Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

Computer Security Series: Part 3

So now you’ve failed Part 1 or Part 2 of this security series and you have a virus. What should you do? The best thing is to stop everything. Turn off the machine and call your favorite geek. Offer them cookies and ask nicely. Remember that the virus warning might be fake and there’s nothing wrong with your computer.

If it’s legit and your computer is actually infected, your favorite geek is going to ask two things:

  1. Do you have all your data backed up? Good grief people, the answer better be a resounding yes. I’ve blogged about this so much. Here’s the test to see how good your backups are: if I walk into your house, throw your computer out into the street and drive over it, what is your reaction? If you’re only mad because of the money loss then you have good backups. If you start crying because of all the pictures and memories that you’ve lost, then YOU NEED TO BACK UP NOW. There’s no excuse for it. Go to http://www.crashplan.com and sign up. It’s stupid simple, nearly free and it will protect your precious memories without you having to think about it.
  2. Do you have the discs to reinstall all your software? Take all those discs that came with your computer and throw them in a bag for safe keeping. If you buy physical software, add the discs to that bag. If you buy software on the Internet, save a copy of it somewhere (not on your computer) to be reused later. Don’t forget to keep all the product keys with the discs too. If you’ve lost the product keys to Windows or Office, check out Magic Jelly Bean (or this open source version). It’s a nifty tool that helped me out recently.

They want to know these answers because the best way to remove a virus is to wipe the computer and start over. The time it takes to do that will almost certainly be less than the time it takes to try to surgically remove the virus. And when it’s all over, wiping the computer is the only way to make sure the virus is really gone.

benmartens March 10, 2014 Geek

Computer Security Series: Part 2

Part 1 covered attacks through your browser. Part is is about attacks via email. We just had a mandatory training for all employees at work because somebody had this happen to them on a work machine and it created a ton of trouble. You really have to be on the lookout.

The first rule is to never click any link that you get in an email. If you always follow that rule, you are extremely unlikely to have any problems.

Ok, we both know that rule will be broken. So what should you think about before clicking on a link in an email?

  1. Assume it’s a scam, a virus, or both.
  2. Are you expecting to receive a link from the sender? Did your buddy call up and say “hey I have this hilarious YouTube video, I’ll send you a link”? If so then you’re probably good to go.
  3. Does it look like something the sender would normally send you? Did your relative who normally writes you long text-only emails suddenly send you an email that only has a single link in it? Just leave it alone. Wait until you know that it’s something they really sent you before you click it.
  4. Is some entity like PayPal or your bank telling you that you need to view something on their website? I NEVER click links like this even if I’m completely convinced they are fake. The penalties for being wrong are too great. If my bank says I have an important message about my account security or PayPal says I need to adjust my account settings, I don’t click on the link. Instead, I open up a browser and manually type in the address for my bank. If it’s a legit message, it will also show up somewhere in my account on their site. This is an important guideline to follow with phone calls too. If I ever get someone asking for any personal information, red flags go off. For example, when my credit card company called and said my card had been stolen, they started asking for my social security number, etc to verify some things. I politely asked for the caller’s name and extension, hung up, called the number on the back of my credit card and got back to talking to that same person. That convinced me he was legit and I continued. It’s too easy to scam people this way! I’ve caught people in the act like this too. Just the other day I had someone calling to collect money for the “King County Police” (which is an imaginary org) so I asked for his name and badge number so I could call him back to verify he was legit. It was a scam and it was funny to hear him squirm. (I later reported it to the sheriff’s office though it probably doesn’t do much good.)

When in doubt, don’t open a link. If you have to open a link, assume it’s a scam or virus and don’t open the link. If you REALLY have to open the link, see if you can get to that site without clicking on the link. And if you REALLY REALLY have to click the link, make sure that the sender actually intended to send it to you.

Only the paranoid survive. Everyone else gets a virus.

benmartens March 7, 2014 Geek

Computer Security Series: Part 1

A laptop recently landed on my desk full of some lovely viruses. I won’t say who it was, but really, you shouldn’t be too embarrassed. These virus writers are good at what they do and it’s easy to be tricked. As I fixed up the laptop, I thought about a short series of blog posts that might be of interest to many of you readers, not just the household that got hacked. I’ll cover how virus writers try to get you through your browser, how they attack via email, and then what to do after you suspect you’ve been hacked.

The most common viruses get onto your machine because you clicked something. It’s pretty difficult to have a computer sitting idle with no human in front of it and get a virus. We are the weakest link. So when hackers try to attack you via websites, they’re going to present you with something that is out of the ordinary, but just plausible enough that you’ll click on it. These popups might seem fairly legit. Here’s an example:

A geek will look at this and know it’s fake, but to the general populace, this seems like something serious that should be fixed by clicking Accept and Install. How can you tell it’s fake? That’s tricky but some basic ways are that this installation box is inside of a browser window. That’s your first red flag. What video player is it trying to update? If it’s going to install something, it should be pretty specific. If you have questions you could take that product name and search for it.

But really the best way to defend against this type of thing is to know the legitimate ways you’ll be warned about this type of thing and then be incredibly suspicious of anything that tells you to install something or “click here to fix your computer.” These days, nearly everything that is needed to fix your computer happens automatically in the background via Windows Update. You might see some notifications from Microsoft Security Essentials when you haven’t run a scan in a while but that’s about it.

You should also have Windows User Account Control enabled. Whenever a program tries to install on your machine or access protected areas of the operating system, it will pop up a warning dialog that asks if you’re sure you know what’s going on. Unfortunately if you believed something like the image above then this probably won’t stop you, but it’s a good backstop to really think about what you’re doing.

So if you get a popup that says you have a virus or that is asking you to install something unexpected, just stop. It’s probably a lie, but just in case it’s legitimate and Microsoft Security Essentials is trying to save you, snap a photo with your phone and email it to your favorite geek. Ask them if it’s legit and what you should click. You might save yourself a lot of trouble.

benmartens March 5, 2014 Geek

Power BI

My project at work is called Power Query for Excel. We released our first version last summer and now our second version is available as part of a larger offering called “Power BI for Office 365.” BI stands for Business Intelligence. The offering includes a bunch of tools that help you make sense of your data, create nice reports and then share them out with your colleagues. This marks the first time that something I’ve worked on at Microsoft is available for purchase!

But never fear home users, while the collaboration and sharing features require payment but you can use some of the pieces for free. For example, you can download the latest version of Power Query from the Microsoft download center.

It’s exciting to see all our hard work available for public use and we love getting feedback! Please use the smile/frown buttons on the Power Query tab in Excel or leave feedback in the Power Query forum (or one of the other Power BI component forums.)

The marketing department put together a nice Power BI overview video. The Power Query specific part is in the “Discover” section around the 36 second mark.

benmartens February 18, 2014 Geek

MailStore

I don’t know about you, but I’m an email packrat. Steve Gibson, the security genius behind grc.com, recommended mailstore.com and I’ve been really impressed with it so far. It runs locally, sucks in mail basically any source you might have (online mail, local Outlook, Exchange, etc), removes duplicates and then indexes it all for crazy fast searches. I love having everything in this nice clean searchable format across all my various accounts through the years. It’s so much cleaner than my old mess of saved PST files and multiple web mail accounts. This also lets me delete all my old email from GMail and Hotmail. There’s no longer a compelling reason for me to let them see all my old data.

I’m still dusting off some old email archives and finding more lost messages, but right now I have 110,000 messages in this database and it only takes up 3.6GB (and that includes attachments.) Searches return results almost instantly, and if for some reason I don’t want to keep using this program, there are easy options for exporting to a wide variety of locations and formats. The only complaint I have is that it can’t detect duplicates that are loaded from the same source. So if I have a piece of mail that gets loaded from GMail and also from my Outlook cache, it will show up twice.

 

They have a paid corporate version but there is also a version that is free for personal use. There are probably other solutions out there, but I’m loving this one and I give it two thumbs up!

benmartens February 7, 2014 Geek

Football Squares With Power Query

Squares is a popular game when you get a big group of people to watch football. It’s a game of chance where all the money that goes in is redistributed to the attendees. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, you can find lots of websites like this one with the basic rules.

After people pick their squares, the paper ends up getting passed around all over the place as people wonder if they are in line to win some money. What happens if Team A kicks a field goal? Ooo I’ll win if Team B scores a touchdown before the end of the quarter!

This year I’m going to geek it up a bit (surprise surprise) and do this with Power Query. People will put their names into a grid inside Excel and then we’ll randomly assign 0-9 to each row and column. From there, the magic of Power Query takes over. Here are the basics of how the document is set up:

  1. The table where people enter their picks is loaded into the Power Query flow with the “From Table” operation.
  2. The current score is grabbed with “From Web” and looks at one of the many pages will report the current score. That score is then modded to contain only the final digit in the score for each team.
  3. Another query then takes those score digits and looks up the corresponding value in the table of picks. That resulting value is the name of the person who will win if the score doesn’t change.
  4. The current score table also contains some extra columns that calculate the last digit of the score if either team scores a field goal or a touchdown. I turned the query in step 3 into a function and then called that function with each possible scoring combination.

The end result looks like this. Simply hitting the Refresh button in Excel will refresh the green table showing who is current in line for some money and who might win if various things happen in the game.

benmartens January 31, 2014 Geek, Sports

Default To Most Recent Facebook Stories

I’m sure Facebook has some business reason for forcing me to view my news feed in the “Top Stories” order, but it’s really frustrating to me. I don’t care about what they think are the top stories. I just want to see things in the order they happened. Thankfully they change the URL when you change your sort order, so if you want to always view your news feed in “Most Recent” order, change your bookmark to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr.

benmartens January 14, 2014 Geek

Converting DC To AC

[UPDATE] A couple days after I declared success on this project, the village piece stopped lighting up even when I put batteries back in it. If any of you electrical wizards out there can tell me what I did wrong, I would love to know. Or maybe it’s just some crazy coincidence that both bulbs burned out at the same time mere days after I changed the power source. Occam’s Razor disagrees with that theory. I’ve left the post as it was originally written so you can debug it for me (and laugh at my feeling of success.)

Tyla always sets up our Thomas Kinkaide Christmas village as part of the decorations. Just about every piece has a plug so it all goes into a power strip which, this year, we can control with a remote. But there were two pieces that ran on batteries and thus had separate switches. This year I set out to convert them to use power from the wall just like the rest of the pieces.

The first piece I tried were the street lights. They took two batteries. I purchased an adjustable power adapter, set it to 3V, touched the wires to the right places and POOF. I blew out the lights. I still don’t know what happened because I had tried quite a few things before I realized the lights were broken, but I think I might have hooked up the power while the batteries were also inserted resulting in 6 volts to the lights. Oops. I immediately went online and purchased replacement streetlights. They’re from a different village set but look fine in our set. This new set was sold with a power adapter so I had no problems there.

The second village piece was a little skating rink. Now it should be noted that there’s only one place to buy pieces for this village set (The Bradford Exchange.) They’re extremely annoying to deal with. Anything you order takes at least a month to arrive, most pieces are limited editions, and you often have to sign up for a set of pieces that arrive installments just to get the one you want. The net effect is that if destroyed this village piece, there was pretty much no way to replace it. I was appropriately nervous given the broken streetlights staring at me from the trash can.

I measured the voltage of the adjustable wall wart and even though I had it set to 3V, it said 3.2V. For most projects, I would have just tried that to see if it worked, but I decided to learn something new and build a circuit to knock the voltage down to something more like 2.6 or 2.7V which is what two lightly used AAs would produce.

To that end, I purchased an LM317 adjustable voltage regular and dug out the rest of my electronics parts. After watching some YouTube videos and lots of trial and error, I ended up with a simple circuit that spit out 2.72V. Perfect!

The next task was to transfer this off the breadboard and solder the connections. I made everything nice and neat with shrink wrap and a small box to hold the voltage regular and it’s heat sink. (I added a heat sink after taking the picture above.) I used red and black wires to help me remember positive and negative voltage, but it dawned on me later that I should have used white so it was easier to hide under the fake snow. The wire was twisted using a trick I learned from Ben Heck: clamp down the wires on one end and stick the other ends in your power drill. Voila! I also added a plug near the village piece for easy setup, takedown and storage.

The last piece of the puzzle was connecting the wires to the terminals where the batteries would normally go. I could have soldered them on, but I was trying to modify the village piece as little as possible. So instead of anything permanent, I created wooden batteries! I cut 1/2” dowels, drilled pilot holes in each end, and attached screws. The first battery got the positive and negative leads from the plug attached to its ends. The second battery just has a wire running between the two ends to transfer the power. Now I have removable “batteries” and I suppose I could use this same setup to power other 3V battery devices.

It was pretty nerve-wracking the first time I tried it (after measuring the voltage a hundred times), but everything works! I was able to turn the wall wart down to 4.5V and still get 2.7V out of the voltage regulator. The heat sink is doing it’s job and the box has a very tiny bit of extra warmth but nothing anywhere near dangerous. Here’s what the finished product looks like with the light inside the cocoa stand and the large pine tree:

If we get any more battery powered pieces, I should be able to add a couple more leads off of this same voltage regulator, make some more wooden batteries, and be done pretty quickly.

benmartens December 27, 2013 Geek, Projects

Quick Install

It had been a while since I rebuilt my computer so I decided to do it over Thanksgiving break. I was amazed at how quickly it went! Windows 8.1 installed off a USB key in the blink of an eye. I probably could have used the reset functionality built into Windows 8 but I really wanted to do a bare bones completely clean install. Windows 8.1 remembers pretty much every customization I did to the machine and even all of the apps that I had downloaded from the Windows Store. Office and a few other desktop apps required manual install, but Office 2013 is takes literally a couple minutes to install.

I also gave Ninite a try for the first time. It’s free to use and it streamlines the install of some of the most popular apps. Put a check next to whatever you want to install (Chrome, 7-Zip, Skype, Notepad++, ImgBurn, Steam, etc) and it will install them with default settings and tell you when it’s done. It saves so much mindless clicking!

The final thing that made the reinstall so quick and painless is that all of my files are backed up in the cloud. So I didn’t think twice before formatting my hard drive. I knew if I had forgotten some important files, I could quickly restore them from a backup.

I remember when a task like this used to take the whole weekend or more. This time I fired it off before going to bed, clicked a few buttons in the morning, and I was pretty much done!

benmartens December 12, 2013 Geek, Links

Free Apps Retrospective

I have about a dozen Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store apps. They’re all paid apps, mostly because I’m too lazy to mess around with advertising and it’s nice to get a little money, even if it’s just a few bucks, for my hobby. CascadeSkier makes up about 90% of all my downloads, but even that one isn’t huge. I decided to open the kimono a bit and share the results of a recent experiment where I offered both apps for free for three days.

Windows 8 Store
This version has been out since 2012 and as of today I have 1574 downloads. This app offers a free trial for a couple days and then you have to pay $1.99 to continue using it. During the period where the app was free, I got 120 downloads so that’s a pretty good chunk considering I only have 1500 total downloads. The really interesting part is that after the free period ended, I saw another peak of about 20-30 downloads and about a third of those people bought the app. We’re not talking huge money here, but it does appear that some of the people who downloaded the app for free convinced acquaintances to buy it later.

One random stat unrelated to the free trial: over the last 12 months, 1 out of every 7 people who view the app in the store download it. 27% of those people buy the app and 75% of those people buy it without even attempting the trial.

Windows Phone
The Windows Phone app has been out since 2010 and it has 1758 downloads. During the free period I got 200 downloads but there was no follow-on peak of paid downloads.

This was an interesting experiment. In reality I probably should have done this a long time ago and maybe I’ll do it again in the future. The reviews show that pretty much anybody who uses the app loves it. So that implies that the more people that are using the app, the more people will hear about it. The flip side of this argument is that I target a very small customer base. This app only applies to skiers and snowboarders who live in Washington or the Portland area and who use Windows Phone or run apps from the Windows 8 Store. I often wonder how close I am to saturating that market.

benmartens December 6, 2013 Geek