A novel way of managing multiple emails/accounts in one for gaming

I became addicted to a mobile game. The game allowed one account per email address but it was common practice for players to have 5-20 accounts. This can quickly become a pain to deal with if the player creates a separate email for every account. There are two potential solutions by using GMail. Plus addressing and dots. Both have their downsides but I believe I found a workable and reliable solution.


Plus Adressing


Plus addressing is a GMail feature where you can add a + (plus) after the account name and any tag you wish. For example if I have a game account which specializes in food I could use the following: myemail+food@gmail.com. The benefit is it creates an infinite amount of email aliases each one with a meaningful tag. There are two downsides though. Some systems do not accept the plus sign in an email address. Worse yet, some systems partially support the plus sign or stop supporting the plus sign after you own the account. For example, I gave Best Buy myemail+bb@gmail.com. This allows me to identify email from Best Buy. However Best Buy has been spamming me too much. I went to unsubscribe and the mailing list will not accept my email address as an input. So the registration page has different email checks than the mailing list. One day Best Buy may make their login page address check match the mailing list address check and I would be locked out completely. That is a huge risk. Lastly there is a risk that you forget which tag you used for an account.... maybe I used myemail+farm@gmail.com instead of +food?


Dot Addressing


Dot addressing is a GMail feature where dots or periods are completely ignored in the account name. This means if your email is first.last@gmail.com, its the same as firstlast@gmail.com and fi.rstlas.t@gmail.com. Dots do not have the acceptance problem with other email systems like Plus addressing has. It is more universal. However, remembering where you placed the dot is hard. And remembering which dot placements you have already used is hard too.


The Novel Solution


The down side to dot addressing was discussed above. The solution I created helps solve the problem and makes it somewhat easier. It is very common in the games I play to use names like Farm 1, Farm 2, Farm 3, etc for the extra accounts. So the solution is to use binary dot addressing to handle accounts. In binary there are Ones, Twos, Fours, Eights, Sixteens, Thirty Twos, etc places. We shall also assume that we will never start or end an email address with a dot. So what email shall we use? How about our initials and a representation for the binary places O,T,F,E,S,T. I actually decided to drop thirty twos place so I don't have any repetition. Perhaps this is an email I would use flotfes@gmail.com. Placing a dot before the proper character would tell me to add that number (1). No dot would mean don't add the number (0). My main game account would be the original address, but I would use fl.otfes@gmail.com for Farm 1. The dot before the 'O' means 1. flo.tfes@gmail.com for Farm 2, fl.o.tfes@gmail.com for Farm 3. The dot before the 'O' means 1 and the dot before 'T' means 2, 1+2 =3. The system isn't perfect but I can always figure out which email address went to which account and I can easily handle over 30 dummy game accounts with only a 6 letter email address.


Good luck and enjoy!

AirPrint Server with Ubuntu - The easy way

With an AirPrint enabled printer, you can easily print over wifi from your Iphone, Ipad, and Ipod Touch.

If you don't have a printer, or your printer is on its last leg, the easy way is to buy a $69 HP Wifi Printer, Scanner, and Fax.


However, many of us like our printers and don't want to buy another. So here is the real easy way to make your old printer AirPrint compatible.

You need to have:

• Ubuntu installed (10.10 was tested)
• The printer working in ubuntu. Usually not difficult, but it is beyond the scope of this blog post.

Steps:

Copy and paste this line into the terminal. You can find the terminal by clicking applications, accessories, terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hughescih/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install airprint-daemon

This will ask for your password to continue. After entering the password, you will see hundreds of lines fly by.
Finally open your printing manager by clicking System, Administration, Printing
Open the printer server settings by clicking Server, Settings
Check the box for 'Publish shared printers connected to this system'
Check the box for 'Allow printing from the Internet'
Click Ok.

Thats it. You can now print from your iphone, etc.

This is based on the blog post here: http://gtk-apps.org/content/show.php/Apple+AirPrint+Support+for+Ubuntu?content=136756

Major surgery! My hack job on my network switch to make my life better

My switch has always been noisy. However starting yesterday it has been ridiculously loud thanks to an aging fan.

I pulled the switch off the wall and tore it apart to dig out the fan and dust everything off. Turns out I only had one fan the right size but it was obviously not powerful enough for the job. My other choice was to step up to a fan I keep stocked... the standard 80mm case fan.

I grabbed my trusty drill bit from back in the days where I would put 80mm and 120mm fans on the side of my case (they didn't come on the side back in those days.) and got to work.

I made sure I found a spot on the switch cover where I would have enough clearance with the internal components to fit the new fan. Then I got a punch and hammer to make an indent for my drill bit.

Ouch. As soon as the inner drill bit made it through the amazingly thick sheet metal, the bit grabbed and spun it right out of my hand cutting me in the process. I'll live, thanks for the concern.

Well it took a few minutes of drilling to get the bit all the way though, then I took fan grill (I stock them too) and used that to mark the location of the screw holes. Using the punch once more I made my indents, then drilled all the holes. The holes can be bigger than the screws if desired because the fan grill will actually be there to hold the screw.

Finally I put the fan and grill in place, had to adjust the wiring order on the fan plug (the old plug was reversed in polarity) hooked it all back up and tried it out. Now the switch is quieter than ever before!

I know a few potential issues with what I did. 

• The airflow will not be identical to the old fan but I did close off the old fan hole with clear tape to try to keep it close to original. A baffle inside the switch could be easily constructed with duct tape to direct the air in the exact same path it had before but I think this is close enough.

• The old fan was 5 volts and the case fan is 12 volts. From what little I understand this is not an issue, the fan will just turn slower than if it had all 12 volts.

• The old fan was .24a @ 5 volts. The new fan is .13a @ 12 volts. I'm not sure what the final draw is though since the new fan isn't actually running at 12 volts. I'm more concerned about startup current.

• Finally I know a larger fan moves more air at less rotations but I have no way of knowing if I am moving more or less air than before. I don't want to over heat.

That's all folks. And yes my network is a mess. I sure don't have time to clean that up.

1024bit RSA cracked in 100 hours. What is coming next?

Here is a very technical read on the attack used on RSA http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~valeria/research/publications/DATE10RSA.pdf. I made it about half way though, see how far you can go... lol. Anyways the summary is by messing with the voltage supply they are able to introduce single bit errors into the RSA algorithm, then they can take these bad outputs and analyze them to reveal the secret key.

They are able to do this without modifying or accessing the internal system components. So in effect the attack leaves no signs of tampering. They performed this particular attack against linux and OpenSSL.

WOW. Just remember security isn't about how strong your front door is.

Two ways to find out who is selling your info.

Gmail has two features which will allow you to monitor who is selling your information. Nearly everyday I find a site that requires registration and it gets annoying. More annoying is revealing my email address to these sites. I used to use multiple addresses but it became annoying to check all of them. So here are two tips for giving out multiple email addresses via Gmail. These addresses can be later filtered if they become too spammy.

Plus Addressing
I've seen this one mentioned alot. Plus addressing allows you to append anything you want to your email address by using a plus sign. So if my name is john@gmail.com, I can sign up to a site with john+somesite@gmail.com. The plus sign is a valid email character. Unfortunately many site registration forms don't allow it. However this is the first thing I try to do every time. If I start getting spam from other companys to john+somesite@gmail.com, then I know who sold me and I can filter that address from going to my inbox.

Dot Addressing
Not as flexible as plus addressing and harder to know which site sold you. However this can be a great way to filter spam. Gmail ignores periods (.) in email addresses. You can't start or end your address with a period and you can't have two in a row, but you can have as many as you want. The best part about this method is I have yet to find a site that won't accept a period in an address. So jo.hn@gmail.com is valid, jo.h.n@gmail.com is valid as well. Obviously longer email addresses have more choice. You are limited here but I would suggest grouping sites by level of trust. So some site you randomly visit that you feel you must sign up for to post a comment and you know you will never be back, put the period in the first position, j.ohn@gmail.com. A site you plan to use all the time would perhaps get a period in the last position. Or whatever you decide. If you have a 6 character email address you have 31 alternates available. An 8 character email address has 256, but then with so many choices you will need a way to keep track. I would just use three or four at a time and change them as they start getting abused.

Both of these schemes work out of the box with gmail, though the dot technique does not work for gmail for your domain addresses. There is no pre-registering the addresses you plan to use. Go ahead, mail something to yourself at some random plus address. Keep in mind there is a maximum length to an email address, so don't go crazy. Other email providers allow plus addressing or other choices as well. You can get more specifics here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address

Jailbreaking the Iphone

I love my iPhone and the last thing I thought I would do would be to Jailbreak the iPhone. I wasn't even sure what it really meant. However my computer lost my itunes library for the second time in a row which left me totally unprepared without any kind of backup (it's a long story). I am so tired of rebuilding my itunes library and fiddling with the stuff that would be so much easier without all this 'protection'. I'm certain I have lost several games and music purchases. But what really gets me is loosing my app data. All those wasted hours on games with accomplishments I'm certain I will not be able to do again are very important to me. Ohh yeah, I've had to fill in data a couple of times into mSecure and I sure don't want to do that again either.

Well it turns out there is an easy way to backup your app data. But it's only available in Jailbreak land. It's called Chronos. Why apple doesn't provide some means of backing up just app data is beyond me. A full restore can be destructive to certain things when all you need is to backup your app data, sync with a new itunes library, and restore app data. There are other great improvements available for Jailbroken iphones which I may explore in a future post.

The amazing thing for Jail Breaking the iphone is it is surprisingly easy and very low risk. Simply download the utility. Plug in your Iphone, and click one button. As far as risk, Jailbreaking doesn't modify the phone, it just gives you a means to install new applications. The applications you choose to install would bear the risk, much like installing applications on your computer. In the worse case scenario, you would have to restore the iPhone, but very few have had that issue.

If you want to learn more, post a comment and I'll try to write about it.