Krups 10-Cup Thermal Coffee Maker FMF5 review - avoid!

We bought this because of the thermal carafe. That part worked great - the coffee stays hot for 3-4 hours with no loss of taste, unlike a regular coffee maker which starts to burn the coffee within 15 minutes of brewing.

Nothing else about this coffee maker is very good, however.

It is very hard to pour from the carafe without spilling.

The machine has some kind of fancy logic that is supposed to determine if the coffee maker has been turned on with no water in it, and will shut off immediately. Nice idea, but whatever method they use also responds if you make coffee, and then refill the reservoir right away to make another batch.

And the real kicker: it failed on us after 1.5 years of service (it only has a 1 year warranty). Not a little failure, either: the heating element cracked in two! I called Krups and they refused to even estimate a repair cost - I had to send it back in at my cost and then they would tell me how much more I would have to pay if I wanted it actually fixed.

And a final minor annoyance - in order to discover what was wrong with the unit, I had to take it apart - which required not only a TORX screwdriver set, but a fancy, TORX security set that is hollowed out in the middle so that it can fit into the screw-head. I own it, I should be able to take it apart without having buy a new screwdriver!

Borrego Springs Resort hotel review

I stayed here during the wildflower bloom of 2010. 

The rooms are clean, and well furnished. I stayed in a king suite, which was quite spacious, with a separate master bedroom. The bed was overly soft, but some people like that.

If you wanted to increase the occupancy, there was more than enough space in the living room for an air mattress. In fact I suspect you could sleep at least 4 people in the living room if you were willing to move the furniture (a dinner table, with two chairs). even with two king sized air mattress, everybody would still have a clear path to the bathroom at night. 

The kitchen included some counter space, cupboards, a small sink (with scalding hot water), a microwave, 4c coffee maker, and a spacious mini fridge with a good freezer. All appliances were in good condition. There were also 2 large TVs, which we never used. I mean come on - you don't come to the desert to watch TV!  

We tried cooking with a propane stove in the kitchen, and set off the fire alarm. The balcony had some metal furniture, so we set up out there and it and worked much better.

The shower was hot enough, with moderate pressure. It was built for midgets though - be prepared to stoop way over to wash your hair.

They have a website - all flash and pretty unusable. 

Microtel inn at the Jacksonville airport (JAX).

Small rooms, but clean. Mini fridge and microwave included in each room. The shower was hot, but didn't have that much pressure. The bed was soft, but did not sag. the pillows were a bit oversized, though. They had free wireless (and Ethernet) that was easy to set up and free local and long distance calling. there was a nice flat screen TV with at least 40 cable channels.

Food: No coffee maker in the room, but there was hot coffee in the lobby until at least midnight. The big disappointment was the breakfast. The bagels (plain or raisin) were stale and the toaster didn't do much more than warm them (even after using it twice). The microwave was on the same circuit, and which kept on getting tripped. Instant oatmeal was available, but the Styrofoam bowls were so small you couldn't cook it without making a mess. The juice machine had "100% OJ" that tasted like it had been cut with 50% water. The best option was the cold cereal. There was no fruit or yogurt.

Most hotels in this price range are clean, so all that is left are the little things. Except for the breakfast all the little things were good.

gBurner trial review - thumbs down.

gBurner is a shareware app that advertises that it is an unlimited, full featured trial, but with NAGS. In fact, it works for 30 days, and then stops being able to burn files that are > 300MB.

I downloaded it to burn an MDS/MDF (PSX image) file that ImgBurn could not, because it had multiple tracks. It did an OK job, in that it was able to import the session, with all the file names, and given the lack of warning or error messages one might think that it had loaded the file correctly. After burning, however, IsoBuster showed that it had skipped all but the first track, and had significantly under-burned the disk.

On the whole: un-impressed. If you need a free general purpose burning program, InfraRecorder is a better bet, and if you need a good Image burner, ImgBurn is the best bet.

It didn't seem to install any mal-ware at least.

Removing Spyware Protect 2009 / google redirect ( aka awareremover2009 aka sysguard.exe aka Antivirus System PRO)

There's a new variant of SysGuard on the loose, which first showed up Nov 9th, 2009. Most current anti-spyware software doesn't completely eradicate it, probably because it involves a rootkit. The first sign of the infection is a fake 'anti-virus' program which displays lots of fake warnings about viruses found on your computer, omitting itself, of course.

It's not clear what the vector was in this case - I didn't install any software for the last few weeks. I'm wondering if it's some remote exploit. When Spyware Protect 2009 first launched I was running Remote Desktop, and after it had launched my SSHD service (cygwin) quit working. I'm curious if anybody else had similar experiences.

It's easy to kill the program with task manager. Just look for a program name ending in sysguard.exe. The first couple letters will be random; mine was called fftwsysguard.exe and was found in C:\Documents and Settings\alan\Local Settings\Application Data\szvcxr (the name of the directory is also random). After killing the program with task manager it's easy to delete the main program from your disk. Finally, you'll stop Windows from attempting to load the program at bootup. Startup Control Panel is good for this.

This does not eliminate the infection. You'll also need to fix your hosts file, found in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

This file will include the following lines, which should be deleted:

91.212.127.227 awareremover2009.microsoft.com
91.212.127.227 awareremover2009.com
91.212.127.227 www.awareremover2009.com

The lines you want to keep are:

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

Even after doing this, Internet Explorer will randomly try to load awareremover2009.com, and IE/FireFox will be prevented from connecting to several anti-virus websites.

At this point, running Trend Micro House Call found and deleted part of it, but this did not fix the problem with the web browsers.


MalWareBytes found some additional parts of the infection:

Registry Keys Infected:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\AvScan (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.


Registry Data Items Infected:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\AntiVirusDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\FirewallDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\UpdatesDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.

But it did not catch all the registry changes; in particular several changers were made to make IE particularly less secure. See http://www.threatexpert.com/ for a list (actually, since awareremover2009 blocks threatexpert, here's a local copy).

Registry Modifications

• The following Registry Keys were created:
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script\Settings
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AvScan

• The newly created Registry Values are:
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
• esdcsadr = "%AppData%\ijipdt\xxeusysguard.exe"

so that xxeusysguard.exe runs every time Windows starts

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download]
• RunInvalidSignatures = 0x00000001
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations]
• LowRiskFileTypes = ".exe"
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]
• SaveZoneInformation = 0x00000001
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
• esdcsadr = "%AppData%\ijipdt\xxeusysguard.exe"

so that xxeusysguard.exe runs every time Windows starts

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script\Settings]
• JITDebug = 0x00000001

• The following Registry Value was deleted:
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]
• AppInit_DLLs = ""

• The following Registry Value was modified:
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download]
• CheckExeSignatures =

The changes you need to make here should be pretty obvious. The deleted values appear to be generally ok, as my other main machine doesn't have anything set for those values either. It might be a good idea to go into your IE preferences and reset all the security settings, just to be sure, though.

After all that, however, I still found that both Firefox and IE got randomly redirected to Ad websites when using Google. I tried to fix this using the following programs:

ESET online scanner found nothing.

Bit Defender Free Edition found nothing (full scan).

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (Nov 2009), (win/system32/MRT.exe, full scan) found nothing.

Spyware Doctor (PC Tools) found nothing, and even if it had, the freely downloadable version only detects infections; you need to pay if you want to remove them.

I found my solution in ComboFix. The problem: sysguard installed a rootkit (hidden in atapi.sys), which prevents detection. ComboFix was the only program that discovered this. Ironic, since ComboFix is 100% freeware, whereas those other scanners were free demos/trials.

ComboFix was able to remove part of the infection (c:\windows\Downloaded Program Files\IDropPTB.dll), but not all of it: a hacked atapi.sys was detected, but not removed. UPDATE: ComboFix was updated sometime Nov 12th and the new version did remove the hacked atapi.sys file! so far, it looks like the infection is finally completely gone.

To make sure, I ran one last round of scans, in the following order:

BitDefender Free Edition found an infected file in the System Restore folder (suggesting that running system restore might have caused the infection to occur again!).

MalwareBytes found another 6(!) copies of the infected atapi.sys file in the System restore folder (once again suggesting BitDefender Free Edition isn't worth the trouble of dealing with it's constant nag screens).

Graffiti 10 years later.

Good handwriting recognition has been elusive in the PDA market. It was laughable on the Newton. Palm made their users learn an entirely new script. Modern PDAs, like the Apple itouch skip it entirely, even though they have 100s of times more powerful hardware (if not more), and rely on soft keyboards instead.

I was a relatively early adopter of the Palm - my 1st was a b&w Palm 3. Though the onscreen keyboard was clearly quicker to learn, I stuck with graffiti thinking it would eventually be faster. Maybe so, but 10 years latter when I pull out my old handspring visor I find that the onscreen keyboard is at least as fast as my relatively practiced graffiti.

A big part of this is that I still make typos using graffiti. If the software could just catch those few remaining mistakes i think it would beat the keyboard. With all the increase in processing power you would think a modern PDA might be able to do it, too. I doubt we will ever find out, though. The days where you could expect users to learn a new form of handwriting are probably over.

Game boy advance flash cart summary

It's getting a bit hard to find Flash carts for the GBA these days. At the moment Deal Extreme seems to be the only place still selling them at anythink like reasonable prices. You can also use these carts on a NDS to play GBA games, or even NDS games, if you buy a "pass-me" cart as well.

supercard - cheap and fairly good compatibility but has slow ram that can cause problems with some games. Real time save is a nice feature though. http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2734

Ez-Flash IV - more expensive, but works with 100% of the games out there. No real time save, and sometimes you have to mess around a bit to get saving to work at all (see my post on advance wars). This is what I have, and I'm quite happy with it. Enough people own this that there's an excellent FAQ and active user forum. This is good, because the docs that come with the product are quite abysmal. EZ-Flash claims to have stopped making this product on their website but when I emailed them they told me that this is still in production, and that the one sold by deal-extreme is genuine, which is where I purchased mine.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22019