumble the discs into very fine pieces with your fingers, or you can hammer them into powder.
The best so far is to get a DVD shredder. I opted a while ago for the paper only shredder because the cost didn't justify the number of discs I may have to shred in the future. Also, for paper you need those cross shredder that is a lot harder to put the pieces together. For DVD there's no such fine shredding. As long as you can see a piece of silvery metal, you may be able to recover a large chunk of data or video from it. Are they real in CSI?
I have seen the microwave destruction video, taking only 5 sec. But there is a danger of harming your microwave because of the electric sparks. And there is bad smell. The metallic disc broke down pretty evenly, but the fragments are still large.
Here's what I tried, which didn't work, and don't waste your time. With a small craft drill you can destroy the surface easily using the right sander tip. But it is only skin deep. I don't even think that the plastic layer was penetrated.
I used pure sulfuric acid, which didn't do a thing because of the plastic layer protection.
It dawn on me that I have a plumbing torch. I fired it up outdoors, but surprising the DVD's are very hard to die. The plastic doesn't melt away easily, and it didn't burn. You have to melt the plastic until the inner layers are exposed, then there's a little flame and no more.
Here's the result, before I cut them up and put it in the trash a few pieces per collection day. Now, the superior part, after the torch treatment, the discs are, similar to the surface of the French desert made using the same technique, very crispy. You can crumble the discs into very fine pieces with your fingers, or you can hammer them into powder.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Early spring cleaning: secure computer data
I tried to encrypt bank accounts on my laptop long ago. You wouldn't believe how many money went through the laptop. I used KeePass and TrueCrypt, but gave up, until now.
You can setup your laptop with whatever password you can create, BIOS, Windows Logon, and even the hard drive. But all are crackable.
KeePass is good, but it's standalone, not integrated with anything. You have to pull your password into the browser forms. It's not bad at all but I have alternatives.
I was using TrueCrypt for file encryption. But it was tedious on a file by file basis. You can use it to create a big encrypted drive too, but I don't trust it enough. And the backup is a problem.
Revisiting TrueCrypt again, I came across encrypting entire operating system, optionally hidden, may have a decoy too. I doubt how TC deal with it. On close look, TC decrypts on the fly, which explains it's capabilities. When you are reading a file, TC doesn't decrypt it into another file, but decrypt a portion of it at a time and hand it over to the application.
I was amazed to see how fast and painless it is to use TC. I encrypt the entire video, actually quite a lot of large video clips, and play it. You don't feel any difference with the encryption, and you don't need to wait for encryption, nor have to deal with which version of the file to keep.
So instead of dealing with passwords, I encrypt the entire profile of firefox, which allows you to specify where your profile should be. So whatever I do on the web is encrypted, history, bookmarks, passwords (now double encrypted), and everything except some extensions may put data outside of the profile directory. If the profile directory is not mounted as a drive, it's just an encrypted file with a code supposed to be unbreakable. When it's mounted, someone need to run some spyware to read the drive where my profile is, or to steal the TC password in memory, if they know I'm using TC. Keyloggers and screen capture spyware won't work because I don't type in passwords anymore.
You can encrypt the entire OS, but I'll settle with using only two different master passwords. One is the personal secrets password and one is the shared secrets password. The only difference is, you don't need to or don't want to give out the personal password even when you drop dead.
There are three types of secrets to encrypt. The first two corresponds with the two type of passwords. Being secrets, the data naturally have to be backup safely. The third type are personal secrets that don't need to be backup. You don't want others to know but you can recover the data in other ways other than backup.
The model of 2 password, 3 types of data is strange, but like bookmark, you can lost it with minor inconvenience, but you don't want others to know all your online activities, such as surfing at work. (In this case there are other logs on the company LAN but you can also bypass the company LAN.)
For each type of data, you can split them into TC drives suitable for backup. Since secrets don't change that often, some drives can be huge. Example, 4.7 GB size for DVD, or some other values customized for your online backup accounts. To backup, you just copy the 4.7 GB encrypted file into a DVD. To read, you just mount the encrypted file as a drive.
For the Firefox profile, a 200 to 500 MB file size is enough, which can be smaller. You can setup automatic backup just like any other files. Though the whole file is copied whenever you use FF. I only backup it up manually when I added new passwords. They are randomly generated, only stored in the FF password manager, and I couldn't recover it if the file get corrupted (or lost the master password for that matter).
You can still do daily incremental backup like ordinary files. But you have to do it when both the source drive and the backup drive is mounted. Once unmounted, they are just ordinary drives containing ordinary files to any application.
TC has one interesting option, to have hidden encryption. You can have two passwords to the same drive, one mounts you the outer files, and the other decrypt the hidden files. I am not sure if that's theoretically possible, as I read about it a while ago as the next big research topic, which is supposed to be difficult. But for ordinary people, if you give them a password, they will believe what they decrypt is all what you have. TC seem to claim that others cannot know the existence of hidden files. It will not be easy, but I'm not sure it's impossible.
You can setup your laptop with whatever password you can create, BIOS, Windows Logon, and even the hard drive. But all are crackable.
KeePass is good, but it's standalone, not integrated with anything. You have to pull your password into the browser forms. It's not bad at all but I have alternatives.
I was using TrueCrypt for file encryption. But it was tedious on a file by file basis. You can use it to create a big encrypted drive too, but I don't trust it enough. And the backup is a problem.
Revisiting TrueCrypt again, I came across encrypting entire operating system, optionally hidden, may have a decoy too. I doubt how TC deal with it. On close look, TC decrypts on the fly, which explains it's capabilities. When you are reading a file, TC doesn't decrypt it into another file, but decrypt a portion of it at a time and hand it over to the application.
I was amazed to see how fast and painless it is to use TC. I encrypt the entire video, actually quite a lot of large video clips, and play it. You don't feel any difference with the encryption, and you don't need to wait for encryption, nor have to deal with which version of the file to keep.
So instead of dealing with passwords, I encrypt the entire profile of firefox, which allows you to specify where your profile should be. So whatever I do on the web is encrypted, history, bookmarks, passwords (now double encrypted), and everything except some extensions may put data outside of the profile directory. If the profile directory is not mounted as a drive, it's just an encrypted file with a code supposed to be unbreakable. When it's mounted, someone need to run some spyware to read the drive where my profile is, or to steal the TC password in memory, if they know I'm using TC. Keyloggers and screen capture spyware won't work because I don't type in passwords anymore.
You can encrypt the entire OS, but I'll settle with using only two different master passwords. One is the personal secrets password and one is the shared secrets password. The only difference is, you don't need to or don't want to give out the personal password even when you drop dead.
There are three types of secrets to encrypt. The first two corresponds with the two type of passwords. Being secrets, the data naturally have to be backup safely. The third type are personal secrets that don't need to be backup. You don't want others to know but you can recover the data in other ways other than backup.
The model of 2 password, 3 types of data is strange, but like bookmark, you can lost it with minor inconvenience, but you don't want others to know all your online activities, such as surfing at work. (In this case there are other logs on the company LAN but you can also bypass the company LAN.)
For each type of data, you can split them into TC drives suitable for backup. Since secrets don't change that often, some drives can be huge. Example, 4.7 GB size for DVD, or some other values customized for your online backup accounts. To backup, you just copy the 4.7 GB encrypted file into a DVD. To read, you just mount the encrypted file as a drive.
For the Firefox profile, a 200 to 500 MB file size is enough, which can be smaller. You can setup automatic backup just like any other files. Though the whole file is copied whenever you use FF. I only backup it up manually when I added new passwords. They are randomly generated, only stored in the FF password manager, and I couldn't recover it if the file get corrupted (or lost the master password for that matter).
You can still do daily incremental backup like ordinary files. But you have to do it when both the source drive and the backup drive is mounted. Once unmounted, they are just ordinary drives containing ordinary files to any application.
TC has one interesting option, to have hidden encryption. You can have two passwords to the same drive, one mounts you the outer files, and the other decrypt the hidden files. I am not sure if that's theoretically possible, as I read about it a while ago as the next big research topic, which is supposed to be difficult. But for ordinary people, if you give them a password, they will believe what they decrypt is all what you have. TC seem to claim that others cannot know the existence of hidden files. It will not be easy, but I'm not sure it's impossible.
How to fix Christmas Lights
When I hanged the Christmas lights early, a section didn't light up. Unlike previous years, there are no apparently faulty bulbs in the section. I searched the web for short cuts and I found it - beepers. Those electric current detectors that you are supposed to use before drilling anything on the walls.
I had one, but unfortunately it also detect metal at an right angle to the current detector. Basically it beeps all the time, with a lot of false positive and false negatives. But since I was well trained on this beeper, it wasn't difficult to find the faulty bulb. It's a lot faster than swapping the bulbs one by one.
Unfortunately, a neighbor's kid shake the lights after I hanged them, and turned off a whole segment. The beeper worked poorly when the lights are in place, because the bulbs aren't far apart enough, and you have little control of their position, such as next to some metals.
Also, as I found out later, when multiple bulbs are loose from their socket, it's a nightmare.
So I took out the good old multimeter. After some thought I found a way to do it, better than swapping bulbs, and better than beepers, unless your beeper is high quality and the light bulbs are not close together.
First, set the meter to >120V (or 240V), wear insulated glove if you need to. Took off the bulb in question from it's socket. Probe one contact in the socket, and probe one prong of the main plug to the whole light chain. There are only 4 possibilities, one will give you a reading if the socket and the chain up to the socket is normal. That's how to find faulty bulbs or lose sockets. You don't need to swap all the 4 possibilities. After you get the reading for a working socket, the probe on the main plug don't need to change, and the other probe just follow the direction of wiring.
You can also do a continuity test instead of a live test, but it's less fun without the bulbs lighting up. I can be more formal about it, but I doubt if there's anything to simplify, and that Christmas is already over.
I had one, but unfortunately it also detect metal at an right angle to the current detector. Basically it beeps all the time, with a lot of false positive and false negatives. But since I was well trained on this beeper, it wasn't difficult to find the faulty bulb. It's a lot faster than swapping the bulbs one by one.
Unfortunately, a neighbor's kid shake the lights after I hanged them, and turned off a whole segment. The beeper worked poorly when the lights are in place, because the bulbs aren't far apart enough, and you have little control of their position, such as next to some metals.
Also, as I found out later, when multiple bulbs are loose from their socket, it's a nightmare.
So I took out the good old multimeter. After some thought I found a way to do it, better than swapping bulbs, and better than beepers, unless your beeper is high quality and the light bulbs are not close together.
First, set the meter to >120V (or 240V), wear insulated glove if you need to. Took off the bulb in question from it's socket. Probe one contact in the socket, and probe one prong of the main plug to the whole light chain. There are only 4 possibilities, one will give you a reading if the socket and the chain up to the socket is normal. That's how to find faulty bulbs or lose sockets. You don't need to swap all the 4 possibilities. After you get the reading for a working socket, the probe on the main plug don't need to change, and the other probe just follow the direction of wiring.
You can also do a continuity test instead of a live test, but it's less fun without the bulbs lighting up. I can be more formal about it, but I doubt if there's anything to simplify, and that Christmas is already over.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Early spring cleaning: videos
What started the early spring cleaning is the real mpeg4 codecs, and the death of analogue TV.
After dragging on for a couple of years, finally the real mpeg4 standard appears as H.264, the video and audio codecs are simply called advanced AVC and AAC, with the container file format mp4. Open source software are freely available. If future players will play only one standard, this is it. AVC is used for Blu-ray so it's future proof. AAC isn't, but used in ipods, so it's not going to go away. Unless you are making sound for movies, there's no point to use the new Dolby Digital standards, even if you can get hold of some software.
DVD will be around for a long time, but there's no point storing video in it. You can store a lot more files on it and play it on the computer, or send it to the digital TV.
It's a joy to to the spring cleaning. Home movies can be 5 times or more compressed than DVD, and 25 times smaller than DV from camcorders. You clean up and have a lot more spaces. I got my 320G hard disk because of the videos. Now I have space to play with a lot of other things, like operating systems and virtual machines.
I still have some valuable home movies in VHS-C tapes!!. They are the best, not because of the format, but they use big lenses back then on big machines. The camcorder broke down a long time ago. A few years after that, I realize that we cannot get back the quality without buying a new but old VHS-C camcorder. There are same version loaded on to VHS tapes, and we still have the VHS-C to VHS adapter that hopefully works.
Surprisingly, I just searched online and found that plenty of VHS-C camcorders still on sale, while I thought digital DV tapes are already obsolete.
Of course there are format conversion shops. Firstly, you shouldn't easily trust them. Historically at busy times such as Christmas, when you send your films to develop, it could be lost forever. And I listened to online forums too much, and I believed that you have to touch up the videos and use manual settings to get the best out of the videos. This is plain wrong for home movies and I should have picked the best format or best solution at the moment rather than waiting for the future.
I have both PAL and NTSC VHS library to covert. I brought a dual standard player for the purpose but other than one or two conversions, it's sitting on the garage. I also have a analog to digital box for capturing the video, but I used it for something else and it broke long ago.
I have a DV camcorder with an analog input, designed for people moving from analog to digital. I never did the conversion seriously because I usually ran out of DV tapes, and I was convinced that the DV standard is bad for converting to DVD directly without some sort of color space compensation. I hope it doesn't break down anytime soon, otherwise I have to buy a useless DV camcorder for the purpose. There used to be PC graphic cards capable of TV capture, which give you twice for the same money. But now it's worthless because analog TV is dead. Also, I never brought any graphics card anymore, all integrated, there's no need to unless you are a true gamer.
Now most of the library in in DV tapes. I didn't know how to deal with it before. Compress to DVD and it would have been playing in blu-ray discs for years to come. But I was let to believe that the conversion need some compensation on the color space. And I was let to believe that noisy home movies will benefit a lot from noise filtering and color adjustment before compression. After a couple of years staying in the garage, I don't believe in the crap anymore. Home movie is home movie, that's little you can do about it, and the quality doesn't matter that much, the content is. So I brought bigger and bigger hard drives, and I load DV tapes into it, because it's cheaper and more convenient than tapes.
The other reason I didn't convert DV is because of interleaving. I don't believe the free interleavers are good enough and I had a hard time picking the right one. Also, I believe interleaved source, if compressed to DVD, will look better in analog TV. On the other hand, I was more like to watch in the computer, where interleaved version is more appropriate, and more future proof. Mpeg4 standard such as Divx and Xvid offers so much more compression, and had stand alone players for it. I was so tempted but it turns out that blu-ray players don't support, only DVD.
I don't care to put clips in DVD anymore or blu-ray for that matter. The only function is to impress kids after their birthday party. I got Sony Scenarist and used it a lot, but all comes to nothing. Even the full features of a DVD is quite coomplex, and the software cost a lot. So I don't bother anymore. A clip is a clip no matter where you see it.
So the target is set. I hope to finish everything before the next decade! Hopefully the PAL & NTSC VHS player doesn't break down, now that they don't make it anymore. Same for my DV camcorder, which plays the DV and converts the VHS too. And I will be watching the price of VHS-C camcorders. If they ever drops down to $100, it's worthwhile to buy one instead of sending the tapes to conversion shops, if the tapes are still working. And if I have the money, the time, and the motivation. Watching time flying by isn't always a good thing.
After dragging on for a couple of years, finally the real mpeg4 standard appears as H.264, the video and audio codecs are simply called advanced AVC and AAC, with the container file format mp4. Open source software are freely available. If future players will play only one standard, this is it. AVC is used for Blu-ray so it's future proof. AAC isn't, but used in ipods, so it's not going to go away. Unless you are making sound for movies, there's no point to use the new Dolby Digital standards, even if you can get hold of some software.
DVD will be around for a long time, but there's no point storing video in it. You can store a lot more files on it and play it on the computer, or send it to the digital TV.
It's a joy to to the spring cleaning. Home movies can be 5 times or more compressed than DVD, and 25 times smaller than DV from camcorders. You clean up and have a lot more spaces. I got my 320G hard disk because of the videos. Now I have space to play with a lot of other things, like operating systems and virtual machines.
I still have some valuable home movies in VHS-C tapes!!. They are the best, not because of the format, but they use big lenses back then on big machines. The camcorder broke down a long time ago. A few years after that, I realize that we cannot get back the quality without buying a new but old VHS-C camcorder. There are same version loaded on to VHS tapes, and we still have the VHS-C to VHS adapter that hopefully works.
Surprisingly, I just searched online and found that plenty of VHS-C camcorders still on sale, while I thought digital DV tapes are already obsolete.
Of course there are format conversion shops. Firstly, you shouldn't easily trust them. Historically at busy times such as Christmas, when you send your films to develop, it could be lost forever. And I listened to online forums too much, and I believed that you have to touch up the videos and use manual settings to get the best out of the videos. This is plain wrong for home movies and I should have picked the best format or best solution at the moment rather than waiting for the future.
I have both PAL and NTSC VHS library to covert. I brought a dual standard player for the purpose but other than one or two conversions, it's sitting on the garage. I also have a analog to digital box for capturing the video, but I used it for something else and it broke long ago.
I have a DV camcorder with an analog input, designed for people moving from analog to digital. I never did the conversion seriously because I usually ran out of DV tapes, and I was convinced that the DV standard is bad for converting to DVD directly without some sort of color space compensation. I hope it doesn't break down anytime soon, otherwise I have to buy a useless DV camcorder for the purpose. There used to be PC graphic cards capable of TV capture, which give you twice for the same money. But now it's worthless because analog TV is dead. Also, I never brought any graphics card anymore, all integrated, there's no need to unless you are a true gamer.
Now most of the library in in DV tapes. I didn't know how to deal with it before. Compress to DVD and it would have been playing in blu-ray discs for years to come. But I was let to believe that the conversion need some compensation on the color space. And I was let to believe that noisy home movies will benefit a lot from noise filtering and color adjustment before compression. After a couple of years staying in the garage, I don't believe in the crap anymore. Home movie is home movie, that's little you can do about it, and the quality doesn't matter that much, the content is. So I brought bigger and bigger hard drives, and I load DV tapes into it, because it's cheaper and more convenient than tapes.
The other reason I didn't convert DV is because of interleaving. I don't believe the free interleavers are good enough and I had a hard time picking the right one. Also, I believe interleaved source, if compressed to DVD, will look better in analog TV. On the other hand, I was more like to watch in the computer, where interleaved version is more appropriate, and more future proof. Mpeg4 standard such as Divx and Xvid offers so much more compression, and had stand alone players for it. I was so tempted but it turns out that blu-ray players don't support, only DVD.
I don't care to put clips in DVD anymore or blu-ray for that matter. The only function is to impress kids after their birthday party. I got Sony Scenarist and used it a lot, but all comes to nothing. Even the full features of a DVD is quite coomplex, and the software cost a lot. So I don't bother anymore. A clip is a clip no matter where you see it.
So the target is set. I hope to finish everything before the next decade! Hopefully the PAL & NTSC VHS player doesn't break down, now that they don't make it anymore. Same for my DV camcorder, which plays the DV and converts the VHS too. And I will be watching the price of VHS-C camcorders. If they ever drops down to $100, it's worthwhile to buy one instead of sending the tapes to conversion shops, if the tapes are still working. And if I have the money, the time, and the motivation. Watching time flying by isn't always a good thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)