Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

Annoying Mac Malware/Trojan

By

InstallerJust a quick post since I just had to clean this damn software off a computer. It’s Genieo/MacInstaller. On the computer it was on, it kept downloading, and mounting a DMG with an Installer on it saying “Double click here” (see picture). No, that doesn’t seem sketchy.

The best info on uninstalling it I’ve seen is here. Obviously, if you don’t know what you’re doing, I wouldn’t suggest blindly following these instructions, but I don’t see anything that could go horribly wrong from any of this. Just make sure you’re deleting what it says to delete, and not something else… Mac’s are pretty resilient, but if you delete some things, it will cause issues.

In case you do see this, it looks like the primary vector this is spread by is fake Adobe Flash Player installers. Never, ever, just click a link asking to install/download Flash Player, or Java, or anything like that. Go through the effort of Googling or typing the address of the actual vendor (Adobe, Oracle, etc), and download from there. If your Flash player downloads from “www.thisistotallylegit.com”, it’s probably not.

Anyway, good luck, and death to Mac (and any other) Malware.

Mackie Mixer Repair

By

ZOOMED_1202-VLZ3Another repair from my dad is this Maxie 1202 mixer, a 12 channel analog mixer, that has scratchy/noisy potentiometers, and one channel is reported as pretty much completely dead. Knowing it was all pots, and the unit was going on 20 years old now, I figured it was just dirty.

Taking the mixer apart was relatively time consuming, since you have to pull all the nobs. After removing the back, I did notice that the glue holding down the two power supply filter caps had lost hold, so that was added to my list of fixes (nothing a little hot glue couldn’t fix). I always find it interesting when companies use LM317’s and LM337’s for their power supplies. I guess it does let them set the upper and lower supply rails outside the standard ±5, ±9, ±12, etc.

Total time for disassembly was about 20 minutes. I made sure to index the screws using this handy mat. I also threw all the nobs into a bowl. Interestingly the upper and lower boards of the mixer are joined together by solid core, uninsulated, wire. So I had to keep the upper board slightly elevated from the lower one.

[Read more…]

PHP 5.6.4 upgrade (from 5.3.x) and MySQL 5.6

By

PHP-MysqlI’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but a slashdot linked article about the large number of insecure PHP installs in the world got me off my ass to upgrade my stock Mac OS X php install from 5.3.x to 5.6.x. Thankfully, the process was pretty painless with the scripts provided here.

I did have to modify my http conf (since I’m not running a stock Apple install) to point to the new php, as well as set the new install location in my .profile, both of which were pretty easy. The biggest annoyance with the upgrade to PHP 5.6, however, was having to fix anywhere where objects were being set via reference “=&” rather than just =. So most of my PDO DB queries were being set via “$result =& $db->query(‘select blah from blah where blah’)”. This no longer worked with 5.6, as you can only set variables that way. Why I was doing it that way is because I’m a hack, and most of my PHP is copied and pasted from previous PHP I’ve done… so that practice just spread throughout. *shrugs* I also had to adjust some settings relating to APC no longer being supported, and opcache being the new PHP object cache setup. The real big change is, since I use W3TC, I had to DISABLE the Database and Object caches. Since these rely on no-longer supported APC calls, things would work fine for about an hour, then WordPress would just stop responding altogether (guessing when it would try to issue a garbage cleanup call) ((Sadly, the author of this plugin has been rather quiet about adding Zend opcache support)). Interestingly, my site sped up significantly after this change. Cool.

Since my server is a Mac, I had already been running MySQL 5.6 for some time (since OS X doesn’t ship with MySQL anymore), but I wanted to take this opportunity to “upgrade” all my tables from MyISAM to InnoDB. This, actually, was a bit more of a pain than I thought it would be.

[Read more…]