Crystal Clear Systems

09/01/2023

Our old doorbell, which is a wireless one, seems to be losing its chime as we are finding it increasingly difficult to hear (and it's not an age thing, as my twenty-something offspring have also noticed it!) so I was recently examining the options for an alternative, and considering for the first time a camera-based solution.

This brand features prominently, and seems to be the main alternative to the Ring products, so it was a timely coincidence that this article came to my attention.

Eufy camera users also learned that their camera streams can be accessed remotely using VLC without encryption or authentication.

26/07/2021

Hacker time!

Not really, as this only works for networks that you are legitimately logged on to, but a useful tip if you forget your wifi password, on a Windows machine anyway.

Open a Command Prompt (press Windows Key + R to open the run window, and then type "cmd") - this will give you a good old-fashioned command prompt, which at one time was all we had to work with!

At the prompt type this:

netsh wlan show profile MYNETWORK key=clear

obviously replacing MYNETWORK with whatever your wifi network is called. Hit Enter, and halfway down the response under Security Settings, an element called Key Content ought to give you your password.

Enjoy!

16/07/2021

This is quite fun. A lot of people are already using various remote desktop approaches to access their business data, so this (presumably an expansion of the existing Azure Virtual Machine logic) is likely to be a welcome addition to the armoury!

Microsoft has announced a new cloud PC technology where users stream their PC to any device.

23/02/2021

A while back you may recall a bit of a fuss over a government spreadsheet that failed to transfer some Covid testing data from A to B, and the rumour was that it was because of an out-of-date version of Excel limiting the amount of data to some 65000 rows instead of the current million or so.

Interestingly, a client of mine has just had the exact same problem, which manifested itself as a number of customer complaints following the sending out of essentially blank emails notifying said customers of some information.

Having exhausted all the normal avenues in trying to determine why this data had failed to turn up as expected, we looked at the spreadsheet being created by a legacy application designed to extract it from the source ready for import into the destination.

Sure enough, one of the tabs was "full to the brim" - 65000+ rows.

What only a few of the news stories last year pointed out was that the issue is not the version of Excel you are currently using (these guys are on the latest Office 365 version), but the "format" of spreadsheet created by a third-party application.

So if I create a *.xls file, it will be the old Office 2003 format, but if I create a *.xlsx file it will be the latest format. Most export routines use various libraries that create the appropriate format, so an "old" format written to a "new" Excel version will be limited to the 65000 rows.

It's important, therefore, not only to ensure that your software versions are up to date, but also that any legacy applications are also kept in line. It's fairly common for people to export comma-delimited text files as "CSV" documents, and then to open them in Excel, running the risk of damaging the formatting if they then save it.

This capacity issue adds a new level of excitement, but now it is one that we will be looking out for much earlier in the process of diagnosing an issue!

(Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash)

18/02/2021

Today's geeky treat is the "Set Theory Clock" situated in Berlin (where it is better known as the Mengenlehreuhr) - it dates from 1975.

The idea is that the top row of light indicate multiples of five hours, and the second row individual hours, so in this case the time reads 11.

The same applies to the third and fourth rows - first minutes in multiples of five, and then single minutes, so this reads 41.

So, it's 11:41 - takes a moment to work it out, a bit like translating Roman numerals, but it's quite fun :)

13/02/2021

I've noticed a marked increase in spam emails via web-based contact forms. Today (via a third-party contact form I have forwarded to me) I have received an attractive offer to "send business offer utterly legal" :)

These guys are using contact forms to send scams or marketing literature (I suspect largely the former) and claim to be charging $49 to send a million.

If you are getting a lot of these, consider implementing a simple process to make it harder for bots to submit to your forms. Google ReCAPTCHA is obviously a key method, but there are other approaches - one I quite like is a field where you can enter the answer to a simple randomly generated sum like "2 + 3" - if the answer is missing or incorrect the form submission will fail.

A lot of these emails are increasingly being sent by real people, of course, working at what must be a dismal hourly rate in some sweat shop. They (being human even if they are not being treated that way) are able to bypass these checks, so you can't do much about those except with content filtering.

However, in this day and age, don't just stick a contact form on your website with no protection against these jokers.

(Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash)