Pants

Due to the fact that my jeans are in very bad condition, I decided to go buy some.

I went to Farm and Fleet as my ability to wear out pants at obscene rates makes me warry of picking up used.

I go in there and there’s millions of jeans in tons of ‘fits’.

Regular fit and relaxed fit were the big ones, but there were some others.  Including traditional and classic.  And depending on the brand they used varying terms.

After trying on a few pairs of relaxed fit and finding them way to tight, I found a list for Carhartt’s fits (in order of tightness): regular, relaxed, loose, and dungaree.  So I immediately tried on a pair of dungaree fit and loved that.   I’m glad I never tried any regulars…

Carhartt had a nice easy system, but they were the more expensive brand.

The problem I had was that I couldn’t use that system on any other brand.  Especially since only Carhartt seemed to have dungaree.

Man that was obnoxious.

I settled on one pair of Carhartt dungaree, one pair of Lee loose, and one pair of Key relaxed.  The Key relaxed weren’t bad.

But most relaxed fit were much too tight.  Getting my wallet and cell in those would be a little uncomfortable.  And they call that ‘relaxed’.  I can’t imagine how nasty regular would have been.

The only thing on my jeans that I want snug in the waist.  Everything else needs to be roomy.  Girl’s jeans on the other hand…

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How To Hide Files and Folders On a Computer

And how to find said files and folders.

All these following methods work better the smaller the size of the files. Much as it is easier to hide a penny than a car, it is easier to hide a 50 byte file than a 2 gig file. Actually, the difference between a penny and a car might be smaller as 2 gigs is more than 40 million times larger than 50 bytes.

I have three methods that I have discovered in my time. The first, and most effective method, I actually found as a way people used to transfer non-image files over imageboards.

It is to combine a jpeg image file with a rar archive file. This can be done either with a program or with the command prompt in Windows. I don’t know how you’d go about this with other OS as I’ve never tried. I have tried combining other files with jpeg, and so far none have worked. But other combinations may, in fact, be able to do the same thing.

Let’s say I wanted to store my personal information of a computer. Not an unreasonable desire, but not particularly safe.

My personal info file is 164 bytes. Yes. Bytes.

For best effect I should choose a larger image file. The larger the image, the less likely it will be that someone will notice the extra baggage. I have a 20+ megabyte image file, but it’s PNG and that is really larger than needed. One of my 7.2 megapixel images from my camera should work just fine.

First you need to compress the personal information into an rar file. Given the size of the text file, the rar file will actually be larger. Put both the rar file and the image file into your C drive.

If you need instructions on how to do this, open up My Computer. Single click and hold the rar file and drag your mouse to ‘C:’. Then release the mouse button. Repeat for the jpeg.

The C drive would be the one selected in that picture.

Your C drive should look something like this. Note the rar and jpg files at the bottom.

Next open the command prompt. In most Windows OS you go Start>Run, type ‘cmd, and then hit ‘enter’ or the run button. In Vista you just hit Start and then type ‘cmd’ into the bar at the bottom and hit enter. Best user feature of Vista is building the run program into the Start menu.

When this is done you will get this window:

It should say ‘c:\>’. If not, type ‘cd c:\’ and hit enter. See the picture. Don’t worry about the yen signs, that’s just a weird feature of my computer I can’t be rid of.

Once the command prompt has been set to the C drive, type ‘copy /b imagefile.jpg + rarfile.rar output.jpg’ Replace ‘imagefile.jpg’ with the name of the image file. Do the same with ‘rarfile.rar’. You can change output.jpg to anything you’d like. Just leave the ‘.jpg’ at the end.

Hit enter and you will get the following:

You will now have an additional file in your C drive that is named output.jpg, or whatever you used. You can treat it in all respects like a jpeg, but in addition you can open it in WinRAR or 7Zip and get the file or files within.

This is the results of my experiment. You can open it up and see the file yourself.

Nifty, eh?

Finding files hidden in this way can be extremely difficult. As long as the person hiding isn’t trying to hide anything large, you pretty much have no chance other than opening every jpeg in any decent decompresser program. However, anything much larger than a text file will give anything but the largest pictures an unusually large file size. Trying to hide an image or anything larger would be rather hard. If I did something silly like try to hide ef -a tale of memories- (at a whoppin’ 2.05 gigs) in this fashion, I’d end up with a jpeg that was over 2 gigs. Which is so absurdly beyond anything reasonable for a jpeg.

The second method works better for larger things. In fact, you could use this method to hide files over a gig. However, this is significantly less secure. This would be using the ‘hidden files and folders’ thingy that is a part of Windows.

Open up Windows Explorer. Say, open My Computer. Go Tools>Folder Options>View

In the Advanced Settings box there will be a option right near the top for Hidden Files and Folders. Set it to ‘do not show’.

Then, when you want to hide a file or folder, right click the file or folder and click on properties.  At the bottom of the new window will be a setting listed ‘properties’.  Check ‘hidden’.  You’ll probably want to leave ‘read-only’ alone.  The file will then be hidden.  To access it again you will either have to 1.) change the folder settings to show hidden files and folders or 2.) remember the file or folder name.  This also works best if you stick the hidden files and folders in folders that are chock full of stuff.  Especially a lot of large files.

Finding this one is not anywhere near so hard as the last.  If you notice a folder that is larger than it should be given its contents, there may be something there.  You can then go an change the folder settings to ’show’.  Or you can just change that setting as soon as you sit down at the computer so that everything will be revealed straight up.

The final method is not so great.  Just remove the file’s extension.  That way anyone who runs across the file and may want to look at it will have to try opening it in many different programs.  You will have to remember what type of file it is, though.  This works better if you use some weird file type.  Like .kbg.

This doesn’t work very well as a file without an extension sticks out like a sore thumb.  Well, any file that the computer doesn’t know what to do with will stick out in this fashion.

Finding said items is not hard.  As I said, they stick out.  Finding out what they are is harder.  Sometimes the computer will still recognize the file, which will make it even easier.  Otherwise, just open it in programs that have a large number of files types they recognize.  A lot of open source alternatives to major programs will actually have a very large selection of files types recognized.  Another method would just be to try all sorts of major file extensions.  That method would require knowing a decent amount.

And I’m done for now.

I may post later with my thoughts on Cloverfield once I get back from my town trip.

Upcoming Post!

Yeah, I have this idea for a post, but I don’t have time to do it tonight.  Getting all the pictures for it will take some time.

So I’m posting this so as to make sure I get this done tomorrow or Wednesday.

Yeah.

Silly.  I know.  But it’ll do what it’s here to do.

Hopefully.

Flashes of Insight

So over the past few months I have been trying to find information on a series of Japanese novels.  All the fansites I’d been going to only covered the first 2/3 of the series.

I just could not find info for the last 1/3, no matter how hard I searched.

I looked and I looked and I looked.  And I found nothing.

And then yesterday at work I had a flash of insight.  A big one.

“Hey, maybe I should try Japanese websites!”

All my searching and looking had been in English and on English sites.  Why would I do something so silly as to look for information on Japanese novels on Japanese sites?  That’s just nonsense.

My very first try, ja.wikipedia.org,  gave me all the info I wanted.  I was able to spoil myself silly.

It also gave me this:

松平 瞳子（まつだいら とうこ）

声：釘宮理恵

紅薔薇のつぼみ（ロサ・キネンシス・アン・ブゥトン）の妹（プティ・スール）【第31巻「薔薇の花かんむり」～】

Which is utterly depressing.

Milwaukee

So I drove up to Milwaukee last night so as to go to LMC.

Once I got into Milwaukee I noticed that due to the conditions the highway looked very pretty.  A little fey too.  The way the cars themselves almost disappeared, but the lights remained very clear gave this feel of apparitions carrying lights down the roads.

Very cool.

On the way back I picked up a jack for plugging my iPod into my car stereo from Best  Buy given that I had a 5 dollar reward thingy.  That’s really nice.  It doesn’t skip like the CD player does.  The cord is oddly huge though.  The plugs on each end are as big as my iPod and the plastic casing for the wires is massive.

And I stopped by a Chipotle in Hales Corner’s.  It wasn’t far off an easy path back to the highway from the Greenfield Best Buy and going there didn’t involve getting on and off the highway at the Marquette Interchange.  I’d never been there before.

The food was the same, but the guy putting the burrito together put a lot less goodies on the tortilla than the folks at every other Chipotle I’ve been too.  Unlike the mildly full feeling I get from a single burrito that I got at the other locations I was still hungry.

Sad.