Choosing a Kindle for travel

Posted on November 14th, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I finally bought a Kindle!

I’ve been thinking about getting one for a while now.  My sister has one and I’ve been borrowing hers when I go hiking as my Dell Streak‘s screen is just not readable in bright sunlight due to glare.  I always question myself before I buy anything nowadays to make sure it’s something I will really be using.

I’ll be traveling long term out of the country in January and I’m expecting my new Kindle to get a lot of use from it.  I know I will be outside quite a bit and I’ll be doing a lot of reading, so the Kindle’s E Ink display is perfect for this.  I’m also planning on doing multi-day treks, long bus/train/plane/boat rides, and possibly end up in places with no electricity for days at a time.  The Kindle’s long battery life (up to 1 month for the model I have) will come very handy in these types of situations.

When I heard about the price drop after the Kindle Fire tablet was announced, that was really the time when I seriously considered getting one.  I actually thought they just dropped the price of the older Kindle model (now called Kindle Keyboard).  But it turned out they actually made 2 additional models.  Smaller, lighter models without the keyboard which I never really used to begin with.  This is just perfect as I try to pack as light as possible!

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Cracking passwords using the power of your GPU

Posted on July 12th, 2011 webmaster 1 comment          Print

I read this article a few weeks ago and I just had to try it.  The use of GPUs in high performance computing is becoming very popular nowadays because you get so much computing power at very little cost compared to CPUs.  You can pretty much buy a workstation and put 8 NVIDIA Tesla GPU cards in it and you got yourself a nice little supercomputer that can compete with a big CPU cluster or grid.

You not only save money on the hardware, but also on storage cost (a rack of servers vs. a workstation under your desk), electricity cost (go green!), and manpower to maintain and manage the cluster or grid computing environment.

IGHashGPU, written by Ivan Golubez, is a great example of this.  This application does a pure brute-force of a password hash to retrieve its original value.  It supports multiple hashing algorithms, such as MD4, MD5, and SHA-1, and can run on multiple GPU cards in parallel.

The application also allows you to specify options, such as the minimum and maximum length of the original password and whether the password contains uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers, and special characters to speed up the process.  For example, if you know that there’s a password policy of at least 6 characters then you can save time by setting the minimum length to 6 so the brute-force will start at 6 characters which will save some processing time.

I tested this application on a box that has one Tesla C2050 GPU and cracking a 7-character MD5-hashed password containing numbers, uppercase, and lowercase characters took a mere 9 minutes and 38 seconds at a rate of roughly 1.17 billion comparisons per second!

I haven’t tested this on a CPU but according to the article it would take about 4 days on the CPU.  Pretty cool!

How to recalibrate your Dell Streak’s touchscreen

Posted on February 21st, 2011 webmaster 15 comments          Print

A few days ago I was trying to unlock the screen on my Dell Streak and I was having a hard time dragging the lock icon, it wouldn’t go all the way through and not responding well.  I thought my Dell Streak was busy at first, maybe a process was using up a lot of resources in the background, but when I was finally able to drag it all the way and at the screen where to type in the password, I noticed that some sections of the touchscreen weren’t responding to my touch.  I figured I probably need to recalibrate.

A quick Google search led me to this post: http://www.streaksmart.com/2010/10/how-to-calibrate-dell-streak-touchscreen.html

I’m just gonna repost it here so I can just search my website next time I need to do this :

1. Power off your Dell Streak.
2. While holding both Volume Up and Volume Down buttons, press the Power button.  This will take you to the recovery mode screen.
3. Press the Volume Down button a couple of times to highlight option 3, Screen calibration, then press the Camera button to select it.
4. You will be prompted Are you sure you want to start calibration? Press the Volume Up button, then press the Volume Up button again on the next screen to start the calibration.  The screen will shut off temporarily, don’t touch the screen.
5. After a few seconds, you should see a message that it’s done, then press Volume Up again to start the calibration data check.  Screen will shut off temporarily again, don’t touch the screen.
6. After a few seconds, you should see another message message that it’s fully done and you’ll be brought back to the menu screen. You can then either power off your device and power it back on the normal way or just don’t do anything and wait for the device to reboot itself.

The screen calibration made a big difference, my Dell Streak now feels a lot more responsive .

Note: I tried this on my Dell Streak running Android 2.2 Froyo, I’m assuming it’s the same for Android 1.6 since the calibration happens before the OS loads.