How To Share Files & Folders From Mac to Windows XP Using VirtualBox

Hardware Reliability

Within the past few months, I've had a number of components & accessories break. What's shocking, is that the equipment wasn't old (< 6 months). One of my hard drives failed, a SATA 160gb, ok - that was a couple of years old, so as annoying as it was, I put it down to bad luck.

Soon after, my Razer Abysuss Mouse broken. I opened it up and found what looked like pretty cheap parts under the chassis:

Underneath the board, I found two small pieces of plastic that controlled the DPI of the mouse and the frequency. These plastic pieces looked very inexpensive to produce and were very difficult to align with the board.

But that wasn't the main issue. The main issue was with the scroll wheel. Along with plenty of other Razer Abysuss users around the world, the scroll wheel had broken/dropped/worn. I admitted defeat and binned it - I'd long lost the receipt.

A few weeks later, my Creative Inspire T3300 2.1 surround sound's power button decided to break. The power button is on the remote that comes built into the system and not only is this button the button to turn on the speakers, it's also the volume control. I opened up the remote:

I was shocked to see that the volume 'slider' had a screw holding it in. Yes, you guessed it, every time you turn the volume up & down, it's slowly turning the screw, which means the volume slider gets dislodged and out of place. I screwed in the slider as tight as I could, resealed the light and soon enough, I had a green light, signifying all was well!

 

Maybe, I've just been super unlucky, but you don't have to look too far to find other people with similar experiences. I hope manufacturers will increase the quality of their products as time goes on. No matter what price you pay for a product - it should do what it was intended to do - without breaking - at least for a bit longer. :) 

Thanks for reading.

An Introduction to Linux Command Line

I read an article about command-line recently and one sentence stood out: “many people younger than 30 have never used, or have little knowledge of command-line”. I would say that this has some truth to it. As a university student studying Computer Forensics BSc, I see many people aged between 18-25 and I’ve yet to meet one who knows the first thing about command-line. In this post, we’ll be looking at the terminal/*nix shell. In Windows, Mac OS and Linux, users can communicate with the computer via the terminal. Terminals serve as conduits for inputting and displaying characters. In Windows, you will see the terminal referred to as the command prompt, which can be called up by typing ‘cmd’ (without quotes) into Start > Run and hitting enter.

In Mac & Linux, you’ll see a ‘Terminal’ with an icon like this: 
Often, you’ll find that Unix commands don’t carry out an entire task by themselves, but when used in conjunction with other commands, the usefulness vastly increases. For the following examples, we wont be using anything Windows-related.

 Open up your shell and navigate over to your desktop using the cd command. (cd = change directory) Example: “cd /home/username/desktop” Now think about what files you may have there. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a few folders and other files lying around. If you type in: ‘ls’ you will be presented with a list of files on your desktop.

 That’s OK, but there’s not a whole lot of information there. Typing in ‘ls –l’ will give you a long-list, which will say: ‘Total x’ where total indicates the total number of disk blocks required to store the files.

Column 1 displays permissions,
Column 2 displays links, which we’ll discuss another time,
Column 3 displays the owner,
Column 4 displays the group,
Column 5 displays the size (in bytes) e.g 33964250.
Column 6 displays the last modification e.g 10 Dec 10:00
and finally Column 7 displays the file name.

 You may notice that the results displayed aren’t in alphabetical order. This may be because you have a mixture of uppercase & lowercase file names. This is an instance where we need to use two tools (commands). We will end this post by discussing the pipe symbol: |  . The pipe symbol simply lets you transfer the results over to another command. So lets say you have just ran ‘ls –l’ but you wish to sort the results. You could run the following: ‘ls –l | sort’.

Your results will still be off. If you consult the manual for sort by typing in ‘sort --help’ you’ll see you need to add –f to ignore upper/lowercase. So typing in: ‘ls –l | sort –f’ will work. You’re essentially asking for a long list of file names, permissions, groups, then piping the results of that command over to sort, ignoring the case. The output will be posted on your screen.

 I hope this was a useful insight into command-line for beginners.

Stay tuned for much more.