Music video for The Left Rights’ “Genesis 16:12″.
Created by M dot Strange.
http://www.youtube.com/user/mdotstrange

http://sternnation.com forums are back online, Mike got everything back up today after the Godaddy screwup. I’ve closed the backup forum for now. See you on the SternNation Forums!

 ”What happened?”

Regarding the outage of the SternNation forums May 15, 16…
Spoke to Mike, there has been a wave of people who have had hosting through GoDaddy have had their sites go down recently. There are posts on the godaddy forums as well as wordpress forums and various others. The reason Godaddy have been telling everyone including Mike of SternNation is “excessive DNS” issues.

Now to take hundreds of sites offline for this particular reason is a bit like chopping your toe completely off just because you had an ingrown toe nail. I spoke to Mike via emails and reading everyone’s complaints on other forums what I’ve been able to piece together is the common factor is a runaway sql server. Now those sites that host with Godaddy use Godaddy’s sql servers, and it’s probably a safe bet that the sql servers aren’t all shared. It’s probably all seperate virtual hosts, it’s very possible that the sql servers vhosts are on it’s own machine while the web hosting accounts are on it’s own machine. Anyhow it doesn’t matter how it’s really setup, but from I can piece together the majority of people with issues all ran forums or wordpress/drupal/joomla type sites.

In the case of a forum it could have been set to not disable hostname lookups, which if there were tons of abandoned accounts or lots of incoming traffic that would cause a whole lot of reverse ip dns requests you then combine this with hundreds of other Godaddy hosted forums also set to do hostname lookups, each time those logs or specific sections were accessed it would send a huge spike in dns traffic to Godaddy’s dns servers creating a type of “internal DDOS” in a sense. Blog sites like WordPress and such also have options to turn on hostname lookups or not.

This is my conclusion going on the posts on godaddy forums and wordpress.org forums at least. The annoying part is Godaddy never informed it’s customers of this issue and dropped the sites offline to deal with the problem without telling the customers creating a huge hornet’s nest of angry customers.

Anyhow with that said, Mike will have the sternnation forums back up and running shortly. But until then I tossed up a temporary forum for those looking for news can swing by and check it out until sternnation is back up. I do have registrations tightened down a bit, so when you register it may take a little bit as I have to approve it manually. But don’t fret, it’ll be taken care of as soon as I see it

Update 5/18: Stern Nation Forums are back online! See ya on the forums.

Telecoms regulator Ofcom has just published a study into the state of online copyright infringement in the UK, with some very interesting conclusions. The researchers found that 10% of the country’s most prolific infringers are responsible for almost 80% of all infringements carried out online, but with a bonus. These plus an additional 10% of infringers spend 300% more than ‘honest’ consumers who don’t infringe copyright at all.

Read the Full Story Here: http://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/

This continues to prove that big media just don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to file sharing. A lot of folks in their 30′s and up like me may remember this same argument and occasional lawsuits making the news when big media were going after blank cassette tapes, dual cassette recorders, blank VHS tapes and VCR’s with record functions and even some fancier VCR’s with programmable record timers you could set to record your favorite show at a specific time. Of course history shows that big media lost their fight against cassette tape sharing, blank cassette and VHS tape mediums.

Bit nostalgic though thinking back on my highschool days sharing mix tapes with friends, or making that cheese “romantic” mix tape for a crush

Hopefully things will get back to normal and we’ll see where things go on the site. I was thinking of offering some small services for gamers and/or possible people wanting to run their own radio stations by renting out teamspeak server space and offer shoutcast server rentals. But I’m going to hold off on that for a while for now.

Anyhow if you like Trance, Trip Hop, House music then feel free to enjoy Dude Suit Radio 24/7 stream, just click the ‘click here to listen’ over on the right. Or if on the mobile version of the site just go to the Dude Suit Radio page.

Months of constant Megaupload controversy, video of the raids leaked, Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom released and most all of the charges dropped, and many many more other news surround the controversial file storage site.

The new “Mega” is now officially online!

Users will get 50 Gig of free data storage! So far that tops any “cloud” service to date. You’d have to pay quite a bit to get that much storage with services like Dropbox, Rapidshare, Amazon, etc. Plus no one in their right mind would use rapidshare anyhow, there is nothing “rapid” about rapidshare.

So head on over to Mega today and give it a try, I personally haven’t tested it yet but will see how the speed is and how sharing fairs for the new reincarnated Megaupload

https://mega.co.nz/

http://sternnation.com

The Sternnation.com forums are down at the moment. Well the forums are probably up and just fine. The problem is the domain name has expired today 1/17/13.

Don’t know if Mike was aware of the impending renewal fee or that the yearly term was up so soon and the reminder email may have slipped his mind.

I’m just speculating. Anyhow soon as I hear anything I’ll update this post.

I know Mike stays pretty busy, so you usually have a grace period to renew before the domain releases, so if that’s the case once Mike notices it should fire back up once the DNS propagates.

otherwise as they say on old tv serials “Stay Tuned…”

Seems like around Jan 7 around that afternoon had a problem with the server but hopefully things should be fixed now “crosses fingers”

The mobile device theme will stay the same for now so mobile devices will not be affected. But desktop viewers may notice subtle changes or big changes to the look and layout of the site over the next few days. Not exactly sure which way I’ll go or if it’ll be a permanent change just thinking about something new for the new year.

For those that are curious I currently use the ‘Pixel’ theme as it is an older simpler them that hasn’t been updated in a while I’ve been thinking a change is in order. Perhaps I may even work on designing one from scratch. Anyhow leave a comment if you have any tips, ideas, etc, course this site is mainly at the moment a ‘stream of consciousness’ blog of my favorites and ideas with the most popular sections being my Dude Suit Radio streaming server, Stern links, and info for UK users to bypass PirateBay blocks.

If you would like to suggest some ideas feel free to leave a comment. If you happen to enjoy a particular WordPress theme then please drop me a comment with the name of the theme and I’ll definitely check it out. If you’d like to browse the bulk of WordPress themes you can find them here http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ although there are 3rd party companies that also design and offer free and commercial themes as well. Just curious what people like mainly, lighter background versus darker background, then 1 to 3 columns or perhaps no columns and use seperate pages instead. Let me know what ya think if you feel like it, I’m curious.

Have a Happy New Year!

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station’s modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Anyhow since my original order the sites in the U.S. are now selling them so newer orders should be smoother, but if you are interested it’s best to order as soon as possible as the demand seems to be out weighing the supply which keeps putting people waiting weeks for resupply.

I took some photos of my Raspberry PI and a custom clear case I ordered as well and put them on Flickr for anyone interested.

9 photos with the custom clear case, board, and board mounted in the case: http://www.flickr.com/photos/qoaa/sets/72157632136696321/

If you are interested in ordering one yourself you can go here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

The Model B, the version I purchased, comes with 512MB ram and an ethernet port. There is a Model A version that comes without the ethernet port and only has 256MB ram instead.

Model B costs $35 and the Model A costs $25

The uses for these are limited by your imagination, many people are using them as headless servers, to router projects, media centers with XBMC software, music players, robotic controllers, etc. Just hop over to Youtube and do a search for Raspberry PI and there are hundreds of videos and projects on display.