Mar 8, 2017
TODAY!
Claim Misplaced Fund from the California State Controller– (Check URL Carefully) but
WATCH FOR SCAMS! .. Usually done state by state but use
Caution Throughout! Other States
Hey Look– POWERPOINT (.pptx) files can be taken to bits! They are actually ZIP files,
so rename them that way (Slideshow.pptx -> Slideshow.zip) & open ’em up with the likes of free IZARC (Windows) to extract all that lovely Content from the Archive
TRAVEL! Yea!!
Icelandic Airlines? WOW! !s that Low Cost? Or Not.. Actual Cost of Living? accomodations: AirBNB? Couchsurfing? Sleep inthe jungle- it’s free. Further north like oh say Iceland… not so easy… Then: Is the Airline Trustworthy? Remeber ICEBANK?
Home Automation & the Woes of the Internet of Things— Internet connected Gadgets with backdoors and schemy schemes. How about going Open Source? Strictly Hackers!
Superwonderful YOuTube Documentaries about the Apollo 11 computers and here about Linux Opensource
Additional notes
Notifications of new show notes and edits are tweeted at: twitter.com/ddhart.
– They’re tagged with #Zentech.
– When what’s said is unclear to me (or I’m unfamiliar with a topic) I tend to quote (” “) verbatim.
– Editor’s comments are delimited by < >
For a couple of months, the audio of today’s show is here. Recent shows are here.
Both Paul & Glenn were in the studio today.
A link at the top of this page goes to a California government page where, if you enter your name, it will tell you if you have unclaimed property.
If you’re going to use the site, Glenn suggested entering your name in various ways — 1st name then last name, last name then 1st name, with or without middle initial, etc.
Glenn also mentioned a couple other websites where you might find forgotten or missing assets — unclaimed.org and missingmoney.com.
Paul cautioned listeners about fake websites, saying you can be more (but not entirely) confident about a website if the address ends in .gov. “Even having a secure certificate, that you can click up on the left, even having that secure certificate is not an absolute guaranty you are at the right place.”
Using the website, Glenn said he found $20 of a rebate he never received. Paul figured the state will hold on to unclaimed property for 6 or 7 years before it goes into the general fund.
Paul had a couple of other warnings. Don’t enter any personal information unless you’re sure you’re on the right site. There no need for a third party to get involved to reclaim the property.
Glenn told of a time he had an inheritance coming from a cousin. The information made it into the media and some companies got in touch with him saying they could help claim the inheritance for a 25% to 35% cut of the proceeds. Glenn contacted the a county office that handles these situations and got a resolution without the help of a third party.
Paul said that when something goes to probate it’s supposed to be published. When you’re contacted by someone offering to help you, assume it is a scam and don’t give away any personal information. Take the time to track down the sources of the information.
You can email the guys with your questions at any time using the address zen at kvmr dot org.
Paul said he added unclaimedmoney.org to the notes above <I don’t see it there>. One of the purported government sites Paul saw was virginiagovernment.org and he said he doesn’t trust that address. Glenn added that state websites that don’t end in .gov should be suspected. An address may have .gov in it, but if there is anything after that (like xxx.gov.org) you may be dealing with a scam site.
Paul said that later versions of Microsoft Word or Powerpoint use the file extensions .docx & .pptx, which are a modified XML format. Paul looked at the raw data in a .pptx file and found it started with the letters ‘PK’. That reminded him of a .zip file, which also begins with ‘PK’. So, he renamed a .pptx file to .zip and had Windows open as if it were a .zip file. To his surprise, he found all of the components (the text, graphics, movies, etc.) that make up the Powerpoint file. You can try the same thing with .docx files. Paul said the utility Izarc enhances your Windows machine “to do more things with more archives.” <The link to it is at the top of this page>.
Related to this are files resulting from pictures that you take with a phone. They will have exif data inside. The data will contain such info as the latitude & longitude of where the pictures was taken. Usually, you can change the phone settings to exclude this extra data from pictures you take.
Glen threw out the quote “oh, I wasn’t naked. I had the radio on”. He asked listeners to call if they know who said it. The answer is at the bottom of this page.
The guys talked about budget airlines. Glenn mentioned an airfare he saw for $65 from a out-of-the-way airfield in New York to Edinburgh. Paul found that the Icelandic airline named Wow has cheap fares. <Link at the top of this page>. The airfare Paul saw to Iceland restricted your baggage to 1 bag that you have to carry and must be smaller than what you can stuff into the overhead bin.
And he warned that nothing is cheap in Iceland. The cost of living is high, which Paul found from another website, which gives you the cost of living in every country in the world. <Link at the top of this page>
Paul mentioned a couchsurfing website that works by referral of both guests and hosts. <Link at the top of this page>. Similar to AirBNB, the idea is to put up travelers for a short time to avoid the cost of more traditional accommodations such as hotels.
Paul said that though HDMI cables are all the same type, DVI comes in different flavors. Be careful to get the right kind when you order one online. Some current displays are 2HD, which require cables to carry 4 times the data rate of HD. Some DVI cables may not handle the higher rate.
Glenn updated us on the Mac Mini he bought recently. As mentioned on the on 2-8-17 show, he found out the RAM was not upgradable. He exchanged the one he bought for the next higher model for $200 more. It has 8gigs of RAM, a 1 terabyte hard drive and an iris video card.
Paul again talked about home automation and internet of things <IOT>. He expressed concern about security. Firewalls are supposed to keep your home devices from being reached from the internet. But all bets are off if the devices are reaching out to a proxy server on the internet. If you buy devices from China, the proxy servers are in China. The data the device sends would normally be what’s required to get the expected service from the device, but who know what else it’s sending.
There are open source projects to perform home automation. But there’s is no guaranty of safety and they’re strictly for hackers. Paul listed a few links at the top of this page. Paul named some of the projects: Calaos, Domoticz, Home Assistant, OpenHAB and OpenMotics. The intention of the open source projects is to avoid having the device communicate with Chinese servers. <Paul talked about home automation on the 1-11-17 show>
Paul likes the documentaries he finds on Youtube from AME, Discovery and National Geographic. One in particular he liked talked about the computer subsystems that helped send Apollo 11 to the Moon. Some of those early computers had only 76K of memory.
The answer to the quote puzzler is Marilyn Monroe. Paul said wikiquote.com is a good place to look up quotes.
It was noted that today is Women’s Day. In that regard, both the guys said they enjoyed the movie ‘Hidden Figures’, which was about women who did, by hand, the math for the Apollo projects. The women themselves were called computers.
Last Updated 12:25 AM 3-9-2017