I upgraded to Mountain Lion yesterday, as I like to torture myself a little from time to time and see what an OS upgrade will break this time. I’ve only two things that didn’t work, Mailplane and Parallels. Mailplane needed to be upgraded to either version 2.x preview or to the Mailplane 3 beta.

Parallels also had an upgrade with support for Mountain Lion and installing that got it working.

I have two 24” monitors on my Mac and I run Parallels full screen on my 2nd monitor. On the new version with OS X Mountain Lion, when I click inside the VM, apps on my main display start flickering like crazy. There is a forum post on it here, but basically the fix for now is to disable 3d acceleration on your VM.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a beer snob. I don’t like canned beer and will do a lot to avoid it. It has a metallic taste that I don’t like and I much prefer bottles. I know draft beer comes in large aluminium barrels, but it doesn’t seem to affect the taste in anything like the same way as 500ml cans do. 

Then I came across this…

At first I quite liked the can bottle, as it’s aesthetically appealing, I much prefer the mouthpiece on a bottle to a can, so I thought, ok, maybe this’ll be alright as I do really like the actual receptacle. Then I drank it. No Heineken, no, just no. It tastes exactly the same as canned beer but costs the same as a bottle. Oh well.

I’m currently waiting for a parcel to be delivered which is my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 that is coming from the US. I received a spam message that took me in for a minute, as I thought it was related to the camera. 

Postal notification, 

Our company’s courier couldn’t make the delivery of parcel.
Status deny:Fee isn’t paid. 

LOCATION OF YOUR PARCEL:Irving 
STATUS: sort order 
SERVICE: One-day Shipping 
NUMBER OF YOUR ITEM:U413001201NU 
FEATURES: No 

The label of your parcel is enclosed to the letter.
You should print the label and show it in the nearest post office to get a parcel. 

Important information!
If the parcel isn’t received within 30 working days our company will have the right to claim compensation from you for it's keeping in the amount of $5.94 for each day of keeping over limited time. 

You can find the information about the procedure and conditions of parcels keeping in the nearest office. 


Thank you.
Royal Mail Logistics Services.

First thing I did was to check the headers of the message (below). I noticed that it got an SPF pass, which I first thought a bit strange as the email was showing as being from status.id959@royalmail.com, then I noticed it was actually “status.id959@royalmail.com via s2.ingenihost.com”, so the SPF pass was for the domain ingenihost.com.

Delivered-To: 
Received: by 10.194.54.37 with SMTP id g5csp160341wjp;
        Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:10:46 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.224.72.138 with SMTP id m10mr7310631qaj.5.1341007846024;
        Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:10:46 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: 
Received: from s2.ingenihost.com (s2.ingenihost.com. [96.9.180.53])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id d3si6031089qao.0.2012.06.29.15.10.45
        (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER);
        Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:10:45 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of colourfu@s2.ingenihost.com designates 96.9.180.53 as permitted sender) client-ip=96.9.180.53;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of colourfu@s2.ingenihost.com designates 96.9.180.53 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=colourfu@s2.ingenihost.com
Received: from colourfu by s2.ingenihost.com with local (Exim 4.69)
	(envelope-from )
	id 1SkjOm-0002rY-Bf
	for ; Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:10:44 -0400
To: 
Subject: Delivery information contains at the postal label
From: "Royal Mail CS" 
X-Mailer: SayMailSMTP
Reply-To: "Royal Mail CS" 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type:multipart/mixed;boundary="----------13410078444FEE27E45161A"
Message-Id: 
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:10:44 -0400
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - s2.ingenihost.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - 
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [543 32003] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - s2.ingenihost.com
X-Source: /usr/bin/php
X-Source-Args: /usr/bin/php /home/colourfu/public_html/.c007.php 
X-Source-Dir: colourfulspaces.com:/public_html

They actually screwed up the attachment, as the file didn’t have a name (filename=”“), so Gmail called it noname. I downloaded it and gave it a .zip extension, unzipped it and found a 44KB file called Label_Royal_Mail_Express_Services_UK4784256.exe. Out of interest I scanned it on Virus Total and found it contained a virus that Kaspersky calls Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Dapato.bkqg. Results for the scan are here.

So definitely not my new camera then. Reported it as spam in Gmail and on SpamCop so hopefully the senders IP gets blacklisted pretty soon.

I’ve seen error 2147943785 a couple of times and it’s always been due to the user that is set to run the scheduled task not having the Log On As Batch Job assignment. 

Start Menu > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Log On As Batch Job

Add the user that is set to run the scheduled task and try to run it again.

I was needed to open a Visual Studio 11 Beta Metro project in Blend and got the error:

The project ‘MyProject.csproj’ could not be opened. The imported project ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\WindowsXaml\v10.0\Microsoft.Windows.UI.Xaml/CSharp.targets’ was not found. Confirm that the path in the <import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

First thought was to edit the line that contains: v$(VisualStudioVersion)\Microsoft.Windows.UI.Xaml.CSharp.targets” in my csproj file, changing v$(VisualStudioVersion) to 11, but that’s not a nice solution. To fix this properly, just use the setx command to set the value and restart Blend.

setx VisualStudioVersion 11.0

I would like to start by pointing out that I’m not endorsing copyright infringement with this post, however The Pirate Bay has a massive amount of totally free downloads, from music promos to open source software, which the music and movie lobby groups have managed to get blocked in the UK courts (just ISPs Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2, BT, Everything Everywhere) and I believe in a free and open internet. That being said, I’d also like to point out that infringement is not the same as theft, no matter how many times they tell you illegal downloading is ‘stealing’. I believe that until they give people reasonably priced, easy to access to TV shows and movies on demand, piracy is only going to keep getting more and more prevalent.

I won’t stay with an ISP that censors the internet, until I’m out of reasonable choices. I’m currently contracted to Virgin Media (because 100 meg), but I will switch to a fibre connection from a smaller ISP that hasn’t been forced into censorship by the BPI and company.

The craziest thing about all this for me is the fact that this has given The Pirate Bay a free massive profile boost via what is known as the Streisand effect.

The easiest option is to simply bypass the blocks with a mirror/proxy site. Here is a list of such sites that are tested to currently work on Virgin Media (and should work on all other UK ISPs): 

1. https://tpb.ipredator.se (official mirror)
2. http://www.pirateproxy.net
3. tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
4. http://tpb.piraten.lu
5. https://tpb.partidopirata.com.ar
6. https://piratereverse.info
7. Google Translate
8. thepiratebay.se.proxy.piratenpartij.nl
9. Yahoo Babelfish Translate
10. http://thepiratebay.se.nyud.net
11. http://labaia.ws
12. tpb.europeancensorship.eu/nph-tpb.cgi/http/thepiratebay.se
13. all4xs.net/repress/thepiratebay.se
14. freedomto.us

Other sites that you shouldn’t use:

1. alt.ragerik.info - Doesn’t work properly
2. thepiratebay.ee - DO NOT USE. It is a scam site.

By far my favourite in that list is Google Translate which you can just use as a fast, advert free, web proxy. Using something as simple as Google Translate to bypass a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay made me chuckle. Another good tip is that you can just add .nyud.net to any URL to access it via the proxy, so http://thepiratebay.se becomes http://thepiratebay.se.nyud.net.

A reader called amity19 left a comment on this post pointing out that you can use the Opera web browser’s turbo feature to access The Pirate Bay and other blocked sites, as it routes all the requests via Opera’s servers for optimisation. To enable it, just go to Preferences > Webpages > Opera Turbo and enable it. It’s a  handy feature and seems to work well.

You can also configure your web browser to use an HTTP or SOCKS proxy quite easily and there is a list of free proxies here and here. For the more technically inclined, I wrote a guide a while ago that tells you how to setup an anonymous Squid proxy on Debian linux, so you could get yourself a Virtual Private Server in another country and use that. A much more simple option however is to SSH to a computer in a country where it isn’t blocked. There is an easy to follow guide on how to do that here. 

The above list will give you access to The Pirate Bay from UK ISPs, however if you really value your privacy, the best option is to use a VPN. You can download your torrents via this anonymously as well as broswing the site. If you want to be even more anonymous you can also use a pre-paid credit card to pay for them (to protect your privacy). There is a list of VPN providers here, however iPredator is operated by The Pirate Bay themselves and a good option. There are also free services such as VPNReactor, which will give you 30 minutes free per connection, which should be plenty of time to find the magnet link to download the latest music promo, etc.

To go one better than a VPN for downloading, use a Seed Box (more info here).

There is also a petition against the censorship of The Pirate Bay, here.