Have you ever had the problem where you click on the “My Computer” and you get the Explorer window that shows all the drives, but it also includes the “Folders” window off on the left, you know the one that you get when you click the “Folders” button next on the Explorer Navigation Bar at the top.

Or maybe your the type of person who WANTS the “Folders” window to be displayed on the left.

Either way, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I prefer NOT to have this “Folders” window active because it gets in the way when I’m viewing a folder as thumbs such as a picture gallery or video gallery. Over the last few weeks I’ve had my computers rebuilt here at the office and they always seem to come back with this “Folders” window as the default, as in I open a folder or “My Computer” and I get this Folder view on the left. For me it is VERY annoying!!! Furthermore, closing the window EVERY SINGLE TIME is not a feasible solution because it is also annoying and time consuming when you have to add one extra click to EVERY SINGLE WINDOW you open! So I went hunting for a solution today! After several hours of hacking the Windows Registry I found the solution that didn’t require digging into the Windows Registry at all.

All you have to do is open an Explorer window and click the ”Tools” Menu, then navigate to the menu item “Folder Options” then select the “File Types” Tab.

Scroll down to “(NONE) Folder” and click it. Then click the “Advanced” button (at the bottom).

Click on “Explore” or “Open” (Depending on which type of behavior you prefer from Windows.)  then click the “Set Default” button.

Click “Ok”, Click “Apply”, Click “Ok”.

That’s it.

Cheers

~Seth

When I was a kid in 1885…I mean 1985, my dad got our family a new computer. The computer my dad got us was called the “Amiga 1000″.

Shortly after that we got the “Flight Simulator 2.0″ from Electronic Arts game company. This was the program I used to learn how to fly in the computer simulator. I loved this simulator, there wasn’t much else I could do in those days because this was the very best technology that was available at the time. So I would fly in the simulator ALL the time! In fact I loved it so much that I would setup chairs in my bedroom so the neighbor kids could come over and become passengers in my simulated airline.

My bedroom was in the basement of my parents house and that’s where they kept the computer. So we had lots of space down there and when all the neighbor kids came over then my sister would dress up as a stewardess and cater to them with hors doeuvres.

Yes I was a super geek even then!

A few years later a new game came out called “F-18 Interceptor”. Wikipedia lists the release date as 1888…I mean 1988. I got my first volenteer job at Shawnee Mission Medical Center around 1991 because the summer of 1992 I went to Bakersfield California to work with my uncle for his masonry company, and the summer of 1993 I got my first real job working for Taco Bell near my house.

So between 1988 and 1991 I spent a lot of time flying F-18 Interceptor, esspecially the carrier landings. This video game had a system to log your flight hours, and 1991 I would have been in 7th grade. So by 7th grade I had already logged well over 7,000 hours of flight simulator time.

Just a few weeks ago my friend Craig Russell of Americans In Orbit-50 Years decided to take me up flying with him from the local airport here in Huntsville Alabama. After we were in the air, he told me to take the controls, so I did and it was the coolest feeling I ever had! Craig could tell immediately that I had a lot of experience because I had such an easy hand on the controls. That’s because I had already trained my mind and muscels how to fly an airplane as early as 7th grade and even before then! Craig has a long and distinguished flying career because he used to fly for commercial airlines, so Craig has something in the ball-park of 9,000 hours of actual flying time. He was very surprised to learn that I had 7,000+ hours in flight simulators even before 7th grade! Now everyone laughs at me because they find it funny to imagine a little kid sitting at a computer flying a simulator all hours of the day and night! So much as even starting a simulated airline in the basement!

I will admit this is a little amusing, now that I think about it.

Some of you may ask, why didn’t you go into avation for a career in the first place?

Well this is a good question, I loved the idea of flying, being free above the world without a care. But I also recognized that it would get boring really quick as a job, because the cockpit would become my office and I would just be sitting behind the controls all the time flying from point A, to point B and back again. This didn’t appeal to me at all, I would have prefered to be in a fighter jet, or testing new airplanes. It was impossible to get into testing new planes unless you had some flight time in a higher performance fighter jet of some kind, and the only real way that a kid could get into that would be to join the airforce, and I wasn’t about to do that! Likewise it was mostly impossible to get into really flying fighter jets if you had eye problems like me. So I knew this was not an option for me. I decided to get into Electrical Engineering and become as smart as I could and educate myself on everything that I possibly could about science and physics. This was also an area that interested me. So that was the direction my career took.

I would like to thank Craig for giving me my first experience flying a real airplane! The other day I helped Craig upload a new video for AIO50 that was aired on a local TV station here in Huntsville for the Americans In Orbit-50 Years event at the Davidson Space Center, US Space Camp. Get a load of these kids in the video!…Awesome!! I love it!

Cheers!

~Seth

Hey guys and gals.

Thankfully I’ve finally got some attention from the spammers.

For those of you who haven’t been watching my site lately, I’ve gotten hit with a DOS - Denial of Service Attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

Thank goodness I don’t have any business operations on my site, so it doesn’t really matter. The network engineers at my host, I really want to thank them for the extra effort on shutting these jerks down!

There was a report released recently on Information Weekly that estimated the cost of the global spam problem at $21.58 billion USD!!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=59300834

To the spammers and bot-net managers, it’s like I warned you earlier, if you play with fire you get burned! Spam me at your own risk!

To the rest of you, I’ve decided to give you all the best little tools that I use to report these guys and get them shut down. I’ve already told you about Spamcop in a previous blog post.

http://www.spamcop.net/

For reference on my previous spam posts:

Message to Spammers!

My First Spammer

Alright so your like me and your tired of spam, the key to stop spam is not simply to filter it and ignore it, but to shut them down! You need to report them to the network managers in charge of the networks that the spammers are using for their bot-nets. Many times the network managers won’t do anything about it because they believe it’s not their responsibility. So in that case you have to make it their responsibility by also reporting it to the ISP that the network managers use to maintain their connection to the Internet backbone. Often times even these ISPs won’t do anything, so you have to report it to their backbone provider as well. In the case where the source is an international location, then you can also report it to the managers and tech people who run the domain name extension for that country. These are called country domain extensions:

http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/topleveldomains/countrycodeA-E.asp

So how do I get all this information without taking hours of research for each spam e-mail that I get? Can you really expect me to do that?!

Actually, no, you don’t need to spend hours of research for each spam e-mail, mostly it’s just a matter of some quick searches on some key sites then copy and paste the information contained in those search results.

I used to think using Spamcop was enough because it dropped my spam from 150 spam e-mails a day down to just 10, but I’ve gotten tired of the 10 spam e-mails I keep getting every day, so now I’m down to just a few. Usually only about 2 or 3, and usually only that when I post a blog entry.

So what tools do I use?

Once you’ve reported the spam e-mail to Spamcop they give you an IP for the source of the spam in the report and the spam trace. After I submit the Spamcop report, I usually click the “Back” button to return to the full Spamcop report. I copy and paste the entire Spamcop report to into a new e-mail. Then I copy and paste the IP - Internet Protocol address:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol

You will see this as a series of numbers for instance 192.168.100.125

This is an example of an IP address, or it might look something like this:

192.168.1.25, or similar…

I copy and paste this set of numbers into this search site:

http://network-tools.com/

These guys give you the entire search results, even if there is another Internet provider. You see many times the source of the spam comes from some other location on the globe like Asia, or Africa and each of these  regional Internet providers that provide who-is service and other who-is services don’t get you the information for all these other who-is regional services, but Network-tools.com does return results from the local, regional and global who-is results for all network addresses! It also tells you what company is the register of that ISP plus contact information for the tech’s, administrators and network engineers at those organizations and their providers all the way up the food chain.

Now how the heck do I get country domain extensions such as .uk, .br, .ng, etc…?

There is a little organization called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, they have a little thing called Root Zone Database where you can find all the contact information for related managers and technicians of the country/organization for that given country extension.

http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/

That should give you enough information to get started with your own spam reporting.

For all you spammers, I again, encourage you to spam me some more, so I can report your ass and shut you down! Spam me at your own risk, and don’t blame me if your bot-net gets shut down, your the one spamming!

You can spam me here, but don’t blame me when you get in trouble:

Iceversaka@hotmail.com

Cheers

~Seth

A few weeks ago I got in a conversation with someone about HHO gas and was told that because the gas is mixed and if it’s under pressure it becomes volitile. The person telling me this said that it would become EXTREAMLY unstable, so much so that it would be comparable to nitroglycerin. A single breath of air or tap of the finger or so much as looking at it sternly could set it off. I decided to test this albiet at my own modest testing abilities. The best way I could figure to test this was to just use a plastic water bottle, fill it with water and turn it upside down in a bubbler jar with the gas delivery hose running into the water bottle. I turned on my gas generator unit and watched it fizz. Soon I could see bubbles in my upside down water bottle which displaced the water filling the bottle with gas. Once the bottle was full I yanked it out and screwed the cap on as fast as I could. Now armed with a plastic bottle full of HHO gas I put on some protective boots, gloves and goggles. I squeezed the plastic water bottle with my gloved hands softly at first and tapped the container. As I expected, nothing. I squeezed harder and tapped again softly at first then harder and harder with a spoon even. Finally I stood on the bottle with the ball of my foot but not all my weight and again tapped softly then hard and harder. Still nothing. Now I put my full weight on the bottle and tapped softly, then hard and finally I slammed the bottle. Still nothing.

So atleast for a moderate PSI the gas does not become volitile. I think I’ve disproven that idea. Although pressurized HHO can still be dangerious if it’s around flame or electricity because the detonation velocity is so high the flame could propogate right through the pressure value on a tank and into a storage tank, which would make for a VERY bad day!!!

Just to prove that the bottle really was filled with HHO gas I put it behind a wall, took off the plastic cap and stood behind the wall with my long grill lighter. KABOOM!!!!!!! The bottle flew about 30 feet!

There are several things I observed doing this.

1. The bottle didn’t explode, it is still functional as a plastic water bottle, although mangled nearly beyond recognition.
2. Containing the implosion inside the plastic bottle made for more of a boom and less of a pop. Usually when I light the bubbles at the top of my bubbler they make a REALLY LOUD….BANG!!! But not a BOOM!
3. The reaction happening really is an implosion not an explosion because the plastic bottle is mangled inward as if it was just pulled from one of those cubes of compressed trash at the dump, and also because the plastic bottle wasn’t blown to bits.

So I think I’ve managed to lay that theory to rest. What I expect is that higher pressures could become volitile if the temperature isn’t managed or maintained at a lower level.

Experiment safely!

Cheers

~Seth

I just wanted to inform everyone that some changes have been made to the forum and the blog on my site. In case you haven’t noticed, all users registered on the forum are now also registered on the blog and all users registered on the blog are now also registered on the forums for my site. I’ve also updated the graphics for the login and reg. pages. A number of additional security measures have been put into place to keep the spammers and hackers out. This has proven to be most effective! Dan also added a useful and much needed Nav-bar to the forums.

All of this is special thanks to my new friend and part-time employee Dan Meeks. I had to bring Dan in because all of this has grown beyond the scope were I could manage it all by my self. Dan is an amazing web programmer and brings a lot of skills to the table. I want to thank Dan for the incredible work and efforts that he’s made on updating the site and making sure that everything works together so well, all without breaking my bank account. (Completely… )

If you want to hire Dan to work on one of your projects, let this stand as a professional recommendation. You can reach him on his Rent-A-Coder page here:

http://about.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/SoftwareCoders/ShowBioInfo.aspx?x=Freeport&y=Illinois&lngAuthorId=680265

But please, if your going to hire Dan for one of your projects, don’t give him to much work, as I still have more stuff for him to do on my site first.

Cheers

~Seth

Just the other day I was working on a document at work that was very important! I had several places to back-up the document to because of different versions of the software that I was working with at the same time. I was in a hurry and saved the file then went to copy it to the other folder for the other version of our software. I knew I would be over writing the other older version, however, I accedently selected from the wrong window. I selected the old file and did a drag-n-drop to the new folder. Since I was in a hurry I didn’t check the expected pop-up request to over-write the file. I just clicked yes. So the old file just destroyed all the changes I just worked so hard to make on the new file.

How many of you have made this exact mistake so many times?

Your choices, well you could go out and download some trialware product that will not let you actually recover anything unless you pay. Or you could just out-right buy some comercial solution for undeleting the file really fast. You’ve just got one file you want to undelete and your in a hurry to recover it. You don’t need some massive corporate solution with a big price tag on it, and your under the gun to get this document out the door so you don’t really have the time to redo all the work you just did.

The solution I found is called NTFS Undelete. This is a simple, easy to use and FREE Undelete package that will scan a particular folder or drive and give you the option to navigate some folders or files that may have been deleted and recover them, or copy them to another drive.

I installed this thing and was able to recover my document for FREE and without even rebooting!

http://ntfsundelete.com/

Cheers and Enjoy!

~Seth

I just got this summary from an old friend in Minnesota:

Ben Huset president of the MNSFS - Minnesota Space Frontier Society

This is a sumary of a great man who passed away this week: Konrad Dannenberg

Written by Greg Allison of the Huntsville HAL-5 chapter of NSS - National Space Society

Space Pioneer Konrad K. Dannenberg passed away on the 16th of February 2009 at the age of 96. He was not only one of the last of the Von Braun’s original rocket team, but one of the most active publicly. In the 1920’s Dannenberg began his rocketry career developing mail rockets after a lecture by Max Valier inspired his interest in space. Mr. Dannenberg designed the injectors of the A4 “V-2″ rocket. Dannenberg went to Ft. Bliss Texas as part of Operation Paper Clip to advance US Army missile development. Later he transfered with the rest of the German Rocket Team to Redstone Arsenal next to Hunstville Alabama where he became a manager on the US Army’s Jupiter and Redstone missiles. He joined NASA when the Marshall Space Flight Center was formed and became a key member of America’s first program to land people on the moon. Mr. Dannenberg rose to the position of depty director of the Saturn V Program, developing the largest rocket ever flown.

This earned him NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. After retiring from NASA in 1973 Dannenberg worked extensively with young people to foster their interest in space. He was an instructor at the US Space Camp, and led the way for student flight experiments on space shuttle Get-Away-Special (GAS) canisters. As a man of vision, Dannenberg was active in the World Future Society. He was a charter member and served on the Board of Directors of the L5 Society, parent society to the National Space Society. Mr. Dannenberg played a critical role in starting Huntsville’s chapter the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5). He called HAL5’s first meeting. Dannenberg was a major advocate for Newspace. He was an advisor to the Canadian X-Prize Team that sought to build an uprated manned V-2. He was there in the Mojave when Burt Rutan’s team won the X-Prize and later presented NSS’s Von Braun award to Rutan. Dannenberg’s career spawnned the entire space age. He inspired many young people to seek careers in space, science and engineering. Many engineers were inspired to excellence by the example Dannenberg established both in his areas of technology development and public service. Konrad Dannenberg set the bar that we should all strive to meet. Those of us that were honored to know Konrad will dearly miss him.

 Gregory H. Allison

Co-Founder and past President, HAL5,

NSS Executive Vice President

Well, there’s egg and bacon,
egg sausage and bacon
Egg and spam
Egg, bacon and spam
Egg, bacon, sausage and spam
Spam, bacon, sausage and spam
Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam
Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam tomato and spam
Spam, spam, spam, egg and spam
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.

(Choir: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Lovely Spam!)

To the Spammers: (ALL of them!!!)

Just in case you didn’t catch my previous post, here it is for your referance:

http://www.setheden.com/SethEdenPer/Blog/?p=19

Please spam me some more, because every spam you send me WILL be reported to the FTC - Federal Trade Commission, and the FCC - Federal Communications Commission. Furthermore I will actually go through the process of doing a WhoIs on your domain names, The domain name you send the e-mail from, and the domain name you are spamming a link to. I will report these spam infractions to the related ISPs - Internet Service Providers and DNSs - Domain Name Service Providers. I tell you what! I’ll even give you my e-mail directly so that it will make it easier for your bots to pickup on it and spam it directly. Please be warned that this means WAR!!! If you play with fire, expect to get burned! If you can’t handle the heat then get out of the kitchen! Oh and nice try hacking my IP, but I squashed your viruses! Also I must commend you on a nice job with the online bank phishing site, very nice work! Although your going to have to do a better job on the domain name redirect, it’s a little obvious when the SSL isn’t enabled and the domain name has nothing to do with my bank.

So here it is, here is my e-mail, feel free to spam me all you want!!! But I warn you, you will be reported!

Spam at your own risk!!!

Iceversaka@hotmail.com

Cheers

~Seth

I’ve reached a major milestone in my athletic life. I’ve finally gotten my fitness level to where I can run 10km every single morning of the work week!

I usually start my day at 4:30am when I get up, out the door by 5:35am, and ride my bicycle to the gym. I usually get there about 5:55am or 6:00am. I’m usually changed and stretched out by 6:15am and hit the tredmil at that time. I run a steady 6.5 miles per hour or about a 9min 23 second mile. By 7:15am I’ve run 6.5 miles which works out to slightly over 10km!

People are telling me that is a lot, and it is for me considering where I’ve come at my athletic performance. After college I gained a lot of weight, and all those periods of unemployment and trying to save money staying home and working to build my online portfolio, etc… my weight was up to about 290-310 lbs. Now I’m down to about 190lbs!

I just know you want to ask, So how did I loose it? Well it all started to come off when I had the opportunity to choose where I wanted to live after relocating for my new job here in Huntsville Alabama. I did some research and found a place I would be able to get safely to work from my appartment to my office on bicycle. After I moved in I got a bicycle and started to use that for my daily commute. Also I walked to the Huntsville Airshow about 5 miles walk then 5 miles walk back. A nice guy gave me a ride most of the way back cause my feet had some pretty nasty blisters by that time. I could barely walk for several days after that! Then my body responded and after I recovered I found my walking ability was much stronger! Between walking and riding my bicycle the pounds started to come off. Not just my belly, but my arms, legs, fingers, cheeks, neck, shoulders, butt, feet, toes, and just about every place else! Then I ran in the short 5km Liz Hurley Fight Breast Cancer Run. After that I was ready to begin something serious! I started to run daily every morning beginning in October 2008 at a steady 5 miles per hour for a full hour every day. Every two weeks I would increase my running pace by 0.1 miles per hour. By Christmas I was up to 5.5 miles per hour, and found that I was board even with the tredmil at an incline of 3! My back doctor told me to try and jump my pace up to 6.5 miles per hour after Christmas, and I thought I might give it a shot, although at a zero incline. My first attempt just 2 weeks ago and I did get to finish the full 6.5 miles per hour but the second day I found myself sick. I couldn’t go for it on two consecurtive days. Then on Monday of this week I went for it again and finished the 6.5 mile run in 60 minutes, I missed Tuesday due to getting some other stuff done but I did it again this morning (Wednesday), and now starting tomorrow morning will be the first day that I run it back-to-back 10km.

It reminds me of the days when I used to run 7 miles during my lunch hour while I was working as CAD Coordinator for Minnesota State University of Mankato. At the end of the 7 mile run I would run up this long steep dirt cliff probably about 300 feet vertical, then turn and run up another dirt cliff maybe about 40 feet vertical. This was the toughest training I ever put myself through, but after that summer in 1999 I could run a single mile in 4 minutes and 37 seconds!!!

At this point I’d be happy to get back to a 6 min mile! Which is actually my goal! In any event I’m certainly happy with my progress! Esspecially looking at my most recent weight loss of 10lbs since Christmas!!!

It’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other!

Cheers

~Seth

A few years ago I was trying to remember an old TV series that I used to love watching when I was a kid. I loved watching it so much that I taped it so I could watch it over and over again. It was a TV series about Astronomers and Space. All I could remember was that it has astounding graphics and was about searching for black holes.

The graphics in that TV series was AMAZING!!!! And I loved it so much that I wanted to be an astronomer when I grew up.

 Anyways I couldn’t remember the name of that TV series, and I was searching and searching for a long time to find the name so maybe I could get buy it or download it. I remember chatting with one guy online and he said I must have been thinking of the Cosmos TV series. Well now that I got Netflix I thought I would check out Cosmos the TV series. I just got the first disk a few days ago…and Cosmos is not the TV series that I was thinking of those years ago. So that guy I was chatting to was wrong. Cosmos is good, but it’s not the one that I remembered watching over and over again as a kid.

So a few nights ago I was really getting tired of not knowing the title of that TV series that I loved so much. If it wasn’t Cosmos then what was it? Well at the very end of my search just before going to bed, I thought I stumbled across some vague referance to a TV series called “The Astronomers”…This rang some bells in my head and I thought that might be it. If only I could see a little glimpse of the TV series opening online or something, just a small video clip or anything. I didn’t find anything at all, but I did find the names of the titles and one of them was titled something like “Searching for Black Holes”. I thought this must be the series and more alarm bells started to go off in my head. So I logged into Netflix and searched for it. It came up so I added it to my list and put it at the very top cause I want to see if it’s what I remembered enjoying so much! There is a long wait for it, but I figure I can wait for Netflix to send it to me.

I’m excited that now I may have finally found one of the TV series about space that I turely adored as a kid.

So if you have Netflix and you have this TV series on your waiting list, can you please remove it so it will be delivered to me sooner? j/k

 Cheers

~Seth

P.S. Maybe it’s in such high demand because this is the year of astronomy.