Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

Well I don’t know what caused to problem in the first place, but the ‘puter is back online. These days loading up WinXP on to a cleanly formatted hard drive is just the very beginning of the process and was the easy part. The next step is locking down the system from external nasties, before I connect to the net.

This is really important, since the out of the box WinXP installation is full of well exploited security exploits. The Internet Storm Center tracks the average time before an unpatched system is exploited by the white noise of port scanning and exploit hunting viruses. It is currently tracking at about 23 minutes.
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For a while now I have been planning on giving the home desktop PC a re-bore. There is a lot of crud that has built up over time with tried and rejected software dregs, neglected games, layers of system build-up and so on.

Well last night it decided to lend me a hand in my decision making. After being prompted for the 5th time to upgrade the antivirus software that I had been using, I decided to load up a newer version that I was no longer using from a different PC. (more…)

Ok here is a cool idea, although it will take a bit longer to work out how it might integrate fully into the Website If I decide to use it. It is a geographic locator for a blog and I would like to see how it fits into the idlemind website.

Look for the Blogmap in the sidebar. Let me know it you think it is cool in the comments.

Edit: I kinda like the idea of this tool so I have moved it across from this post to the sidebar.

With just 69 days to go I have just signed up for the Sydney Marathon (42.195km) for the 3rd year in a row. I have really just started running again with this event in mind. I was feeling pretty crap body wise, body stressed and struggling to relax on a run. After 3 runs in 3 days I can just begin to feel the cobwebs and bodily pollution clear out.

This morning I climbed out of bed and crossed the mental barrier of the cold and the dark and managed to get out for an 11k run before work. This is something that I have never really done in the past. I feel good now though so I think that it was worth it.

I have also been trying something else new. (more…)