Yes... I'm Still Alive

It has occurred to me that it has been two weeks since my last post. Time sure flies doesn’t it? Having a wife and kids, a business to run, and everything else that goes on, it is hard to keep up sometimes. But, don’t worry, I’m still alive and have a lot of neat things to share… I just need more time to do it! Ugh!

My birthday was this past week and, I’m not going to lie, it was pretty awesome! I got to go out to eat with family and friends and also got some cool stuff.

I get some questions from time to time, most of them I can answer by email and are not really significant enough to post on the site (as they are more specific/acute problems), but every once in a while I get a quest that I think will benefit a lot of people and so I try to post it on here for other to read.

So… What do you think?

But, since things have been really crazy lately, I’m going to ask for your opinion(s)… What type of stuff would you like to read/learn from this site? If you have an idea for something that would be interesting and useful to yourself and others, please let me know (comment below or via facebook, twitter, or email).

One of these days I need to put up some reviews on some paperbacks I’ve been reading… Some really good ones too!

I’m looking forward to your feedback guys and gals! have a great weekend!

O hai! U Found Me? Srsly?

Do you have a smart-phone (or a modern camera with GPS)? Do you take pics with it? Do you ever upload them on the internet (social networking, tweeting, forums, email) or text them? Well did you know there is (probably*) hidden data in those pics that anyone could use to track your location. Scary isn’t it?! The hidden data is referred to as EXIF (or sometimes just Meta-data) and contains information like the camera make and model, the image dimensions, and yes: GPS coordinates…

I knew about this (at least to some extent), but I didn’t realize how easy it was for any individual to access that data and use it to track you down, until today. Take a look at this video:

So what to do now?!

1. Well, if you’re worried about pictures you’ve already uploaded, you might consider trying to remove them or at least try to change the privacy settings to try to limit who has access to these photos.
2. The next step would be to disable the geotagging feature of your camera (on the iPhone open Settings and go to “General->Location Services” and turn the Camera toggle off) so that no more GPS data will be tagged on the pics.
3. Finally it’s time to remove the GPS data from existing pictures, I’ll show you how to do that next…

Removing GPS Data (Geotags) From Pictures

I’m going to show you the FREE way, but keep in mind if this scares you (we’re going to use the command line), then there are other options out there (but I don’t have time to find them for you, sorry… the command line / terminal isn’t that scary, really)…

Step 1: Install Jhead

Get Jhead and install it on your computer. It is available for Linux, Mac, Windows and even FreeBSD.

If you are using Ubuntu you can get it straight from the repositories using this command:

Otherwise you will need to see the “releases” section on the main page: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Installation Help
(Note: if you installed it from the repos on Ubuntu, you can skip to the next step)

This is a command line program, there is no GUI (no point-click, no pretty pictures or icons, etc.), so you need to make it easy to access and use.

Mac OS X
If it goes anything like my download did, it might have a “.txt” extension on the end, and it will be in your Downloads folder. Do whatever you like, but I moved mine to a folder I use for command line utilities like this: /Applications/Utilities/NoGUI/ is my directory of choice. Assuming your situation is like mine, here are the commands to make the file executable, rename it, and move it to that destination:

note: if you get an error about there being no such directory, then it’s because you don’t have a NoGUI folder yet, so make one like this:

now it’s not going to be much fun typing out: /Applications/Utilities/NoGUI/jhead every time you want to run the command… so let’s make an alias to simplify things. I’m going to assume you don’t have an alias for your text editor of choice yet, and I’m also going to assume you don’t care for command line / terminal editors like Vi, Vim, Nano, or Emacs, so we’ll do it the ugly way once, then we’ll go ahead and create a alias to the TextEdit as well to make this easier for you in the future.

In your terminal… you should still be at your Home (user)… run the following to backup your bash profile and open the profile (not the backup) in TextEdit:

Now, go to the bottom of the file and on a new line enter the following lines:

Now Save and Quit. You should now be back at the terminal. Now Quit Terminal and then Open it again. When it reopens you the new aliases should have loaded. To be sure type: alias and if it worked you will see all available aliases listed in the output. Now you can skip to Step 2.

Windows
I haven’t tested this on Windows, but there is an executable listed on the page so download it and put it in the root directory of your C: drive. If you want to set up an “alias” for it on Windows, you could try making an environment variable/path for it using the info found here. But for the rest of this guide, I’m just going to assume you put “jhead.exe” in “C:\” so for all of the commands below you will navigate to the directory where your photos are and then will run “C:\jhead.exe ” followed by the rest of the command, the path to the image will stay relative to your current directory.

Linux (other than Ubuntu)
I’ll update this later if I have time… but for now I’ll just have to assume you know how to install things on your own distribution or at least know how to look it up. Sorry.

Step 2: Remove/Modify EXIF Data From Pics

Locate the files you want to modify and then navigate there in your terminal or command prompt. (use Terminal in Linux or Mac, and use Command Prompt — cmd.exe — in Windows).

Once you have changed directory (cd in case you forgot how and you can use ls in Linux/Mac or DIR in Windows to list the files in that directory if you want) and then test the Jhead installation and alias by testing on a photo:

If it works you will see some output like this:

Now, obviously I changed the GPS data for this example… But it’s definitely there… for now!

Please note: All of the following commands are for BATCH processing (doing multiple files at once). You may need to change the extension from “.jpg” to “.JPG” depending on your operating system and the way your files are named. As far as I know Jhead only works with jpg/JPG/jpeg/JPEG files.
If you only want to process one image at a time, just substitute the file name of that image for the “*.jpg”

Here’s the code to remove the stuff we don’t want/need

To remove the EXIF/GPS data (but keep basic info like pic size and date/time) use this:

To remove do the same as above AND add your own comment use this:

If you want to remove EVERYTHING you can and leave just the bare-minimum to display the image, use the following:

If you are interested in other options to use with Jhead, see the full list here: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/usage.html

And that’s all folks!

If you have questions or run into problems, please feel free to comment below or contact me via one of the other methods listed on the Contact Page. Thanks!

Well I mentioned recently that I was going to make a new theme for the site and here it is! To go with the new theme I also changed the navigation. Now the menu is sorted by topic only and is pretty straightforward. (If for some reason you liked the old “Antidote” category posts, they are still here, just under “Tech Stuff”).

Some of these new sections are empty — as in there are no posts there yet — but that will change in the near future. I now have another author to help add content to this site, so stay tuned.

For comparison I have included some small screenshots of the old and new themes with a new poll for you to vote and tell me what you think. If you have ideas/suggestions to make it better, feel free to leave a comment, or contact me via twitter, facebook, or email. Thanks!

New Theme

Old Theme

Since Google has disabled my AdSense account and appealing their decision has no promise of being fruitful, I am left with a slight dilemma… What to do now?

I have space for ads, but no ads to place there. I have a few ideas, but really can’t decide.

Perhaps you can help… I am open to suggestions. You can leave a comment here, on facebook, or on twitter (or if you’re really shy you can send me an email using the “request/suggest an antidote” pages in the menu). I will give it a few days and take count of the votes/suggestions and proceed from there.

Here are the choices I’ve been considering, pick one (or two) or suggest an idea of your own:

1.) Seek out an alternative ad campaign similar to AdSense

2.) Write reviews about books and stuff on Amazon and hope people buy them (Amazon affiliate program)

3.) Seek out a pay-per-post type program (suggestions?)

4.) No Ads, no reviews, just hope people donate to $$$ freely (yeah, there’s a donate button on my page lol who knew?)

5.) Other (here’s where you make your suggestions)

Thanks in advance to all who are nice enough to offer feedback.

So I spent the past couple days helping my brother-in-law try to figure out why he was having issues booting not one, but two Ubuntu installations…

They were both Ubuntu 9.04, one being a single OS machine and the other a dual boot with some flavor of Windows (I never asked as I didn’t think it relevant, and it wasn’t). All of our correspondence was done via email and facebook.

I’m going to post a very ugly overview of the situation below (for anyone desperate, bored, or just curious), but it’s going to be ugly (at least for now) as I have little to no time to format it or include relevant commands and other details.

I have asked him to compile his experience into something useful/readable, but he’s very busy… I’m not sure who is more busy, he or I… So we’ll see…

—————————————————— ——————————————————

The single boot machine… The problem was that when he booted the machine up, instead of loading the GRUB menu, it dropped to the GRUB prompt.The cause was an issue (probably an update gone-wrong and/or that was interrupted) where his menu.lst was truncated and lacked significant boot settings/options as well as menu items. The solution was to recreate his menu.lst which I did with help from some output he sent me, and he had to modify because I goofed on the hd’s as I put (hd0,1) when it should have been (hd0,0)  and then replacing the old truncated menu.lst with the correct one.

The dual boot machine… The problem was that Ubuntu would not boot up at all and he was unable to access the files (even with a Live CD). The cause was actually fairly easy to determine. On this machine he used Wubi to install Ubuntu inside Windows. This meant that not only does (Wubi) Ubuntu rely on the Windows MBR to boot, but the file system for Ubuntu is stored inside the Windows partition as a virtual disk! Windows is notoriously bad at managing file systems (hence why you need to defragment the hard drive/partitions at frequent intervals). Windows caused an error that essentially moved his Ubuntu virtual disks and renamed them as something like “found.000″ (or something like that). Anyway, you can find more about that here: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wubi-install-ubuntu-in-windows-partition/ and here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide#Cannot%20boot%20into%20Ubuntu

Alex’s Antidote is currently undergoing some major changes….

During the transition process there will be few or perhaps no new posts.
Most, if not all, of the old content will be removed, hidden, or replaced.

Some changes you can expect to see:
- New theme/layout
– with better navigation
– better look and feel
– better functionality

- New Features
– New Content (purpose and direction)
– User-Specific Options
– And More!

If you would like to be placed on the mailing list to receive newsletter updates by email, please send an email with your request to: alex@alexsantidote.com
Until then… Take care!
…Alex