I read this article on pcworld.com by Matt Peckham on “15 Reasons PC Gaming Beats All” and felt I needed to respond to it. Some of the items were downright wrong especially items 7 and 11 on his list. If you haven’t already check out Matt’s arguments then come back and compare my responses.

Now I was a long time Hardcore PC gamer and in the past couple of years I started to sour on it when I realized how badly components, constant upgrades and time spent tweaking, troubleshooting and repairing was hitting my pocketbook and gaming time.

I’ve since dumped my gaming PC switched to a MacBook Pro for my primary computer and all my gaming is restricted to the 3 current generation consoles (Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii)

Read on for the full list

Today I was doing some idle tidying up and I decided I wanted to clean off the top of my Mac Mini. Months ago I had stuck a post-it note to it and the residue from the adhesive didn’t want to come off. I tried wiping it down with a general purpose cleaner, picking at it for a while but it just wasn’t coming off. I don’t know where it came from but I remembered something about using a normal white pencil eraser to clean off plastic. Well I tracked down a white eraser and just started rubbing at it like it was a pencil mark and sure enough within seconds all the glue residue was gone. This should work for any type of hard plastic like an old MacBook or fith or older generation iPod.

As a long time tech geek one of the things I’ve found useful and interesting is technical books. Hacking, Programming, System Administration, Software, Protocols, Operating Systems. Even if I don’t actually work with that particular subject I still enjoy learning about it. Well thanks to hacknmod.com I’ve found a repository of thousands of free digitized tech books. Everything from the PHP Cookbook to Windows XP Annoyances can be found HERE Most of the files are in .pdf format but a few are in .chm and a couple in .html. Hacknmod.com also points us to another repository of knowledge HERE

Make sure you check out the original article HERE

As always if you have any questions comments or suggestions please post them in the comment section below.

TCPDump. If you want to capture traffic you need to be using this tool. TCPDump is small lightweight and really easy to understand once you learn the basic syntax. It’s the perfect tool to gather info off the wired or wireless network. If you’re running it on a computer with dsniff installed you can use dsniff to route traffic through your computer and see everything your target is doing even on a switched network (See the article on How-To spy on other users on the local network from back in August )

For years the de-facto groupware suite was Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Well as someone who prefers to not use Microsoft products if I can avoid it this has been somewhat of a problem. Sure there have been some projects that replaced some of the functionality of Exchange (Like Zimbra)  but there have always been problems. Things just never seemed to work quite right. That is until I tried Zarafa. Zarafa is an Exchange replacement that runs on Linux. Like a lot of recent Open Source projects the company responsible for Zarafa as made available both a Community (Read “free as in beer and speech”) version that has a restriction of 3 connected mapi (Outlook) clients and a paid version that you can pay for per client access license.

The key features of Zarafa are

1. Ajax based web interface (This is as close to Outlook in a web browser as I’ve ever seen)
2. Outlook support (versions 2000 to 2007)
3. Mobile support (Push email to Activesync devices (Windows Mobile or iPhone) via Z-Push
4. Active Directory/LDAP integration
5. POP3/IMAP support
6. MySQL support
7. Single Sign on support
8. Brick Level Backup (not in the community version)

Nmap is one of those essential tools that you find yourself always reaching for after a few years of system administration. It’s an excellent tool for network mapping but more importantly for our purposes it can be used for security auditing. The main ways I use Nmap are as a port scanner and in some cases to identify the OS of the IP being scanned. These are by no means the only uses. Nmap has a ton of option and in addition can be extended with scripts.

Stealth MAC is an absolute necessity if you’re going to be doing anything subversive from your iPod/iPhone every network enabled device has what is known as a MAC address which is a unique identifier that’s assigned to the network adapter by the manufacturer. These are supposed to be globally unique ( but that’s not always the case) and normally the first three pairs of numbers/letters identify the hardware manufacturer. This is terrible if we’re planning on doing something subversive on a network as it’s a digital footprint of our activities.