Consumed Consumer . org

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.

Now that we know what VOIP is and the hardware and the provider have been chosen, what's left is to do some finer configuration of our service and start VOIP-ing!

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..

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.

After discussing options in choosing a cheap, low-end, learning VPS , we take a look here at how to set it up for secure use, for when you get a so much for so little, you want to make sure it’s only yours!

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.

After discussing the softphone options in the first part and the VOIP device in the second, we are now looking at finding a provider and setting up the system.

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.

I recently wrote about a regular meeting of art-minded friends . This coming Sunday we will meet again, but first for a potluck "dinner".

Having recently upgraded my smartphone for the nth time, I found myself needing to automate a few tasks. Unlike my previous foray into Tasker automation however, my new phone is not rooted, nor do I plan to root it anytime soon.

A while back (2006, most likely), I purchased several D-link Vonage locked ATAs, with the intention to try VOIP. They were cheap ($9.99) and figured that if I find that I do not like Vonage, I will unlock them somehow and use them with another provider. Though I have decided that I do not like Vonage, I was unable to unlock and abandoned the project. Now that I have a working VOIP setup, I decided to give unlocking one more try .

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.

One of the features designed to help beginners that ends up annoying the hell out of anyone else is the Windows Update "Restart your computer now?" nag. We look at a few ways to stop it.

I have recently unearthed a computer I haven't touched in a while and together with it the problems that frustrated me initially. Not only that the problems did not go away, but now the computer seems to suffer abandonment issues. This is a multiboot machine and it seems that the CD-ROM / DVD burner is identified by all OSs but it is unusable in only one of them. I'm showing you how to fix this problem.

Most of us use Gmail, but there's a small minority still clinging to hotmail or Ymail, because that's what their ancestors used when they were chasing wild goats. For all, here's how to get your browser to use you email service whenever you click an email address.

There was a time when having a “media center” involved building an HTPC, which was a difficult project to undertake, wrought with frustrations and hardware/software incompatibilities. OTA HDTV came along and many felt left behind just when they had gotten things working. Some experimented with Popcorn while others played with NZBs/NNTP/Usenet downloads. After all these years, one media interface has emerged dominant: XBMC / Boxi / Kodi.

We recently needed an older computer and discovered we had forgotten a login password. Our development server for designing and testing a website will most likely reside on an older laptop running in dual boot with Windows XP SP 3 and Backtrack Linux 5.

When working on the CLI (command line interface) or, as it is widely known, "the prompt", most people prefer to set certain shortcuts as typing the same thing over and over is not something anyone enjoys. In Linux, such shortcuts are called aliases. This is a continuation from choosing and then setting up your first VPS .

I recently went to the trouble of installing Metasploit Framework (MSF) on a few devices (Android smartphone, Windows laptop, Kali on multiboot), with various degrees of success. My experiences may be helpful for others attempting the same, as well as for me, so that I can finish it 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.