It’s already considered old school to do the undetectable noscope monitor hack (heh!) in Counter-Strike. But writing on my monitor with a permanent marker doesn’t sound like a great idea to me. So based on a suggestion from someone in #cplug the other night, here’s my offering…

Background: In games like Counter-Strike source, most standard weapons display a crosshair at the center of the screen/HUD. In an effort to make gameplay more “realistic” (relatively speaking), sniper rifles do not display a crosshair unless you zoom in with the scope. However, zooming in dramatically reduces your field of view and makes you move slower…

And thus was the low-tech no-scope hack born!

Step 1: Get a pack of those self-adhesive page reinforcers.

Step 2: Start up Counter-Strike and select a weapon that displays a crosshair (e.g. the default pistol). Make sure you are aligned with your monitor like you normally are while playing, and stick the page reinforcer right over the crosshair.

Step 3: Select any of the sniper rifles, and blast away. At reasonably close distances, your shots will all land within the diameter of the page reinforcer.

w00t!

Update: Obviously, this only really helps if you are relatively close to your target. For long distance shots, you’ll still need to zoom in.

Digg: Like it? Digg it!

If you are in the habit of loading third-party modules in Python, you really should check out Setuptools. Setuptools includes all sorts of enhancements to the Python distutils to help developers build and distribute their applications. But most importantly (for me at least), it includes the EasyInstall utility:

Easy Install is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages.

Here’s how to install it and make sure it’s working properly…

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Secure Shell (SSH) is everywhere.

Since it’s inception in 1995, SSH has become the most widespread remote login protocol for Linux boxes, with some estimates saying that there were at least 2 million SSH users at the end of 2000. Gone are the days of telnet sending your data in plaintext over untrusted networks. Now you can type with a reasonable amount of confidence that your data is encrypted and secure.

But, as Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility!

By its very nature, an improperly configured ssh daemon can be a network liability rather than a asset. If you have a Linux box that is accessible via the Internet, it pays to know what you are doing.

Therefore, here are five things you can do to lock down your server and make ssh more secure…

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Bitlbee is an IRC gateway application that allows you to use an IRC client to chat with people on any of the major IM networks. Basically, you run Bitlbee as a daemon, and then connect to it as if it were a standard IRC server (6667/tcp). From there, you have Bitlbee log in to the various networks, and each of the people on your contact lists shows up in the #bitlbee channel.

It’s a really cool idea. It’s particularly useful if you predominantly use IRC for chatting, but you have a few friends who only use, for example, AIM.

From the earliest versions of Bitlbee it has been easy to connect to AIM, MSN, and ICQ. Now that Google has launched their own IM service (based on the Jabber protocol), many people would like to connect to that network as well.

So here’s how to use Bitlbee to connect to Google Talk (aka GTalk)…

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As I mentioned the other day, I upgraded my cell to a new Moto RAZR V3 with Cingular service. So far I’m extremely pleased with it and it seems to do everything I’d like it to do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with a large selection of ringtones. Sure, I could “buy” ringtones, but that just seems silly to me when I can make a ringtone of any song for free.

Here’s one way to do it using Audacity to crop the song, LAME to encode it, and Bluetooth to transfer it to your phone. You just need the following items…

Requirements:

1. Cell phone that supports MP3 ringtones
2. Bluetooth adapter
3. MP3 of the song you want to use
4. Windows XP SP2 (see note at end)

If you have those four things, just follow these simple steps and never pay for a ringtone again…

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There are times when you want to connect to the Internet through unknown and/or insecure networks such as the local Panera or other WiFi hotspot. If you aren’t careful, you might make it all too easy for someone to sniff your connection using Ettercap.

One of the best ways to secure your connection is to use a VPN, but that isn’t always practical. So here’s a way to securely connect to the net using only an SSH client and a remote box that you control/trust.

Requirements:

1. PuTTY* loaded on your local machine
2. Remote host running OpenSSH (e.g. Linux box at home)
3. Firefox (obviously)
4. Gaim for all your IM needs

Just follow these steps…

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I’ve been playing with Cacti this week. The project has come a long way from when I first started using it, and I would now consider it one of the most powerful (free) monitoring/graphing packages currently available.

So tonight, now that all my Linux boxen are being monitored, I wanted to add my single Windows box. It turns out there is a SNMP component included in Windows 2000, you just need to install it. Here’s how to do it.

1. Find your Windows 2000 install CD. You’ll need it.

2. Start, Settings, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components

3. Select Management and Monitoring Tools

4. Hit Details, and check the box for Simple Network Management Protocol

5. Hit OK and Next, and walk through the installation wizard.

That’s it. Add the box as a new host device in Cacti using the Windows 2000/XP SNMP template and you are all set. Gotta love those pretty rrdtool graphs!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This was originally posted in April 2006 and has been deprecated. Check out my new/revised Django on Windows guide instead.

Django, TurboGears, Pylons, Zope, Quixote , Web.py…

There has been a proliferation of Python web frameworks lately, possibly due in part to the success of Ruby on Rails. I don’t claim to be an expert in web applications, but I have been playing around two of the frameworks: Django and TurboGears. I don’t think TurboGears could be any easier to install, and Django isn’t bad either. But getting an entire stack together to run Django on Windows could be non-obvious to a newcomer. So I decided to put together a tutorial on how to start from scratch and end up with a working Django install.

This guide covers installing Python (and required modules), Postgres, Apache, mod_python, and Django. Also, it includes steps to confirm that Django is working properly post-install. It does not, however, cover how to actually build web applications with the Django framework, as that is well beyond the scope of this guide. However, I do recommend checking out the official tutorial.

There are quite a few steps, so let’s get started…

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I’m a huge fan of IPCop. It’s a great firewall distro that makes administration a snap using a slick web interface. My goal was to use IPCop and an easy-to-use VPN client to allow access to my LAN while away from home.

I ended up going with the ZERINA OpenVPN addon for IPCop and the OpenVPN GUI for Windows.

If you’ve ever wanted full, secure, encrypted access to your LAN from any remote location, here is your guide.

Just follow these ten easy steps…

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Last night my goal was to mount a share on my desktop containing ripped DVDs (.vob files) using Samba. Then play the movies over the network with VLC so I can watch then on the TV in the family room. I’ve been using VLC on Windows for a long time and love it, so I figured this should be an easy task. Not so! After emerging VLC and all the library dependencies, I found that I had no GUI.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get VLC to play DVDs mounted on a Samba share…

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