For more information on usenet, refer to how usenet works.

What you need to view text based usenet discussions: Google Groups

Binary Newsgroups

Binary newsgroups are files rather than discussion. This includes video, software, games, photos, and more.

This is what most people are using usenet for nowadays. They’re mostly after their linux isos. (wink wink.)

If you’re familiar with torrents, you should think of an NZB file as a torrent. It basically just points to the data you need to download off the usenet protocol. Now, a torrent file does other things, but I’m trying to keep it simple.

Sign up and take a look at NZBMatrix. You can download anything on there with 1 click. At your maximum download speed every single time.

Why do people still use torrents?

So you know that usenet is by far easier to work with than torrents, why doesn’t everyone use it? Well setting up everything can be a bit of a hassle when you’re unfamiliar with it. Along with that many people choose to use the wrong usenet servers and don’t have their configurations correct. Another problem is people are trying to use the wrong software to handle their downloads or they don’t understand NZBs and try and download directly off usenet by downloading the “headers” in the groups. All these things mess people up and think usenet is far too complex. Another issue people have is cost. Generally if you have everything setup correctly it might run you $11 per month.

There’s no shortcuts to getting a silky smooth experience on usenet binaries. Don’t do it. It doesn’t work. If you’re serious, follow this guide to a t.

The Purchases

• NZBMatrix Premium account – $10
• Usenetserver $10/month
• Usenet-news 20GB Block account $8 or Astraweb $8 (this is to fill in missing parts on Usenetserver.)

Total startup cost: $28 (first month total)

Get all those things now rather than later. The next month will only be $8 or $11, and it will stay that way.

It’s hard to explain why you need the usenet-news account along with usenetserver but here’s the simplest explanation: usenet is a very old protocol, it wasn’t meant for file sharing. Some text gets lost with some servers over time, having a completely different server can fill in the missing parts. The Par2 standard was implemented to try and fix this, but it hasn’t completely, so fill servers are still somewhat necessary. Again, I don’t really expect you to understand this unless you’re familiar with usenet. Feel free to do more research for yourself, just know that I’m handing you the most optimal usenet setup to get complete files nearly every single time. (For some more in depth research refer here: Which Usenet Server? )

If you just want to get your feet wet however, check out free binary usenet here. Combine that with a free usenet nzb search engine here.

So you’ve decided to take the plunge?

The first thing you should do after you’ve made all the above purchases is download sabnzb. The setup is pretty straight forward and it will link the nzb files you download to the sabnzb program. The only things you really need to do is setup the servers and your download folder. For a full guide refer here. The usenet-news server should be set as a “backup server”.  After that you just click and download the nzbs off nzbmatrix and pop it open with sabnzb. Your download begins.

For more advanced usenet features such as couchpotato/sickbeard I will be writing another tutorial.

These methods should all be white hat as far as I know

PermaLinks

First thing you want to do when setting up a WordPress blog is setup permalinks. Google and other search engines will like to see keywords in your url. They may also really hate the look of ?p= because it is a dynamic link, this may hurt your rankings in itself.

Link Building

If you want to get right down to it, back links are king. The more back links you have, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your rank in the search engines. You need lots and lots of back links from other sites. Some easy ways to get back links would be through Entrecard, they have “top dropper” days where you will get listed and pick up back links. Also, if you want a quick way to get indexed by Google and the other search engines, you’re going to want to use Entrecard. If you’re not a blog, you might want to try something like ProjectWonderful to start your site off. Advertising is a necessary evil to starting a site. Once people know your site exists, more links will come rolling in by themselves if you write good posts.

Social Networking

Submitting some of your articles to Digg or StumbleUpon is a good idea for a little while, because your dugg articles will show up in the search engines.  However, you will get banned if you submit too many of your own articles.

You notice all that crap at the bottom of my site? Those are other blog networks that hold my RSS feed and list my articles there for people to find. Some also keep track of my traffic to a degree. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and Technorati  are some examples. Even listing your site on Twitter can help. I have just recently started with Twitter to see how it goes.

Some other places you might want to list your articles would be MySpace and FaceBook if you have those accounts, let your friends know you have a blog. I use some WordPress plugins to automatically post there.

RSS Submissions

You should submit your RSS feed wherever you can, because it will list your articles more places, meaning more people are likely to find them and read your articles.

Keywords

Keywords are highly important. I don’t pay much attention to them myself, but if you really want to rank well you need to research keywords. The wording on your site can mean the difference of 50 unique/day and 0 people find your article through search engines. If you pick a term that is far too competitive for your site, you will not rank. I have only just begun to try and play with keywords in my articles. The point is, try to pick less competitive keywords when you write a post by using different wording.

Some useful SEO WordPress Plugins

All-in-one-seo - This plugin helps to automatically handle some SEO functions like title and description of the page.

Sociable – This plugin automatically puts Digg/Stumble/Etc links under each post.

TweetSuite – Puts the Tweet link under each post.

WordBook – Automatically posts your posts on the blog to FaceBook.

Google-XML-Sitemaps – Automatically creates site maps for Google and other search engines.

WordPress Related Posts – Shows related posts based on tags on each post. Helpful for getting people to read more than one article

Conclusion

That is about how far I have gotten with my SEO. I’m still working on it day by day, trying my best to optimize the site. Hopefully someone will find this information useful. Feel free to contribute more SEO and Traffic tips in the comments.

*Note* Always ground yourself by touching the metal case of the computer or using a grounding wrist band.

First of all you have to remove everything connected to the motherboard. That includes the PCI/PCI-Express/AGP cards, the IDE/Sata cables, case cables, and the power cables. Once that’s done, you must unscrew all the mounting screws used to keep the motherboard in place. They are located in many different areas on the board. Once you’re done, you should be able to gently lift the motherboard out of the case.

(This is how my case looked after I removed the motherboard. )

The next step is to remove the heat sink and fan from the old motherboard. The removal process should be documented if you have a stock heat sink/fan, or if you have an aftermarket cooler you should be able to look it up. The removal process will vary.

Once that’s done, you’ll have to remove the CPU, or processor from the old motherboard. There’s generally a latch by the cpu socket that you have to push down and then up to release the CPU. Place the CPU into the new motherboard and pull the latch down. Some older processors have pins on them so you should be careful. The next thing you’re going to want to do is remove the ram sticks from the old motherboard by pressing down on the release latches. Move them to the new motherboard as well, press them firmly into the memory socket.

(Processor and Ram moved to new location)

The next thing you want to do is wipe off the old thermal paste and create a mirror finish on the top of the processor. Then reapply artic silver, or some other kind of thermal paste.

Next, you will  also want to create a mirror finish on the  heat sink and attach the heat sink to the new motherboard.

With that done, it seems it’s time to move the motherboard over to the case and mount it with the screws taken off the old motherboard. Then, all that needs to be done is to attach all the PCI/PCI-Express/AGP Cards, connect the power, and IDE/Sata cables. Not quite finished yet. There are some little wires hanging off your case you’re probably going to want to connect again to your case, otherwise your power button isn’t going to work Look up the pins for the connector in your motherboard manual. Then, hit the power switch

Next you’ll probably have to reinstall Windows or whatever OS you choose. You can backup your data by using a Linux LiveCD and copying them to a flash drive or another hard drive. You could also try following this guide: Replace Your Motherboard Without Killing Windows

Hopefully this will prove useful to someone out there

Introduction

IRC, or Internet Relay Chat has been around for ages, and many still use it today. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. This is not a Yahoo chat, nor an AIM chat. Most channels are controlled by bots. (Programs placed on servers) These bots do various things such as automatically banning spammers, holding the operator position in the channel, or maybe even trivia. There are also other kinds of bots, one is called an XDCC bot. They are in certain channels where you may download various things.

What’s needed

First, you’re going to need an IRC client. This could be mIRC, which is probably the most popular, XChat, Irssi, or anything else that connects to the IRC protocol and has DCC (Direct Client to Client) functions. I am going to use XChat for the example, because it pretty much works well with transfers right out of the box.

Start up XChat, click do not display this message again when the first pop up box shows up. Exit out of that.

Basic commands

/server irc.xxxx.tld – Sets the irc server you wish to connect to. (Example /server irc.technologyinsanity.com)

/join#channel  – Lets you join a channel while connected to a server. (Example /join #technologyinsanity)

/msg USER <message> – private messages a user on the network you’re connected to. (Example /msg s0uThp4rk what’s up?)

Network Services

Some may require you to register with nickserv or get a vhost (a virtual host, which would be s0uThp4rk@the.cow.com instead of s0uThp4rk@myip.resolvedhost.tld)

In such cases, here are some basic commands for that.

/msg nickserv register <password> <email>

Then, generally you will join #vhost and send the message !vhost your.vhost.tld

Requesting Packs

In order to request a pack from an XDCC bot, you must be in the channel that has such bots, and meet the requirements for the bot if there are any. You may use an XDCC search engine such as packetnews.com or xdccing.com. I would not recommend you use these websites without adblock plus enabled. You can then click on the pack or one of the other links and it will try to automatically open XChat and join the channel. An alternative would to idle in a channel and request a pack you want when you see it. You could also install a script to “catch” xdcc packets and request them from a window within the script.

The general command for requesting a pack is:

/msg <botname> xdcc send #<packnumber>

Then you have to accept the send, or wait in queue until an open slot is available. You can also set xchat to automatically accept sends in the preferences.

Conclusion

That should be about it for this introductory. Instead of leeching things from xdcc channels, maybe you would rather chat? Check out my channel at irc.technologyinsanity.com #technologyinsanity

Packs on XDCC. These are not legal, however..

Few more problems, however We just thought starting up Hamachi was going to be enough. Not so. You have to make sure Hamachi is the default network adapter so the game uses it. That’s simple enough, right? Here’s a short guide of what we did to do that.

Click start –> Settings –> Control Panel –> Network & Internet Connections –> Network Connections –> Look where File, Edit, etc are located and find Advanced –> Advanced Settings –> Click on the Hamachi adapter and click up.  A reboot will be required.

Now that was done on both of our computers, everything should work, right? Not so. He could ping me, but I could not ping him through Hamachi. We finally narrowed it down to his Anti-Virus program, once he killed that I could ping him.

Now everything should work, right!? No. We couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t see his host in the game. Long story short, you cannot minimize the game while hosting, or else it kills the host. Now I could connect, and we were able to play just like we used to.Very cool.

I hope this helps someone if they’re trying to setup a LAN server through Hamachi for a game. It can be a pain at first.

Want to join us? Contact me through e-mail, the forums, or my IRC server. Quite a wide selection

Here’s a youtube video showing in game footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzrXTKnIkfs

UPDATE: I was able to convince my friend azlesk8er to take a cap of him hitting 26 million. Here is his video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4bFR0VMA9s

These are the best things you can do to secure your website properly

• Use random generated passwords 32-64 characters in length.
• Research your particular software and/or plugins for vulnerabilities at all times by visiting milw0rm and packetstorm on a regular basis.
• Optionally, you may want to install some kind of spam filter if possible on your software.

Own your server? You’ll probably want to do this as well, on top of the list above.

• Do periodic software updates on your server, change the ports that certain services run on, such as FTP and SSH since these are common targets.
• Disable root login.
• Set ServerTokens to “Prod” in Apache.
• Run software that automatically bans an IP after a certain amount of failed login attempts.
• Again, for all passwords on the server use 32-64 char random generated passwords, including the host control panel if you have one.

Just searching around reveals to me that there are far too many insecure websites out there, that could easily enough become fairly secure by following at least some of these methods. You can never be too secure, there are new vulnerabilities found every day, and there is no shortage of malicious users out there ready to deface your website or gain root login to your server for the fun of it. There are many more tactics out there for security, but these are some of the better tactics that will deter most people. Be careful out there.

Thanks go out to nukeit.org

NoScript

NoScript is a plugin for FireFox that blocks all scripts on pages. You have to disable script blocking on entrecard.com and amazonaws.com

Next, you have to MAKE SURE that temporarily allow top-level sites by default is clicked. It was blocking entrecard still and I wondered why, this option makes that problem go away.

Firefox Settings

Go to Tools>Options>Content and add exceptions entrecard.com and amazonaws.com to the “Load images automatically” option. Then disable that optioin. Also uncheck “Enable Java”.

Linky

Linky is a plugin for firefox that allows you to select links from a page. First, what I do is go into my drops inbox and select all the people who have dropped me. Then I use linky to open all selected links in tabs.

I also drop randomly a lot, so I just go into campaign, select all the links in “New” , “Cheap” , or “Random” for about 12 rows. The only issue I have with that is I have to manually uncheck the details link, but I’ve been thinking about making an autoit script for that. The amount of tabs you can have will probably depend on how much RAM you have in your computer.

Note that I still browse blogs and drop comments after I’ve dropped my cards. I highly doubt anyone who drops 300 cards is doing everything manually, that would take an eternity I wouldn’t have anytime to blog or work on my site.

Let me know if I missed anything, this should be very similar to other guides out there, but I use linky instead of some other things people do. I have to thank nukeit.org for linky, I believe he mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

Setting up a multiple OS platform for is pretty straightforward. I recommend you buy another hard drive, because in my experience partitions are nothing but trouble. If you want to go with partitions, then just use tools to do so, there are many of them out there I used to use Partition Magic, but you can easily do this from the DOS prompt as well.

Linux

Linux is a highly useful operating system, with many programming tools pre-installed, and it’s really not that hard to get used to. (for me)

I’ve tried many different distributions of Linux, including SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Slackware Linux. Slackware Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. Why? It’s stable, it gets the job done. I don’t need all the fancy tools they include in Ubuntu. Often I will also install Dropline Gnome onto Slackware, and choose whether I want to run KDE or Gnome. Slackware Linux also offers a few other GUI setups that are less resource hungry, if your PC isn’t up to date, Linux and slackware is the best bet for you.

Linux generally requires an Ext3 file system, but there are others that it uses as well, so in partition magic select that when you go to make the partition, if you’re doing it that way, if you’ve purchased an entirely new hard drive, then continue on.

Now, you’ve successfully partitioned your hard drive or bought a new one. What’s next? Well, just download the distribution you want, burn onto a CD and look into your motherboard for directions on booting from the CD drive.  Insert the disc during start up, and wallah start installing Linux.

You might need to format your hard drive to Ext3, or if you made a partition, it should already be formatted. Just install everything, it will also most likely install grub or lilo, (I’ve used both) install that to your boot sector on your main drive. You should be about done now, the PC will restart, and you will be prompted to select Windows or Linux. Depending on your distribution, it may require some setup to get into the gui. Slackware linux generally requires a bit of command line work before you can access the GUI, so you’ll have to read a bit. (here) That guide helped me when I first took on the challenge of installing slackware, interestingly enough, slackware was the first distribution of Linux I ever installed.

Hackintosh

Hackintosh is another story alltogether, the same applies for setting up partitions or a new hard drive however. You may have to try multiple discs of hackintosh before the automated installer works for your system. You also have to check to see if your computer components are compatible with Hackintosh. To do this, I advise you read over a few things at insanelymac. There’s also a “legality” issue with running hackintosh, so I’m not promoting it or anything I may or may not have installed hackintosh, I can’t remember

You’re going to have to create a “blank” partition, where it has not been formatted. This is because Partition Magic does not format to the Mac OSX file system, and neither does any other utility. This is done through the installation. Also, if you’ve purchased a different hard drive, then just leave it unformatted. Hackintosh is quite touchy with hardware compatibility, because it’s expecting your computer to be a mac, and macs basically just have USB ports. You’ll have to look for modification scripts on insanelymac, or if they don’t exist, then your hardware wont work and don’t continue. Many people purchase certain components on purpose to make it 100% hackintosh compatible, because their system will be MUCH cheaper than a Mac, but a lot of manual work is required. I’ve never been 100% hackintosh compatible myself.

Anyway, once the installation is done, then you might have to go into the bios and select the drive that hackintosh was installed on to be booted first. There are some utilities that can be modified to make dual booting with hackintosh work without doing it this way, but it is somewhat difficult.

Windows

Multi-booting with different versions of windows is a real pain. I currently have Vista and XP installed on separate hard drives, and have not had any issues, but it’s a real pain to setup. Each windows version will vary, Vista is very difficult to get working with dual-boot configurations. It requires some editing of the boot.ini file. Also, some of the boot files from windows XP have to be transferred to the Vista hard drive. This is because it is booting Vista first, and using the Vista bootloader. From there you select either XP or Vista. I can try to help you if you really want this kind of setup, but I’m not going to delve into it here, unless I get a request then I will edit this with the needed info. (Maybe I’m being lazy not wanting to look things up.. What you see here all came from my head )

There are some tools out there that can help you out with multiple Windows versions, I believe that every version except Vista works similar to Linux, but you have to edit the boot.ini file, or install one of the many OS selector applications out there.

Thanks, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you need help, I’m here, just go post in the forums

A goal of mine someday is to go Quad Boot. I love to mess around with different operating systems and have a choice when I boot up This is a general overview, to get you started on the road to multiple OSes, if I get a good response on this article I might make a more complete tutorial.

Small update: It seems Ubuntu has made it so you no longer have to partition your hard drive in order to install it. It will run with windows, apparently. I’m going to test this out soon.