Consumed Consumer . org

After wasting time and intense frustration, I have decided that waiting for videos of photos to upload to online services is not something I want to do from my laptop. I shall thus explore alternatives..

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

What if we told you that you can buy a cheap laptop and, for the price you would normally pay for a Windows based one, you can get a laptop running a much more stable operating system AND send a similar laptop to a child in Africa?

Apparently, I could have gotten one with Gizmo5 back when I signed up with them, but I didn't know. Oh well, it's still neat!

You're traveling to a new country and either because you have a prepaid in your home country without roaming privileges, or because roaming is too expensive, you want to get a local SIM card to send and receive text messages (SMS), check your email and use Google Maps for directions. Where do you go and what do you get? In this series, we’ll have an answer (or more) for you for the countries we are travelling to most often. Today, Canada.

I will be writing this guide as I perform every step. Hopefully it will be helpful to you as well. An UPDATED VERSION was published 1 year later.

After successfully formatting my 2 new Western Digital 2TB discs properly, with the "advanced 4k option" , the time has come to move all the data from my existing 2TB array (1 TB + 1 TB in RAID 0) to one of the new drives. The quickest way to do this is to connect the drive via the NAS unit USB port.

Although I have purchased my WRT-610n router (pretty much the same as the newer E3000 ) many months ago, only recently was I forced to install the Linux firmware on it – mostly due to lack of time and procrastinating. This is primarily due to some issues with my Internet connectivity, which I am hoping could be solved with a better router.

I recently had to play a bit with a new installation of Ubuntu and again, old unnerving ghosts came back to haunt me. Since these ghosts have a habit of tormenting indiscriminately, I am sharing my solutions with you.

A problem with my (micro) SD card unmounting itself (the famous “unexpectedly removed” error) pushed me to finally backup, root and fully move my apps to the SD card.  

After our salute dedicated to Microsoft Windows 7 milestone, it is only natural to repeat our welcome to Windows 8 RTM and answer the burning question “where can I get the ISO?” .

There seems to be a mistaken belief that in order to gain superuser access (or to do serious development or, to use a popular misnomer, “hacking”, one has to “jailbreak”, or as it is called everywhere other than iOS, “root”. Let us see how anyone can do most of it using an excellent and completely free hack (or app) called Termux.

There are many ways to recover mistakenly deleted files. Most OSs provide some kind of trash function or "Recycle Bin", which allows you to very easily undelete files. There are, however, situations when that is not possible.

Why would ConsumedConsumer.org care about the US elections? Frankly, because we cannot afford not to.

Over the years, I tried many hardware solutions to bring “convergence” to the PC desktop, but I found most implementations to be flawed one way or another. The new contender from Silicon Dust seems to be the perfect solution.

Having briefly discussed how to choose a virtual private server (VPS), we have experimented with a number of (hosting?) providers, some providing limited-time free service, some providing rock-bottom prices, and we are now ready to make a recommendation. We started this overview in 2020 and finished it in 2022.

Despite the numerous vulnerabilities and cracking methods around WPA and its successor, a black hat might find themselves brute-forcing a handshake. If the most common list of passwords fails, (a dictionary attack that automated tools generally employ) the next to try is a list of valid phone numbers in that particular area, which can be easily generated.

Unlike softphones , discussed in the first instalment of our beginner’s guide to VOIP , hardware solutions enable you to use the regular phone(s) you are presumably accustomed to use. There are three major solutions that could enable your home phone line to be routed over the Internet.

For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of running a TOR relay for my own privacy reasons and to give back to the community as well. Though my router and NAS (and possibly even my WD Live box) have enough chutzpah to run it, I prefer to use a very old computer instead for reasons of separation (security). For a while, I even considered buying a Raspberry Pi or some other similar cheap gizmo, then I remember I have a bunch of old computers I've never used..

If you have ever played with internet security or just cracking wireless networks, you are most likely aware of BackTrack’s existence. The latest release has hit the BT (torrents) on January 11 and we are happy to acknowledge it with a YouTube playlist.