Electronics

One of my interests has always been computers and I've always known the basic theory about how computers work, how the electronics operate etc. I know how electronic components work and what each does and even the formulae that are relevant but I've never been confident enough to actually dive in and start creating stuff from scratch.

I enjoy the Velleman kits from Maplins... ten minutes with a soldering iron and you have an electronic game or quiz buzzer or clock, but I could never follow how they worked properly. There was always some strange arrangement of components that confused me.

Recently, I was asked by my brother to make a little "disarming" pack for his Scout group for a camp they are going on. I made him one a few years ago that was basically a small circuit with no electronic components that the Scouts had to "disarm" without setting it off. It consisted of a buzzer and a battery. The buzzer was constantly short-circuited by a small resistor on a wire that stopped it sounding. When the wire was cut or the resistor removed, the short circuit disappeared and the buzzer sounded.

That was crude and simple and didn't really work very well apparently, and I was also concerned about how safe it was so had to test it a lot. A few weeks ago, my brother announced that he wants another one and I had enough warning this time to do it properly.

I found the Kelsey Park Electronics Club website, belonging to a school many miles from myself, and it's been a lifesaver, explaining things that I've never seen explained anywhere else, in a simple way, with lovely printable PDF's for the projecta. The author clearly knows his subject and it is a fantastic resource.

Using that website, analysing a few of the circuits and stealing a few of the ideas from there I've come up with a brilliant circuit for this year's camp and have already spent a small fortune at Maplin's buying the breadboards and components and testing it out. Now, if only I could find a louder but lower-power buzzer than the one that cost me a tenner!

Another Linux Desktop progress update

It's been over a month and I'm sticking with Linux on the desktop. Too many things "just work" for me to go back, my data actually feels more secure than it did before and the computer does what I ask of it, poorly written software aside.

What poorly written software? Nothing too vital. I just wanted to play some movie trailers online with Opera but that's proving almost impossible, even with MPlayer-plugin, plugger et al. Nothing seems to make it work whereas FireFox runs it just as it should with the same plugins.
I've followed every page I could find on getting these plugins to work with Opera but they just display a blank box or throw up lots of stdout errors, or both. That's no big deal, I could just use Firefox, but I like the way Opera works faster for day-to-day browsing and is integrated with RSS, news, mail, etc.

The other program that was giving me hell was KPlayer. Some files it just would not display properly, displaying what appeared to be vsync problems (a single tear at a certain point on the screen while displaying video). I first noticed this while playing a DVD. Putting KPlayer into X11 rather than XV mode solved it but it took too much CPU. MPlayer GUI showed no such problems (despite KPlayer using MPlayer to display) but I didn't like it or any of it's skins.

I could NOT find any difference between how KPlayer and MPlayer were rendering the clips but KPlayer always looked different. Eventually, Xine came as a good middle ground, showing all the clips I want it to while not displaying any artifacts, using the computer's hardware acceleration to it's full and having a usable GUI.

Using ALSA-only for sound is a great leap forward and the only problems I get are the soundcard-sharing issues that are well documented and easy to fix with dmix plugins. I've tried those and they work perfectly.

I investigated KDE 3.4 for a while, even downloading the KLAX live CD (a new version of KDE on a SLAX LiveCD, based on Slackware). 3.4 seemed faster, more responsive, cleaner and more bug-free but I'm wary of upgrading it until I've made a tar.gz of my system as it is at the moment. That's another thing that I love about Linux... the low-level config is all runtime-determined and the remaining config is hardware-independent.

I can transfer this disk image to any other machine in the world and it would boot up (after running lilo) and work just as before, with only a few minor tweaks to support non-detected hardware. The point is that, unlike Windows, I could move this hard disk to any machine should this one go wrong and be up and running again in minutes rather than hours and use the exact same settings as I have now. You just CANNOT do that with Windows. Even changing your motherboard pretty much requires a reinstall but in Linux, it hardly cares about what motherboard you are running.

I've gone onto Linux 2.6 now, given the fact that it supports more hardware, has ALSA built-in at the kernel level, has lots of bugfixes and new features. It meant that I had to tweak the startup scripts somewhat to enable me to dual boot and compile software for whatever kernel I happened to be running (mainly just symlink magic) but that didn't take long and was hardly necessary anyway... I think I've only booted back into 2.4 once.

KNemo has replaced my Zonealarm because now I have the power of an iptables firewall, I just miss the little flashing lights that indicated network activity. :-)

SSH logins are now working flawlessly and, following advice from a number of sites, I've got non-root passwordless SSH up and running, with an su providing all the power I need. I do see this as a little unnecessary root had his own private key that was the only way to log in but it's working now. I can use PuTTY from work and log in to my home machine and laugh at all the login attempts I see bouncing off port 22:

203.73.40.40 only tried 2 times.
210.96.200.24 only tried 2 times.
212.19.84.19 only tried 2 times.
210.204.129.27 only tried 3 times.
211.160.17.13 only tried 3 times.
212.160.93.188 already blocked for 5 attempts.
61.16.165.148 already blocked for 5 attempts.
70.183.189.207 already blocked for 5 attempts.
210.178.215.221 already blocked for 6 attempts.
211.169.117.119 already blocked for 6 attempts.
211.248.77.194 already blocked for 6 attempts.
213.179.250.115 already blocked for 6 attempts.
218.108.89.205 already blocked for 6 attempts.
61.219.67.127 already blocked for 6 attempts.
66.14.195.102 already blocked for 6 attempts.
202.180.175.138 already blocked for 7 attempts.
61.218.8.110 already blocked for 7 attempts.
202.127.24.198 already blocked for 8 attempts.
211.112.77.28 already blocked for 9 attempts.
211.114.170.161 already blocked for 9 attempts.
203.199.69.160 already blocked for 10 attempts.
201.144.107.203 already blocked for 11 attempts.
213.21.187.186 already blocked for 11 attempts.
202.141.12.146 already blocked for 12 attempts.
84.45.142.57 already blocked for 12 attempts.
220.65.55.130 already blocked for 13 attempts.
202.201.0.246 already blocked for 15 attempts.
210.51.12.238 already blocked for 15 attempts.
211.114.177.138 already blocked for 15 attempts.
211.114.195.7 already blocked for 15 attempts.
62.76.207.201 already blocked for 15 attempts.
163.27.7.2 already blocked for 18 attempts.
81.190.223.110 already blocked for 21 attempts.
64.49.222.180 already blocked for 24 attempts.
222.53.117.195 already blocked for 28 attempts.
210.51.25.217 already blocked for 32 attempts.
202.183.229.200 already blocked for 34 attempts.
66.82.4.25 already blocked for 39 attempts.
211.147.7.88 already blocked for 43 attempts.
212.89.111.97 already blocked for 44 attempts.
62.65.85.126 already blocked for 44 attempts.
81.214.131.217 already blocked for 44 attempts.
61.220.76.58 already blocked for 57 attempts.
220.130.3.60 already blocked for 61 attempts.
212.251.61.243 already blocked for 77 attempts.
211.250.189.5 already blocked for 89 attempts.
217.160.130.112 already blocked for 89 attempts.
24.10.130.62 already blocked for 89 attempts.
80.190.249.210 already blocked for 89 attempts.
82.235.174.242 already blocked for 89 attempts.
12.26.192.66 already blocked for 108 attempts.
165.229.65.86 already blocked for 108 attempts.
64.208.57.92 already blocked for 108 attempts.
81.208.31.177 already blocked for 109 attempts.
203.177.36.178 already blocked for 114 attempts.
80.183.225.131 already blocked for 122 attempts.
219.101.165.151 already blocked for 154 attempts.
195.70.198.199 already blocked for 216 attempts.
66.236.248.139 already blocked for 216 attempts.
211.26.36.3 already blocked for 221 attempts.
128.252.171.31 already blocked for 348 attempts.
211.172.225.111 already blocked for 382 attempts.
211.144.101.203 already blocked for 413 attempts.
61.193.182.107 already blocked for 425 attempts.
218.149.85.18 already blocked for 467 attempts.
202.30.198.245 already blocked for 519 attempts.
137.195.182.25 already blocked for 701 attempts.
213.251.132.146 already blocked for 702 attempts.
218.179.255.249 already blocked for 1409 attempts.

That's the output from my custom script which I add new features to whenever I feel like it:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Script to search logs for SSH brute-force attempts and block IP's

# Log a message saying we have started.
logger -t SearchLogs -p cron.notice -- Starting Log Search...

# Search through /var/log/messsages for "Failed" lines from SSH.
# Strip out IP from each line.
cat /var/log/messages* |grep sshd |grep Failed\ password\ for | sed s/.*from\ // | sed s/\:\:ffff\:// |sed s/\ port\ .*// > /tmp/ssh_attempt_ips.txt

# Similarly for "Invalid" lines
cat /var/log/messages* |grep sshd |grep Invalid\ user | sed s/.*from\ // |sed s/\:\:ffff\:// >> /tmp/ssh_attempt_ips.txt

# Similarly for "Did not recieved identification string" lines
cat /var/log/messages* |grep sshd |grep Did\ not\ receive\ identification\ string\ from | sed s/.*from\ // |sed s/\:\:ffff\:// >> /tmp/ssh_attempt_ips.txt

# Sort IP's and weed out any duplicate lines to rid us of multiple IP's.
# Also, add a count of each IP so that we can judge how many attempts
# they had and strip out some whitespace.
#
# Also, ignore any line containing 212.85.1.15 as that's our main IP for
# logging in from, similarly for 127.0.0.1.
cat /tmp/ssh_attempt_ips.txt |sort |uniq -c -d |sort |sed s/\ */\ / | sed '/.*212.85.1.15/d' | sed '/.*127.0.0.1/d' > /tmp/ssh_attempt_counts.txt

# Remove whitespace from beginning of line, place | in between counts and IP's.
cat /tmp/ssh_attempt_counts.txt |sed s/\^\ // | sed s/\ /\|/ > /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt

if [ -f /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt ]
then
# For each line...
for BAD_IP in `cat /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt`
do
# Strip the count from the IP...
COUNT=`cat /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt |grep $BAD_IP | sed s/\|.*//`
IP_TO_BLOCK=`cat /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt |grep $BAD_IP | sed s/.*\|//`

# If a particular IP had more than 5 goes...
if [ "$COUNT" -gt "4" ]
then
EXISTING_LINE=`iptables -n -L INPUT |grep $IP_TO_BLOCK`

# Add to permanent blacklist.
echo $IP_TO_BLOCK >> /etc/ssh_blacklist.txt

# If it's not already on the firewall blocklist
if [ -z "$EXISTING_LINE" ]
then
# Print out a message and add to firewall.
echo Blocking $IP_TO_BLOCK for $COUNT attempts
logger -t SearchLogs -p cron.notice -- Blocking $IP_TO_BLOCK for $COUNT attempts
logger -t SearchLogs -- Blocking $IP_TO_BLOCK for $COUNT attempts
echo iptables -A INPUT -s $IP_TO_BLOCK -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s $IP_TO_BLOCK -j LOG
iptables -A INPUT -s $IP_TO_BLOCK -j DROP
else
echo $IP_TO_BLOCK already blocked for $COUNT attempts.
logger -t SearchLogs -p cron.notice -- $IP_TO_BLOCK already blocked for $COUNT attempts
fi
else
# Just warn.
logger -t SearchLogs -p cron.notice -- $IP_TO_BLOCK only tried $COUNT times.
echo $IP_TO_BLOCK only tried $COUNT times.
fi
done
else
echo "Can't read /tmp/ssh_prioritised_list.txt"
fi

cat /etc/ssh_blacklist.txt |sort |uniq > /tmp/ssh_blacklist.txt
cp /tmp/ssh_blacklist.txt /etc/

# Log a message to say we've finished
logger -t SearchLogs -p cron.notice -- Log Search Ended.

#---------------------------------------

I have that running as a cron job and it produces the output you see above. It's amazing how many attempts you get. Looking up the IP's on DShield shows that I'm not alone on being attacked from some of these IP's. It's tempting to move the SSH port just to avoid the log spam.

Overall, thoroughly impressed. I wouldn't class it as a perfect system but it's a damn sight closer than Windows ever was and when you consider that people who are giving their time and effort away are doing a better job than the largest company in the world pumping billions into research, you have to ask yourself whether you've ever been right to give them money.

Some computer annoyances.

I've had a few pet peeves about how computers work for many years and I thought I'd air them here. Firstly, login procedures.

Why are password dialogs not more secure? How many times have you had some program pop up and ask you for a password while you are in the middle of typing, you've not noticed and pressed some keys and Enter in the course of your work? Or how many times have you been in the middle of writing a password when something else pops up or shifts the cursor focus so you end up typing the password somewhere completely different? (Hotmail's login dialog comes to mind because sometimes it would change focus if you typed in your password before the scripts on the page had finished loading, meaning you typed your password on the login name box for all to read).

In the same way that Windows has the "press Ctrl-Alt-Del" to log on, in order to ensure that your password can only go to the one program not affected by Ctrl-Alt-Del, i.e. the login dialog, shouldn't we have some facility within the OS itself to prevent other passwords being scattered willy-nilly when they are entered?

Maybe a system-default password screen. If the user needs to enter a password for any purpose, they have to click on the password box itself, which is just a large rectangular link. When that is clicked, the screen is blanked, the keyboard is locked to every program but the login system (so preventing software key-loggers) and a password dialog appears asking you to "Type in the password for Opera 8.01 to access the website www.hotmail.com" or "Type in the password for Control Panel to access your network configuration" or "Type in the password for SSH to login as the user root on remote system server.house.com".

This screen would also be secured by the operating system somehow, to ensure fake screens could not be generated (even though they would require user-interaction to do so). This could be by some sort of visual cue which cannot be modified or overlaid by any program by the system itself (in a similar vein to the secure icon in web browser which SHOULD NOT be able to have a website overlay it's image) or by using the clever tricks that people are suggesting web browsers should use such as a customised screen which nobody but the system has access to... therefore the program would have to know what the user's customised login screen looked like. Any deviation from their picture of The Simpsons beating up a computer and the user would know that it was a fake login box.

[Incidentally, I once used a technique many years ago, before the web was popular, to obtain an admin login at my old school. Using Visual Basic and the PrintScreen button, I was able to replicate the look and functionality of the RM software login screen that the school was using at the time, even down to the help dialogs and pixel-perfect positioning, and got my sixth-form computer science teacher to log into the machine. It was set up so that it failed consistently with any login but wrote the username and password to a file.

The computers at the time had a problem that they would fail to log in with the exact same message if they had been disconnected from the network since they booted up, no matter if you reconnected them later on. The way to fix it was to reboot from the login screen. My program simulated this functionality and was run from within any non-privileged user account. Once the admin had typed their username and password, they got the error they thought meant the computer had to be rebooted, they would reboot, come to a GENUINE login screen and log in successfully. However, the username and password they had tried would be logged to a plaintext file on the user account I had run the program on.

Honestly, I let the person in question log in, then immediately told him what I'd done. Stupidly, he had challenged everyone in the sixth form to try to get admin access, seeing it as a learning experience, and had foiled several previous attempts to steal his username and password. The only other success was when someone read his password over his shoulder and then created dozens of admin accounts using it, using their own name. They were quickly spotted and caught. Mine wasn't and would never have been as multiple logins from the same username were allowed and I would have had time enough to circumvent the measures in place which showed up admin users on the system (an easily subvertible two-line "cron job" that showed all admin users on a spare monitor in the server room)]

Ideally, there would be a fourth LED on your keyboard, indicating "secure" status which can ONLY be toggled by the operating system itself, not application software or device drivers. This would light only when the REAL login screen was up and people would be trained to realise that if the light's not on, people can read their password.

This should also stop the problem of accidentally writing your password at the end of the username box. Either a special button or key combination (even as simple as tabbing to the password field in question and pressing enter) would take you to the secure password screen. The light on the keyboard would be enough to show non-touch-typists that they are in the password box, the blanked screen for the login procedure enough to show touch-typists that they are in the right place.

I do consider password showing on the screen to be quite a weak link, though not completely unstoppable. For a busy user, though, especially around kids or teenagers, this would be a great way to stop unintentional password theft.

Another update.

Following on from my previous post, another update:

Kplayer & Mplayer are working perfectly now that I've got the codecs installed properly, have acceleration working with the right options and I now know to always use Alsa for sound wherever possible. I have one spurious AVI file which identifies itself as DivX which won't play properly under any of the codecs except one but that one's not automatically picked. Selecting that codec manually makes it work and it's only one file that does this.

I've associated most of the formats with their respective players. Upgrading to the just-released Opera 8 was simple enough, no glitches and it's much faster and more stable, although it was too clever for it's own good and tried to use the Win32 Opera directory from my previous Windows install to get its Java from.

The first Java site I visited, I noticed and a quick whereis pointed me to a seemingly good java directory which Opera refused but then managed to find some sort of clue and suggested I try another. The suggestion worked and Java runs better than ever inside the browser.

I've now bought Crossover Office because it does what I want it to, was cheap enough, though I'm not sure about the subscription module for update. However, I was paying for one piece of subscription-based software on Windows and at least if I stop paying for Crossover, I get to "keep" the last version. Crossover runs my Word 2000 without problem, also my Irfanview tool (at least for all the bits I've tried that I would ever need). I'm going to try JASC Paint Shop Pro 7 on it at a later date.

I've configured the login screen the way I want it and this way it has a simple "shutdown" button that my girlfriend can use to turn it off if she's the last to bed at night. Before it needed a console login and a shutdown command and she's not familiar with non-GUI systems.

KPlayer issues solved, I've set it to be the default player for every media file format and I've also tested GSpot in wine and it runs perfectly.

Sound was my biggest problem so far. SDL games were sometimes perfect, next time they were run the sound would lag by over a second. That was unacceptable and annoying. Eventually, after much Googling, an upgrade of SDL, a tweak of ALSA settings to enable basic hardware mixing (I'm not brave enough to attempt the dmix plugin yet and don't really have a need for it) and most importantly, disabling the aRTs system. This hasn't lost me any sound that I would like to keep and stops the sound that I do want from lagging so inconsistently. This is something that I hope upgrading to a later version (whether or ALSA, KDE, aRTs, or even the linux kernel) will fix because it's plainly a problem.

I've upgraded packages (simple) and also installed remote passwordless SSH (more difficult) by a combination of Googling and guessing. Already I've had a few SSH login attempts using basic passwords from various places in Taiwan and China but I'm not paranoid enough to worry about them. Passwordless-SSH was more of an educational distraction than a real need. And, yes, my ADSL router was forwarding unknown ports to a no-longer-existent local IP address instead of to my main machine (which used to have it's own firewall). A quick tweak of the settings and SSH showed up externally as responding.

Further on my quest for "work distractive technologies", I've played a bit with TuxRacer and it looks like 3D acceleration is working properly... :-)

Still fighting with the bloody KDE clock as it just insists on pissing about when set to a timezone that uses BST and says it's applied changes that it doesn't. Wonder if KDE 3.4 has fixed that issue?

Still no problems or major disappointments as of yet but rest assured that I'm hunting for some more show-stoppers..

Linux Conversion Update

Okay, so I've been running Linux for a few days now. I've managed to get all of my necessary apps and most of my "useful" apps working properly.

KDE provides most of the tools natively but I had to install some things like MPlayer (and Kplayer, a GUI for it), K3B and a few others. I've also downloaded Crossover Office having been disappointed at the conversion capabilities of AbiWord and KOffice (through no fault on the behalf of their authors, I want to add). I haven't got around to installing OpenOffice at the moment and Word 2000 is about the only thing that I will admit that Microsoft has done right so I have no problems with paying money to get that to work. It saves me time playing about, ensures compatibility and means I won't strip or corrupt important info in my DOC files. Similarly for Excel 97/Gnumeric.

Crossover + Word is working perfectly, not a sign of a glitch, but Wine isn't up to running much else that I want at the moment, but luckily most of what I want has nothing to do with actual work. :-) It does run Irfanview, Dreamweaver and Paint Shop Pro, though, and DW and PSP I consider to be my vital apps. I have yet to test it out on every feature of those programs.

I've also installed the nVidia drivers which sped up X's 2D drawing noticeably. That was the only time I needed to shut down X and restart. I'm still using a console login at the moment because I've never been afraid of a command line and I like to see what's been going on at boot before I start up a complex program like X.

Linux still hasn't crashed once so it's definitely better than my previous setup, and even X hasn't crashed out yet (which, from previous Linux experience, I was expecting, especially with a binary display driver).

I managed to download a Knoppix torrent and burn to a CD within an hour of deciding to do it, without meeting any unpassable shortfalls or annoyances along the way (just installed BitTorrent and K3B from LinuxPackages and it all just worked). In fact, K3B is better than most CD-Writing software I've used on Windows and I've pretty much used them all.

KPlayer/MPlayer was a little more tricky but hardly a vital program. The package I was using was missing a few symlinks, which were easily created, a little bit of configuration and I'm only having trouble now with one MPEG-4 avi that seems screwed in MPlayer but works in another, unaccelerated, media player that came with Slackware. I'm assuming that the Win32 codecs are faster but not as well supported as the OS codecs that came with Slackware and that a slight override somewhere will cure this. While fixing this, I did notice that I quite miss using GSpot, a codec-discoverer for any avi/mpg/etc. file. I'll have to find an OS equivalent or get it running under Wine.

Installing new and missing software has been a breeze thanks to LinuxPackages.net, not that I've ever been scared of compiling my own, it just makes it so much easier to keep track of what program is where. Thanks to Slackware's plain tgz packages, if I lose track of where the "executable" went, I can just browse the package in Ark and look for it. That's worth its weight in gold and useful for those packages that didn't have quite as much attention paid to their creation as others on LinuxPackages and might be missing a KDE shortcut icon or similar.

I've been upgrading a few libs like SDL et al and not run into any problems yet, in fact I can say that it's only made things work better. I'm looking at the prospect of upgrading to the latest -current Slackware packages as they include the latest version of KDE. I'm not too worried about the rest of the updates as they are mainly bugfixes and security updates. The computer is firewalled and not running any internet-bound services and the only bugs I've run into are Konqueror crashing a bit more than it should. It's hardly a problem as it doesn't even take down other instances of itself, let alone X or the OS, and a click on the Konqueror icon gets it straight back up.

I haven't managed to test remote SSH yet and I'm a bit worried that my firewall might be being a little overzealous and blocking it as the port appears "stealthed" to any web port-scanner. I'll have to see if that's because of the firewall, the way I've set it up or the SSH config. I've noticed this same problem on another 10.1 machine with this firewall so I will have to look into this. Internet access from the computer itself, though, works just fine, even over P2P and torrenting.

I've been trying out a couple of Linux games and they've been quite fun so far, just the sort of games I like, small, fast, not too fancy but fun. Am missing my other games a bit but knew I would be and will have to wait for a new PC for gaming.

Have yet to try the DVD but I see no reason why it should not work as MPlayer can play MPEG2 files off my hard disk and the computer can see the DVD drive, so there shouldn't be any problems. I have updated packages for libdvdcss etc. on standby just in case.

Had a few teething troubles with the KDE clock as it really messes up when you select timezones, whacking hours on and off of the clock a few seconds after selecting them and simultaneously resisting most attempts to stop it being too clever for it's own good and adding hours for BST etc. In the end, I just set it to a non-timezone until I can be bothered to fight with it again.

Altogether, it's been pretty painless, I haven't lost any work, my main apps are up and running and there's not much functionality that I didn't have before. The computer is more stable, turns itself off EVERY time I ask it to, boots up without issues or any error messages and runs most of the existing hardware (with the only exception being the old scanner) without me having to do anything at all.

Also, I've noticed the benefit of using a local network, printer-server and ADSL router again. To be able to have a network where everything important like printers and internet access are done over a standalone networked device is a real lifesaver but then, Slackware would easily handle my printer and any sort of NAT effortlessly. I have also recently set up a Slackware machine for my brother which does all of the above in one machine so that he just plugs in any computer and it all just works (firewall, NAT, printer sharing, Samba storage, etc.) once it has an IP. This has greatly aided his transition from a 500MHz 98 machine to a new mega-gaming-machine XP.

My entire changeover has gone mostly unnoticed by the other user of my home network, namely my girlfriend. The only comments she had were, when she used the machine once to save turning hers on, that it didn't have a seperate Opera icon for her like the old one did, with her bookmarks and emails. That was because I'd forgotten to transfer her settings across when I'd done mine. That's easily fixed, as all the old Windows drives are still present and mapped into the filesystem and, thanks to Opera being cross-platform again, it's simply a matter of copying them over to the right place.

The other comment was that she couldn't play PartyPoker on it, her favourite online game, because that's a Windows-only piece of software. I had tried that in Wine myself but it really didn't like it at all. She'll just have to stick to her own computer for that, which I knew she would.

Overall, quite happy with it so far and still waiting for the first showstopper.