Get Great Free Music at 8bitcollective - 8bc.org

8bitcollective is an online chiptune media sharing site. What is is chiptune you ask? Basically, it is Nintendo or gaming console music (Wikipedia has a more in-depth explanation). It is old school greatness! Who doesn't love listening to some Super Mario Bros every once in a while? Yes. This is music for geeks.8bit collective is a site dedicated to people who are still creating this music and sharing it with one another. The site has thousands and thousands of free songs. Most of them are not that great, but every once in a while you will come...

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How to do HDR photography with a single image

HDR photography is done using 3 or more bracketed images. There are some instances though where taking three bracketed photos is not possible; for instance, action shots. In this tutorial I will show you what you can do if you only have one photo to work with. Read article...

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Gimp Resynthesizer Explained - Texture Transfer and Input and Output

Note: As was mentioned in a comment on this post, Resynthesizer no longer does what this blog suggests; if you want the functions shown in this blog, please use Filters > Enhance > Heal selection Click here for the tutorial. In a previous post I talked a bit about the Gimp plugin Resynthesizer. Someone posted a comment asking for a bit more explanation; more specifically, what the elements of the plugin mean. This actually is not easy to find...

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Get-WinEvent, EventLogs, ETL, Providers on Win7

'Get-WinEvent' in Powerhsell 2 when combined with ETL on Windows 7 allows exceptional event log queries. This function allows the administrator to create an array of all Event Logs and sort by 'time created' all those records created in the last (1) day:function global:LatestLogEntries{   [CmdletBinding()]   Param(       [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]       [int32]...

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Tip of The Day - Subscribing to RSS Feeds

If you use the Internet for more than 1 minute a year, then chances are, you have seen an icon that says "RSS" or "Feed." These pretty icons are intended to make our lives easier. Most of us have websites or news that we like to read every day. We may go to many many different websites every day to stay updated on what is going on. Wouldn't it be easier if we could do that with a single page? There is! That is what the pretty RSS button is for. If...

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Tip of The Day - Removing labels or glue with WD-40

For this tip of the day I am going to talk about two of my favorite things in the universe. WD-40 and hydrogen peroxide. They both have about a million uses and they are pretty cheap. I will be showing why WD-40 is amazing for removing glue or labels. Read article...

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Wanted: Incident Handler in Michigan

Do you know how to detect and respond to intruders in a multinational organization? Do you want to join a team with that mission? Are you an experienced information security professional who is looking for a challenge? If your answer to these three questions is yes, please consider applying for the last open Incident Handler role in GE-CIRT. In this role you will mentor intermediate and junior CIRT members and work with some of the best detection...

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Create a grunge business card using the Gimp

A while back I did a tutorial for making a business card using Inkscape. This will be basically the same, but use the Gimp instead.A business card is a great way to represent yourself and your talent level (especially if you are a designer and you designed your own card). Creating a business card in the Gimp is fairly fast and easy. Read article...

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Tip of The Day - Buy things for the lowest possible price

People in general are alway trying to find the greatest deal possible.  Here are some tips for how you can do just that effectively.For our purposes, we are going to be looking for a Canon DSLR camera; let's see how cheap we can go.We will be using Google Product Search for this, but the principles apply the same for eBay.com or other similar services.1. Do a Google search for Canon DSLR2. Press the "shopping" link above the search results.3. On the right, press the link "Sort by Price: Low to High"(At this point, you are probably thinking...

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How to create a winter landscape scene using the Gimp

This week I went skiing with my family and took a picture I thought would make a nice winter scene. I will show you how to do it in the Gimp. Read article...

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How to clean your vehicle's headlights - Use toothpaste

BeforeAfter For the longest time I have thought that my headlights looked very dim and that I could probably clean my headlight covers to remedy this. Yesterday I decided to do something about it.There are many products you can buy to do this. I am cheap and lazy so I decided to do it another way.This is actually super easy and relatively quick to do. Searching on Google, I found people using toothpaste doing the same thing here and here and...

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Seven Cool Open Source Projects for Defenders

Long-time blog readers should know that I don't rely on tools to defend my enterprise. I rely on people first, followed by tools, then processes. However, today I took a moment to consider the myriad of really cool work happening (mainly) in the open source tool community. When I started counting, I found about seven projects that are likely to help you defend your enterprise. Most of these require some commitment of brainpower and willingness...

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More on Chinese Stealth Fighter and APT

Since my 27 December post Courtesy of APT, featuring the new Chinese stealth fighter, Aviation Week writer Bill Sweetman wrote more about the development of this aircraft and the support from APT:One question that may go unanswered for a long time concerns the degree to which cyberespionage has aided the development of the J-20. U.S. defense industry cybersecurity experts have cited 2006—close to the date when the J-20 program would have started—as...

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Happy 8th Birthday TaoSecurity Blog

Today, 8 January 2011, is the 8th birthday of TaoSecurity Blog. I wrote my first post on 8 January 2003 while working as an incident response consultant for Foundstone. 2739 posts (averaging 342 per year) later, I am still blogging. I don't have any changes planned here. I plan to continue blogging, especially with respect to network security monitoring, incident detection and response, network forensics, threat-centric security, and FreeBSD...

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The "IT as a Business" Train Wreck

I just read this year-old article by InfoWorld's Bob Lewis titled Run IT as a business -- why that's a train wreck waiting to happen. It reminded me of comments on a CIO article I posted in 2008 as The Limits of Running IT Like a Business. Here I would like to emphasize a few of Bob's points via excerpts from the 2010 article.When IT is a business, selling to its internal customers, its principal product is software that "meets requirements." This...

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To Those Who Want Tim Thomas Books

I continue to be bombarded by questions from readers looking to buy the books by Timothy L Thomas, mentioned in my posts Review of Dragon Bytes Posted, Review of Decoding the Virtual Dragon Posted, and Review of The Dragon's Quantum Leap Posted. As you can see at Amazon.com, they are not available. I hope that the spotlight I'm shining on these books helps Mr Thomas either 1) reprint the books or 2) secure a different publisher who will reprint...

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TaoSecurity Lab

In a recent blog comment one of you asked about TaoSecurity lab. This is a collection of my own gear -- nothing associated with my corporate employer. I decided to post the diagram at left in case someone found it useful. To summarize the color scheme: 1) blue (and the blue squiggle) means "wireless access," regardless of the nature of the device (phone, appliance, laptop, etc.); 2) green means Cisco; 3) gray means "appliance"; 4) peach (?) means...

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VizSec 2011 Call for Papers Open

The call for papers for VizSec 2011 is open. VizSec2011 will be held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, on 20 July. Full paper submissions are due 1 April and panel abstract submissions are due 15 April. This is the conference to attend if you're interested in graphical depiction and analysis of security data! I was pleased to provide the keynote last year, but I will not be able to attend this year.Tw...

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Starting the New Year Right

Today's a company holiday (odd, but ok), so I figured what better way to start the New Year than to see if my Commodore 64 still works? I bought it in mid-1986, so it's almost 25 years old, and it's been over seven years since I posted My C-64 Rides Again. Since then the monitor I used with my C-64 died, but my dad shipped me his old RBG monitor.Would everything work? Could I access the Internet with it? The answer: YES. As you can see above,...

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2010 Review - 11 Best tutorials for learning Gimp

This list is not necessarily the best Gimp tutorials per se, but this is a list that will help someone become an expert using the Gimp. If you are a beginner just starting to use the Gimp, completing these tutorials will help you understand a great variety of the tools that the Gimp has to offer. Read article...

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