I understand that postmodern can be quite scary. It can be metaphored as someone pulling the whole rug out from underneath your feet. And most modernists might have been the ones’ to put the rug there. But, nonetheless, the rug is there. But like any old rug it can collect dust, become congested and even old and tattered. So, postmodernism proposes that we need a new rug. A new way to look at things. And the rug they bring in to replace the old rug may look different and may even cover only certain aspects of the floor. But generally, it is a rug. Where the modern rug tried to fit into every genre and every space and find an answer for everything, the postmodern rug seeks to ask questions and understands that sometimes those questions lead to more questions. And that questions are not the enemy, they lead us into a mischevious child-like wonder that draws us to seek the adventure in all we say and do. If we don’t have questions than we have no journey to find the answers. If all we have is answers, what are the right questions? I think postmodernism allows to search. To be in awe and to be in wonder of the reality that life is bigger than finding answers. That life is bigger than certainty. That life is bigger than one religious system. I think also postmodernism reminds us what it looks like to rediscover our innocence. Rabbi Jesus had this tendency to use a child as a metaphor for rediscovering the child like qualities within. The trusting and the curious questioning that both reside within a child’s mind. The audacity to try anything once even if there are apparent dangers staring you in the face. The hunger to want to learn more. The ability to have a wide-eyed defiant hope in the midst of hopeless situations. These are the qualities that postmodernism hopes to reintroduce and restore to the conversation.

Postmodernism is such a vast subject, I definitely don’t seek to contain it in any one blog but only dip into the well of benefits we can gain from it.

This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. (John 3:16)

To me, this is the ultimate Christmas verse. It starts with love and culminates in wholeness. God initiated his love toward us! Why such love? It’s certainly not because we earned it or deserved it. And, it’s not just because of what he foresaw who we would become. God is in love with us – period! No other motive was behind his sending Jesus to our world that first Christmas. But, as a result of his loving coming and loving ministry, we are offered restored wholeness.

As we come to the end of 2009, perhaps there are pieces strewn around the room of your heart. Disappointments, unanswered prayer, unalterable mistakes – pieces, shards of what could have been. Jesus comes to restore, mend and heal. Sit down and watch him take those pieces and create a new masterpiece from them; as the picture quote says, he needs all the pieces.

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Habitat in the News!

If you’re in the kitchen tomorrow and are looking for something to do while you cook, tune in (or set your DVR)  to News Channel 8 at 7am to watch the broadcast of the Montgomery County Thanksgiving Parade. ReStore participated in the event with a group of Churchill High School students. Look for the ReStore truck!

ReStore was also featured in the Gazette last week for the Holiday Shoppe. The 2nd Annual ReStore Holiday Shoppe is an opportunity to reuse and recycle holiday decorations. Also, any customers who bring in donations for the Holiday Shoppe will receive 10% off their ReStore purchase. Don’t forget ReStore is having a Black Friday Sale, check out yesterday’s post for more info!

Donations are accepted from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday at the ReStore, 9100 Gaither Road, Gaithersburg. Donations are tax-deductible and proceeds support Habitat for Humanity. For details, call 301-947-3304 or visit www.ReStoreMoCo.org.

Habi-Titus wishes everyone a Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!

This is a nice tale of a apparently dead iPod that was brought back to life.  Click here to read how.

Come shop at ReStore this Friday, November 27th for our spectacular Black Friday Savings! ReStore will be open early at 8am and will stay open until 6pm on Friday only! Take advantage of these great savings.

EVERYTHING is on sale!

Discounts include:

30% off from 8am-9am
25% off from 9am-12pm
15% off from 12pm-3pm
10% off from 3pm-6pm
*Sales above do not apply to Holiday Shoppe merchandise

Holiday Shoppe Discounts:
20% off merchandise from 8am-12pm

Also, please note that Habitat ReStore will be closed on Thanksgiving… happy holiday

There are many situations that require you to restore backups to different computers, other than the one from where the data was originally backed up from. In the case of Apple’s Time Machine the restore procedure to different machines is not very intuitive. You have to use the “secret” option key…

There is a supported way to restore Time Machine backups of other computers using the “option-key” click on the Time Machine menu. If you want to use it just do the following:

1. Connect the Time Machine disk to the Mac you want to restore the files to
2. Set the “Show time machine status in the menu bar” In System Preferences -> Time Machine.
3. Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and keeping the mouse button pressed, press the “Option” key.
4. Select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”
5. Select the disk you want
6. click Use Selected Disk

The Time Machine will open with the selected disk and you can use it to restore the files.

If, like me, you are using a non supported Time Machine configuration, where the backup disk is mounted using SMB or AFP (see this post on how to enable that) then the procedure above will not work directly. In my case I backup to my Buffalo TeraStation NAS, and the “Browse Other Time Machine Disks” window shows up empty, with no disk to select.

In order for this to work you need to first mount the Time Machine disk by hand in using the command line.

1. Mount the shared folder where your Time Machine backups are stored
2. Open a Terminal window and cd to the Time Machine volume. in my case I called it backups

   sudo cd /Volumes/backups

3. use hdiutil to mount the specific Time Machine .sparsebundle file

   sudo hdiutil attach <time_machine_file.sparsebundle>

Now you should be able to see the mounted volume in Finder, with all the backups listed as folders, and you can copy any files directly from it. Remember that mounting the disk may take some time due to the size of the disk and network connection speed, especially If you do this over a WiFi network.

Another option is to repeat the supported Time Machine procedure  outlined in the beginning of this post. You should now see the mounted disk as a Time Machine disk. Select the the disk and click “Use Selected Disk” and Time Machine will open on the selected disk just like with a Time Machine supported back up disk.

Personally I like to copy them directly from the Finder but your preference may vary so I document both ways of achieving this goal. Hope this helps.

]]> http://rheide.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/restoring-files-that-chkdsk-messed-up/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:45:54 +0000 rheide http://rheide.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/restoring-files-that-chkdsk-messed-up/

So, as you can read in the previous posts I have a hard drive that has crashed. But not completely. After running “chkdsk /f” on the thing I am left with 9999 files that have been restored, very conveniently called FILExxxx.CHK. How wonderful. I’m rather annoyed that only 9999 files were restored, and not more. At this point I am suspecting that only the file table broke, and the files themselves should be intact. Now I can access my files again, but I have no idea which file is which, and I sure as hell am not going to click every individual file to find out what it is. Being the software engineer that I am, I wrote a script.

I should mention here that I was rather fortunate/foresighted to have made a regular directory index of all my files, and my latest listing was from two days before the crash. That’s very lucky. I have in my possession a huge text file containing the exact output of a “dir /a/s>out.txt” call. What to do with that? Well, for once my laziness paid off. Had I bothered to add the ‘/b’ option, output would only contain the filenames, but omitting this causes the file sizes to be output as well.

So we have a listing of a file containing its name and its file size, and a mystery file xxxx.CHK containing ’something’, which also has a file size. So… I think you can see where I’m going with this. I doubt that there’s many people in a similar situation as me though, as usually hard drives crash a bit harder than this, and usually people don’t run the kind of script that I was running to index my disk. I did not envision this use case either though..

Linking the two pieces of information together turns out to be harder than I thought, though. The file size of the mystery files seems to be off by a tiny amount, which I guess is a result of chkdsk not being able to guess the file boundary exactly. As a result, exact file size matching results in zero matches, so a bit of fuzziness must be added. I haven’t had time to do this yet, but at first glance it seems that all mystery files are a tiny bit larger (at most 32kb) than the ones in the directory listing, so I’m thinking I’ll just grab the closest match that is larger than the original. This will probably mix up at least some of the files on the disk, though, but that should be easily solved. Once I know which two files are swapped it’s easy to get back the data that I want. This works for most of my personal files and some hard-to-get stuff, but most of the files I can download again without too much trouble.

When/If I finish the perl script (yes, yuck) I’ll post it online somewhere. When it’s done.

All you fans of OSen that Apple doesn’t provide iTunes for — GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc. — may find it annoying that there’s no real way to restore or jailbreak your shiny new iPhone or iPod Touch besides dual-booting or finding a compatible machine, huh?

Firstly, this is kinda what you have to expect after buying an Apple device   If it doesn’t fit into the Apple World™, you’d better believe that a whole host of problems will rise up.  If you’re a nice local IT guy like me though, you may wish to help liberate the souls of hapless iFollowers partially, and assist them in the jailbreaking of their devices.

As it turns out, virtualization software can help.  Alas, VMware Workstation does not work, and I haven’t tried QEMU.  The problem with VMware seems to be that iTunes doesn’t see the iPod at one critical step, and eventually gives up looking, handing you an error (usually 1611).  VirtualBox works great, though it requires a bit of manual work.  You will, sadly, need Sun’s Personal Use and Evalutation License (PUEL) version of VirtualBox, which is not Free Software — the Open Source Edition (OSE) does not support USB last I checked.  To clarify, VirtualBox PUEL is free in price, but not open-source free as in freedom.

This tutorial should work for all OSen capable of USB 2.0 and USB-enabled VirtualBox, and the jailbreaking section should work for the iPod Touch 1G/2G, and the iPhone 1G/2G/3G/3GS.  I don’t think the restore process will let you downgrade firmware, though, so you should have firmware 3.0.1 or lower.  We will be using redsn0w 0.8  to jailbreak.  This app works better in Windoze anyways; it often fails on GNU/Linux even though that OS is also supported.

BY USING THIS GUIDE YOU AGREE THAT I AM NOT TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMANGES, LOSS OF FUNCTION, etc. etc etc…..  Basically, don’t be a douche.  I don’t think it’s even possible to screw up your iPod/iPhone with this; Apple actually did a good job at least in ensuring there’s pretty much always a way to restore if things go awry.  Losing your data will definitely happen if you restore, though — that’s part of what the restore does — so back up.  The jailbreaking shouldn’t cost you your data, but being safe can’t hurt.

Now that all that crap is over with, go ahead and grab VirtualBox PUEL, and make your virtual machine.  The OS I used is Windows XP Pro SP3, others may or may not work.  I wouldn’t advise a 64-bit Windows copy (the LibUsb-Win32 drivers are 32-bit, and this complicates matters), and XP is probably overall your best bet.  Make sure to enable USB in the settings, and install the OS.  You may also need to have the guest OS able to get to the Internet.

Once you have the VM up and running (I installed the guest additions, you may not need them), get the LibUsb-Win32 drivers and install them.  I’m not sure why exactly they are necessary, but they seem to in general make this whole process much smoother and more fail-proof.  Here they are, make sure to get the latest .exe file.  Reboot after installation.

Next, you need iTunes.  I’m not sure if later versions don’t work, but I would really recommend version 8.2.0, as I’ve had the most success with it.  You can find a downloadable copy here.

And last, you need the actual firmware you’re going to install.  I won’t link it, as the legality is somewhat questionable (as is everything with Apple), but you should be able to use Google to find a firmware that works with your model iPod/iPhone.  Remember, the .ipsw file you need is different for every model of iPod — one for the 2G iPhone, one for the 2G iPod, one for the 1G iPod, etc. etc.  I recommend firmware 3.0 for iPods, and 3.0.1 for iPhones (fixes an SMS exploit).  3.1 and later have nice features, but protect against the jailbreak hack we will use later.  If you’re too comfortable bending over for Steve Jobs, then you can go right for the latest firmware (3.1.2 at the time of writing)   There ARE exploits for 3.1+, blackra1n seems to be the one everyone goes to, but they have some shortcomings.  Google for more info, I won’t get into it here.  If you do use 3.1+, you may need a later version of iTunes; I’m not sure.

Once all this is acquired, and you’ve rebooted your VM again, don’t let iTunes start.  The first thing to do is open up a command prompt and cd to “C:\Program Files\LibUsb-Win32\bin”, or wherever else you installed that package.  Once there, run “install-filter.exe -i”.  There should be no output from the command.

Next, we get the iPod/iPhone ready.  Plug it in and turn it completely off — it’s okay if iTunes starts up in a fuss once it sees the connection.  We are now going to enter DFU mode, which is an even lower-level version of the Recovery mode, and works better sometimes.  Follow these instructions carefully.  There are lots of differing instructions online, but I find these steps to work the best — if they don’t, Google for DFU mode and try other methods.  If, after many retries, you can’t get in DFU mode, then you can try in Recovery mode, which may work.  I believe you get in Recovery mode by plugging in the device to the PC and holding down the Home button for a while until you see an image depicting a connection to iTunes.  Here are the DFU instructions, though:

0.) Ensure your iPod/iPhone is connected to the computer via your USB cable, and completely powered off.

1.) Press in and hold down the power switch for about three seconds, until a tiny bit after you see the silver Apple logo.  Once you see that, also start holding in the Home button, or whatever that button’s name is on the front of the device.  After a little while, the device should completely power off again.  If you see the image depicting connecting an iPod to iTunes, all is not lost, although this usually works better if you start holding the Home button earlier so that you never see that screen before the device shuts down.

2.) Now that the device is off again, keep holding the power switch and the Home button for about a full second, and then switch to holding just the Home button.  If you see the Apple logo again, you held down the power button too long, and you’ll have to start over.  If the screen stays  completely off, that’s good — keep holding down that Home button for a good 15-20 seconds, and then you can release; you should be in DFU mode.  You can verify this by running the ‘lsusb’ program in your chosen bare-metal OS, or whatever equivalent function it offers to show all USB devices plugged in, or by looking in the Devices -> USB Devices section of VirtualBox’s menu (that does not refresh automatically, you have to keep opening the menu every few seconds to refresh).  Then, you may stop holding down the Home button.

If anything goes wrong during this sequence, start all over.  If you want out of DFU mode, hold down the power and Home buttons for a bit and the device should be off (no real detectable difference), so then you can power it on again — don’t worry, you can’t get stuck in DFU mode!

Now you can give the virtual machine the iPod/iPhone — use Devices -> USB Devices to check your device.  The VM may immediately drop it again, just go back in and check it again.

iTunes will detect the device now.  Remember throughout this guide, usually when iTunes shows a slim progress bar that keeps going through, it’s looking for the device or waiting for it to be unchecked/rechecked in Devices -> USB Devices.  It may do this now, in which case you should check the iPod/iPhone in USB Devices if it isn’t checked, and if it is, uncheck and then recheck.

iTunes should now complain that the device is in recovery mode, and needs to be restored.  That’s what we want.  Hold down the left Shift key and click the Restore button in iTunes.  Now, choose the .ipsw firmware file you downloaded before.  This is why I specified downloading the firmware manually — if you just click the Restore button, iTunes will download and install the very latest firmware, which is likely not what you want if you’re going to jailbreak.  Even if you aren’t, I recommend the manual method.

Go ahead and feed it the .ipsw.  After extracting it, iTunes will do some preparation, and then show another floating progress bar most likely.  Uncheck the iPod in the VM menu, wait a second, and it should reappear in the menu (in Recovery mode this time, not DFU).  Check it again, and iTunes will proceed.  At this point, you should start to get feedback on the iPod/iPhone.

After some more work, iTunes will again stall at “Preparing iPod for restore…”, and the iPod should disconnect from the VM.  Go ahead and reconnect it.  It will be listed as not in Recovery mode anymore.  The floating bar will persist for a while — DON’T disconnect and reconnect the device from the VM, as I suggested before, in this case!  From here on, remember: when the iPod/iPhone has a slowly filling progress bar on its display, don’t tamper with the VM connection.  The progress bar should switch back to a normal bar shortly.

Sit back and relax, there won’t be any need for user interaction for a while.  Sooner or later, iTunes will again show a floating progress bar while it verifies the iPod software.  Still, don’t disconnect — there’s still a progress bar on the device, right?  Right.

If you got an error around the 1600s during this process, you likely failed to reconnect/disconnect/whateverconnect the device when iTunes wanted you to.  Try again.  If you get a low error number like 9 or 2, you likely disconnected or such when iTunes was busy working on the iPhone/iPod — don’t worry, just try again.

The iPod will disconnect for quite a while.  When it becomes ready again, you should have a newly restored iPod/iPhone!  Congratulations   If you want to truly make this device yours, and jailbreak it, keep reading.

Okay, jailbreak time.  Google around for a tool called redsn0w, and download it.  This guide was written for version 0.8 — if later versions come out, they may or may not work.

We need to again enter DFU mode.  This time, it’s mandatory.  Follow the above instructions to get in DFU mode, and connect the device to the virtual machine using its menu.  Close iTunes, and start redsn0w.  Feed it the same .ipsw firmware you have on your iPod/iPhone.  Click next, and it will patch the firmware.  You will be asked what to install for a package manager on the jailbroken device (I recommend Cydia only; Icy is faster and slicker but now unmaintained and is also more bug-prone in my experience).

You will be given instructions now by redsn0w on entering DFU mode.  Since we already did that, just click through them without doing anything to your device, waiting when it forces you to wait.  Make sure your iPod/iPhone is connected to the VM in the VM menu, and is in DFU mode!  Once redsn0w sees your device, it will skip through the rest of the instructions and begin.

Throughout the jailbreak process, redsn0w will every now and again stall on “Waiting for reboot…”.  This is your cue to reconnect the iPod/iPhone in VirtualBox’s menu if it got disconnected, or if it is still connected there, disconnect and reconnect.

Congratulations on your squeaky-clean jailbroken iPhone or iPod   Now go, and use it to show off the power of a world full of enterprising hackers!  The less Winblows is necessary, the better

Feel free to comment with questions, troubles, — or hey, even thank yous if I helped you out; they are much appreciated

Let’s not ignore, gloss over, not think about, or otherwise minimize the destructive and illegal acts by the deliberate traitors. All who love God, freedom, the Constitution, their children and those who come after, MUST do EVERYTHING it takes to stop them! We cannot wait for an election (which may be filled with fraud and weak-willed candidates) as time is not on our side! If they will not listen to We the People and they will not submit to the Constitution, then We the People have no other choice than to exercise our 2nd Amendment Right and duty to restore righteous governance as the Founders intended. Please read the linked article by James Simpson

Cloward-Piven Government.

Hone your gardening and matching skills in this delightful puzzle game. With three gameplay modes, you can collect custom garden upgrades, arrange tiles to match patterns, or kick back and enjoy endless entertainment. Enchanted Gardens lets you create the gardens of your dreams without getting your hands dirty!

3 gameplay modes.

Hundreds of levels.

5 gardens to restore.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows 2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

It Takes Just A second To Say Thanks,

It Takes Longer To The Work On This.

Enchanted Gardens

Konversation IRC chat client, every day I am in Kubuntu chat with 300 members active at any time (well logged in but not necessarily all talking)

I need to study/experiment with complete backup restore techniques

someone gave me this advice

for the mem stick, just mount it (i.e. on /mnt/bckstick) then tar f /mnt/bckstick/.tar

I must google and expand upon it

Today I do sweeping and mopping, but I shall add to this post, and
experiment.

I also used synaptic manager to install a simply gui backup restore and i shall test that also, but a huge tar command is attractive to me.

In Kubuntu IRC (Konversation is my client) one may query bot with !
and !info

!info backup gave several links

The most useful looking link is

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HomeUserBackup

by Dr. Brent Lipke DC

Carpal tunnel syndrome is the occupational disease of the 21^st century.  It involves numbness, weakness or pain in the wrist and hand and is caused by pressure on the nerve entering the wrist.

Traditionally it has been treated by wearing a splint, taking anti inflammatory drugs or with surgery, all having limited success. 

Spinal misalignments are often found in the lower necks of patients suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome.  Nerve compression in the neck can block the flow of nutrients to nerves in the arm, shoulder and hand, making them susceptible to injury.  Chiropractic gently restores proper nerve flow from the neck to the hand correcting the cause of the problem.   

To learn more about how a safe, gentle and scientific, Chiropractic adjustment could TRANSFORM your health contact your chiropractor.  If you are interested in a complimentary consultation, CALL me at The Family Chiropractic Centre, 519-837-1234. 

I’m Dr. Brent Lipke, educating you to help you educate others !

Volunteer Recognition 2009

!!!

Don’t forget that the food drive to benefit Manna Food Center ends tomorrow! Please drop off any non-perishable food items to ReStore!

The past few nights I have been really bad with my sleep patterns.  To the point it’s been 1:30 or later that I’ve gone to bed.  Blame it on the Playstation 3.

I get on it and I lose track of time very easily.  Which will come in handy when I want to tear my hair out staring at the four walls but know I should not be driving on the road just to be out of the house.

Well tonight I did pretty good.  By 9:30 I was off the playstation and I got some other things done that I needed to get done.  Then I went to sync my iPhone for new podcasts, etc…  Started getting an error that the phone could not be accessed.

So I’ve ended up doing a full restore of the phone and it’s now synching.

I’m really debating about upgrading to iPhone 3Gs or look at the Blackberry when I can do an upgrade in February…

There are times this phone drives me up the wall.  Then there are times I’m in love with it.

The good thing I guess is I haven’t called into work because of lack of sleep.  Maybe I can work on getting back into a healthy habit during the weekend.

Right now the phone seems to be going through the resync and installing my apps and stuff.  Hopefully it will not give me a problem.  Especially since I need to have the enterprise access working for all my contacts.

Sigh…

This blog is about things.. that won’t work. You will come in this situation, where you have to break the barriers and restore the good old world order. Your first instinct call will be that it is highly as unlikely as pigs flying. If you are a loser and worse still, ignorant as you haven’t gauged yourself, you would not accept that calling and try working out things. After some time you will realize why you are such a loser. But in this life there is nothing as loser or winner. Is there? Soon I had a revelation. We are on a sea shore and we build sand castles. Just when we conclude that it is the best thing to happen in our life and should stay till the end, a wave comes and washes away everything. We do it again. We make different castles. In the end, all we are left with is the sand beneath our feet, thats what it is best for. The final solution to the problem is to drown in the sea. Jal mein kahin..

Yesterday, after spending some hours to get all development eviroment set, I have managed to finish the installation of the good and old Xubuntu 9.04.

It’s a bit faster than the 9.10 and so far, no errors what so ever. Next step, wait for the next stable release for Xubuntu and check out some forums before the upgrade.

The post is good, but the comments are even better.  Click here.

Here is how.  Nice writeup.  Click here.

If you have backed-up a database with password protection such as:

BACKUP DATABASE [DATABASE] TO  DISK = N‘\\NETWORK_STARAGE_LOCATION\database.BAK’ WITH PASSWORD = ‘PASSWORD’,
NOFORMAT, NOINIT,  NAME = N‘DATABASE-Full Database Backup’, SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD, STATS=10
GO

As outlined in a previous post http://robbamforth.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/sql-server-2005-database-backup/

Then you will be required to restore the database programmatically as both Enterprise Manger and SQL Server Management Studio do not support the password option when restoring with the GUI wizard.

To view the files available in the backup:

RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK='\\NETWORK_STARAGE_LOCATION\database.BAK' 
WITH PASSWORD = 'password'

To run a full simple backup:

RESTORE DATABASE Northwind FROM DISK='\\NETWORK_STARAGE_LOCATION\database.BAK’
WITH PASSWORD = 'password'

This post shows how to restore a backup to a different location to where it was taken: http://robbamforth.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/sql-%e2%80%93-how-to-restore-a-database-backup-to-a-different-location/