Changing your Google Apps primary domain on your free legacy account

Note: This is a shared article - all credits go to Jen who first published it at: Swapping your Google Apps primary domain to your secondary domain (for dummies). I have tried it at two Google App accounts and it worked like a charm.

I know, I know, most of you are reading this and thinking, WTF? WTveryF are you talking about now? And that’s fair, this is a little out there, even for me. But I’ve just spent the better part of today trying to change the domain of my free Google Apps account, and now that I’ve made it happen, I feel I should share.
I am one of those lucky few who signed up for a free Google Apps account way back when there was such a thing, but somewhere along the line my domain changed. There’s a type A coder in my head, and she’s mostly ridiculed and pushed around by the rest of the gals upstairs, but she really likes things to be nice and orderly, so today she’s had a go at being in charge.

If I haven’t lost you yet, it may be because you CARE about the outcome! Perhaps you chanced upon my blog in a desperate attempt to change your OWN primary domain! Well then, my friend, I shall get right to it! And I’m going to make it SUPER easy:

* A note! As commentator have kindly pointed out, this method only allows you to have ONE DOMAIN and keep your free account. You can have a bunch of aliases too, but ONLY ONE DOMAIN. Sorry, those are the Googley Rules for free accounts now.

Legacy Google Apps Users:

1. If you’re lucky enough to have a FREE FREE FREE account, you need to upgrade to the free 30 day enterprise trial. Don’t forget to downgrade before the 30 days are up, or you’ll lose your FREE FREE FREE account!!!
2. You can upgrade from the Admin page of your Google Apps account. Seriously, let me help you, log in here: https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/

Adding a Secondary Domain:

1. Righto, so you’ve upgraded to a paid account (free for 30 days) – if you have a paid account, you’re already on track. Go back to the admin console, and click on ‘Domains’. If you can’t see ‘Domains’, click on ‘more controls’ at the bottom of the page. Okay, fine, just click here: https://admin.google.com/AdminHome?fral=1#Domains:
2. Click on the add a domain or alias button, and then add another domain. Don’t add an alias, okay, if you were happy with an alias you wouldn’t have searched out this post.
3. Follow Google’s verification steps.

Swapping your Primary and Secondary Domains:

1. Go here: https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/v1/reference/customers/update
2. You’re in customer update now, click on Try It Now (it’s in blue).
3. Make sure you’re logged into your relevant Google account (you should see your mail address in the top right corner).
4. Next to customerKey type: my_customer
5. Next to fields type: customerDomain
6. Click next to ‘Request Body’, and in the –add a property– drop-down that appears, choose: customerDomain
7. The following will magically appear: “customerDomain”:
8. Type your secondary domain in the box next to “customerDomain”: (leave out the www. bit, just type in yourdomainname.com)
9. Click Authorise and Execute
10. Your secondary domain is now your primary domain!

Legacy Users

1. Downgrade your account if you don’t want to lose your FREE FREE FREE account!!!
2. You need to remove your secondary domain (what used to be your primary domain) first. Go here to delete it: https://admin.google.com/AdminHome?fral=1#Domains:
3. Once you’ve deleted your secondary domain, click on billing in the Admin console, and in the drop-down next to Google Apps for Work, click cancel subscription.
4. Choose the downgrade account option.
5. Submit.

That is all.
Ja, I know, that was a lot. But a lot less than the four hours I’ve spent figuring it out.

Sleeping guard + 'scarecrow' guard poster

Sleeping guard puts up a guard poster as a scarecrow.

Wrong Juggaar

Wrong juggaar... should I tell him... or just see what happens?

Crisis of an Entrepreneur

Shared via samdavidson.

Entrepreneur is not a verb

Writers write. Bakers bake. Managers manage. Designers design.

What do entrepreneurs do?

This is the beauty of entrepreneurship. No clear or singular verb defines what we do.

This is the crisis of entrepreneurship. No clear or singular verb defines what we do.

Entrepreneurs do lots of things. We could do anything. We can't do everything. But we don't do nothing.

The challenge of the entrepreneur is to find your verb and do that thing better than anyone else.

 

A day in the life of corporate vs a day in the life of a startup.

Rise of today's hackers

An excerpt from a recent read:

Most of these hackers [from 1960s and 70s who were once limited to university facilities] would go on to form Silicon Valley start-up companies, lead the open-source software movement, and create small (or sometimes very large) fortunes for themselves. They entered the popular imagination not as hackers but as "computer geniuses" or "nerds."

Their progeny, the kids who would grow up with the PC in their homes and schools, were faced with a different set of problems and possibilities. These young hackers were born into a world of passwords and PIN numbers, created and made possible by the corporations that the old-school hackers had built. These younger hackers had no institutional affiliation and no limitations on access (at least to their own machines). Moreover, they saw that secrecy was a double-edged sword. Secrets can preserve an institution's identity, but, just as important, they can also protect a hacker from being identified. While a culture of secrecy provided for security, it also allowed for a new kind of anonymity, one that could be exploited and used to a hacker's advantage.

With these discoveries, the new-school hackers began to reach out to one another and create their own culture, a culture that expressed a general dissatisfaction with the world, typical of teenage angst, but also a dissatisfaction with ways technology was being used. For teenage boys discovering the ways that computers could be used to reach out to one another, there was nothing more disturbing than seeing those same computers being used to systematically organize the world. Groups of hackers began to meet, to learn from one another, and to form a subculture, which was dedicated to resisting and interrupting “the system.”

Fear was driving the popular imagination, and hackers were delighted to go along with the image. After all, what high school kid doesn't delight in the feeling that he or she rules a universe that their parents, teachers, and most adults don't understand? One thing teenagers understand is how to make their parents uncomfortable. Like loud music, teen fashion, and smoking cigarettes, hacking is a form of rebellion and an exercise of power. The difference rests in the fact that the 1990s represented such a fundamental break between youth and mainstream culture that hacking was unable to be successfully assimilated into the narratives of youth rebellion without being either wildly exaggerated or completely trivialized. Parents intuitively understand the defiance of music, youth fashion, and cigarettes; they did similar things themselves. With hacking, they are faced with an entirely new phenomenon. That gap, between what hackers understand about computers and what their parents don't understand, and more importantly fear, makes hacking the ideal tool for youth culture's expression of the chasm between generations. Hacking is a space in which youth, particularly boys, can demonstrate mastery and autonomy and challenge the conventions of parental and societal authority. Divorced from parental or institutional authority, the PC enabled the single most important aspect of formative masculinity to emerge, independent learning, “without the help of caring adults, with limited assistance from other boys, and without any significant emotional support.” Hackers used the personal computer to enter the adult world on their own terms. In doing so, they found a kind of independence that was uniquely situated. Hackers had found something they could master, and unlike the usual rebellious expressions of youth culture, it was something that had a profound impact on the adult world.

Hacker subculture has a tendency to exploit cultural attitudes toward technology. Aware of the manner in which it is represented, hacker culture is both an embracing and a perversion of the media portrayals of it. Hackers both adopt and alter the popular image of the computer underground and, in so doing, position themselves as ambivalent and often undecidable figures within the discourse of technology.

In tracing out these two dimensions, anxiety about technology and hacker subculture itself, I argue that we must regard technology as a cultural and relational phenomenon. Doing so, I divorce the question of technology from its instrumental, technical, or scientific grounding. In fact, I will demonstrate that tools such as telephones, modems, and even computers are incidental to the actual technology of hacking. Instead, throughout this work, I argue that what hackers and the discourse about hackers reveal is that technology is primarily about mediating human relationships, and that process of mediation, since the end of World War II, has grown increasingly complex. Hacking, first and foremost, is about understanding (and exploiting) those relationships.

In the past twenty years, the culture of secrecy, which governs a significant portion of social, cultural, and particularly economic interaction, has played a lead role in making hacking possible. It has produced a climate in which contemporary hackers feel both alienated and advantaged. Although hackers philosophically oppose secrecy, they also self-consciously exploit it as their modus operandi, further complicating their ambivalent status in relation to technology and contemporary culture.

The oldschool hackers of the 1960s and 1970s — who are generally credited with the birth of the computer revolution and who subscribed to an ethic of “free access to technology” and a free and open exchange of information — are thought to differ from their 1980s and 1990s counterparts, generally stereotyped as “high-tech hoodlums” or computer terrorists. Historically, however, the two groups are linked in a number of ways, not the least of which is the fact that the hackers of the 1980s and 1990s have taken up the old-school ethic, demanding free access to information. Further problematizing the dichotomy is the fact that many old-school hackers have become Silicon Valley industry giants, and, to the new-school hackers' mind-set, have become rich by betraying their own principles of openness, freedom, and exchange. Accordingly, the new-school hackers see themselves as upholding the original old-school ethic and find themselves in conflict with many old schoolers now turned corporate.

— Douglas Thomas (2002). Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press. Pg. xii, xiv, xx, xxi, xxii.

Car tetris

Don't worry.. I've been training for this for 25 years.

Laptop Battery Juggaar

Laptop battery rigged to work with disposable or rechargeable off the shelf cells.

Let's not cheat in classes

"If you cheat in engineering classes, you WILL kill people later. For your own sake and every one else's, quit or learn.

Highlight everything stupid

Light the face..

Survival 101

Survival 101: Drive your crashed car home to save money.

How to sock on Wikipedia

Shared via MZMcBride and encyclopediadramatica. This article is not meant for promoting sock puppetry though, it serves as an equal tool for those trying to catch it by understanding how it is done.

So you want to sock and not get caught? Well, it's not exactly easy, but there are definitely some things that can make it easier. The following are some tips for socking well.

Multiple accounts are the natural result of a non-anonymous website. People switch accounts just to stay anonymous. But a sock puppet is when a person uses these accounts to prove they've not gotten laid for a very long time, if ever. It is a tactic often used by trolls harrassing people on certain sites, faggots "trolling" on Wikipedia, and even pplz on ED who are evading a well-earned ban.

Anonymous websites let you samefag with little pissing away of your life and people can spot them with just a little bit of intelligence.

However, non-anonymous websites are MMORPGs where people work their sock accounts up to epic activity histories. Then when the sock puppets come by to back each other up, people look at their long histories of activity and go, "There's no way someone would spend that much of their time making all these accounts look like different people. They must be different people in real life because no one could have that less of a life spend that much time building these accounts up just to win some petty arguments."

And that, prey tell, is why sock puppets are effective. It's not that people can't tell, it's that they really don't want to believe.

Sockfarm

A sock farm is where someone creates a sock puppet account, and then another, and another, and another, and another... These accounts all make minor edits to articles aka "farming", and as many useless ones as they can to build up their edit count. They start having conversations with one another. Then they fall in love, get married, break up, and fight.

Eventually this farm is "harvested" and it can get administrators elected, articles deleted, kept, merged, and through sheer numbers make anything happen on Wikipedia that they want.

Of course you need a lot of time before getting the fruits of your farming, but it's worth the efforts. Eventually you will manage to control over 9000 sock puppets, have yourself elected as Sysop, have everyone banned, and then organize a massive raid (maybe with /b/tards, but they are not your personal army) in order to vandalize and delete the whole encyclopedia. Wikimedia will collapse, Jimbo Wales will be screwed and you will be considered as a legendary hero, even greater than Willy on Wheels or Grawp.

Anyway, you are too lazy to do it, aren't you?

Become familiar with the tracking tools

On Wikipedia there are those elite few, the Magic 40, that possess CheckUser abilities. This means that they check the IP addresses that any account edits from. While you're busy socking away there can be slip-ups: you might sign a post or edit a user page with the wrong account. Since this is Wikipedia after all, and suspicion is the order of the day there, this will be noticed. A CU will be notified and an IP check conducted: "ZOMG 34 accounts edited from ip 127.0.0.1." And you're screwed. But who wants that?

1. Use Tor. Liberally. If you're caught just say you're editing from China and that the secret police would kill you if they knew you were editing Wikipedia.
2. Use AOL. Yuck what internet veteran uses AOL you say? A smart one, AOL gives you a new IP with every page load. CheckUser=CheckUseless!
3. Open Proxies This is risky as they are blocked on sight, and just editing from an open proxy can be seen as a sign of trollkind. Well, yeah.
4. Use shared IPs like cybercafes and community colleges for some of your accounts.
5. Get in your car and go searching for unsecured Wireless hotspots. This is great when using troll socks to post power words. Maybe you'll even get someone else banned!
6. If you live in a city like Portland that offers wireless across town...well it can't get any easier than that.
7. Use different browsers. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session.

Since you'll likely be socking on a MediaWiki wiki, all of the documentation and source code of the extensions used by the software is publicly available. Read the page about the CheckUser extension and browse its source code if you know PHP decently.

Also, it's important to understand Wikimedia's configuration of the extension. The data available to CheckUser is only stored for 90 days. After that, it gets deleted.

Use different browsers

This is one of the easiest ways to sock. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session. Protip: you can tint backgrounds of edit textareas to distinguish them (slight reddish color for alt account, slight blueish color for master account, e.g.).

Use a shell account

Using SSH or a VPN, use a shell account to proxy. This masks your actual IP address and instead assigns you whichever IP you're proxying through.

Shell accounts can be purchased (from a web hosting provider) or most schools and offices have publicly available VPNs.

However, be warned that some proxies retain XFF headers (see below for more) and others don't. You'll likely need to spoof your headers to be safe.

Alter your headers

When a CheckUser checks your account, they can get header information that looks something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_4_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1

You need to spoof this info if you'll be using the same computer or browser to sock.

XFF

XFF headers reveal information about your originating IP address. As mentioned above, your proxy may strip the XFF headers, however this isn't guaranteed. Generally speaking, spoofing XFF headers is pointless.

User agent

User agent headers are easily spoofed. These reveal the browser you're using. If you're using two separate browsers as suggested above, it's probably still a good idea to spoof the user agent string as it always includes operating system information.

Alter your behavior

This is one of the most important steps to not get caught socking.

Time zones

It's trivial to map someone's contributions throughout the data. And sock trackers regularly use this tactic to spot patterns between accounts. Edit at different time zones with different accounts. Direct overlap between two accounts always looks suspicious.

Content areas

This is rather trivial to understand, yet many people get caught this way. To effectively sock, you have to edit in different areas than your master account. If your master account is involved in every bot discussion, your sock should not be. While it may be helpful to comment occasionally on bot discussions using your sock account to throw people off, you should avoid similar content areas.

It's equally important to avoid similar types of edits. If you're the master of fixing references, make your sock the master of writing content or the master of typo fixes. Don't have your two accounts making the same type of edits.

Edit summaries

This is another easy way to get caught. If you always edit using edit summaries, make sure your alt account does not. Also, make sure you use different types of edit summaries. For example, for a standard reply, many users use "+reply", "re", "r", or "reply". Some even copy and paste part of the message in the edit summary box. Whichever way you choose, be sure to not do the same thing on your alt account.

Writing style

This is very important if you make a lot of 'public' comments (comments on various noticeboards and talk pages). One obscure word used by both accounts and people could start to ask questions. If you're a poor speller, have one of your accounts use Firefox's spelling checker. If you always spell you as 'u,' well, you shouldn't do that for any reason. But if you do anyway, make sure your other account doesn't do the same thing. Writing style can quickly give away a user's true identity.

Talk with yourself

This is an incredibly tricky tactic that can easily backfire, but if done effectively, it can make it seem very, very implausible that the two accounts are connected. This should be done rarely, if at all. The occasional talk page comment to your alt account or point something out to them. Do not give them awards or constantly praise their work. That quickly raises suspicions, especially after a recent incident on the English Wikipedia.

Avoid double voting in major elections

Every user who votes for Board officials or for stewards is CheckUsered. Don't double vote in major elections unless you're sure that your IP information and XFF headers won't reveal a direct similarity.

Act your age

New accounts don't know about noticeboards. They don't usually even know about namespaces. Remember that when someone is examining your contributions history, a normal account always shows a predictable evolution. Be sure to keep this in mind when using your alt account. Sure, you can try to excuse your behavior with claims that you edited anonymously for years or whatever, but it's a whole lot easier to simply edit linearly (using edit summaries more often as time passes, exploring other namespaces, getting involved with the administrative side of things, etc.).

However, as a caveat, do not try to act like a completely new user. Blatant mistakes and downright stupidity will just get more attention focused on you. Play it cool and you'll have no issues.

Spring through tree

A natural spring finds its way through a tree trunk.

Moltyform - Efforts for a Good Sleep

Moltyform places roadside advertisements 'boards' rigged with a bed form that can be converted into beds at night by travelers, labours from rural areas or the homeless.

Sleeping bag advert

A sleeping bag advertisement photograph at Karakorum.

Flame in gravity vs flame in space

Shared via Highbrows; Pakistan's first applied sciences blog.

This is how a flame looks like in space (ie. in microgravity in orbit).

Samurai showdown: counter baton charge

Woman charges back at assaulting riot police at Lahore, Pakistan.

An explosive in action at Pakistan Army

A well timed photograph.

Pakistani R&D start up designs ad hoc WiFi Gadget

Shared via Highbrows; Pakistan's first applied sciences blog.

Pakistani Tech and R&D startup, Highbrows Engineering & Technologies, creates a gadget that uses a battery to power up Evo Wingle anywhere for highspeed WiFi internet on the go for cellphones.

See below for images of the gadget taken from the Highbrows official blog: Ad hoc on the go Wifi from Evo Wingle without a power socket:

Engineer vs. Hacker Quandary

This article has been copied and shared from eetimes.com post of 26/7/2013.

MADISON, Wis. — There's a popular theory that most hackers could eventually become engineers if they chose to do so, but the reverse -- training engineers to become hackers -- is next to impossible.

Is this true?

Before answering that question, let's examine how exactly hackers are different from engineers. That question (which you might say has already been asked and answered) hit me while talking to Richard Soja, distinguished member of the technical staff at Freescale Semiconductor.

Soja and I were discussing issues concerning cars. I was asking him how the best automotive chip suppliers like Freescale can get a few steps ahead of hackers to identify potential security holes.

Soja quipped: "To protect against attacks, you need to think like attackers."
Obviously. But Soja seems to believe that asking engineers to think like hackers is easier said than done. He explained:

Engineers, by nature, are good at creating positive things and coming up with new ideas. But the idea of destroying their beautiful, brand-new ideas doesn't come naturally to engineers.

Among engineers who can best think like hackers are those who work on testing, he added.

Hmmm. That's interesting.

Still, I'm not totally sold on the premise that hackers and engineers are two different technology types with dissimilar brains.

So, first, let me list my questions, and why I think we need a better explanation.

1. Are hackers and engineers essentially two separate species? I wonder if hackers are born to hack and others are not. If yes, can we define two separate types?

2. One could argue that hackers and engineers are basically alike but display two different mindsets -- depending on the different projects they undertake. If so, how do the mindsets differ?

3. Another argument is that "hackers vs. engineers" merely describes a transitional process in one's career. For example, a budding engineer who doesn't have formal training or a coherent career direction might begin life as a hacker, but then gradually grow up to become an engineer through experiences working in organizations. If true, are we saying that engineers are the butterfly and hackers the caterpillar?
More important, I'm curious:

4. Can you teach engineers to become hackers and think like hackers? The butterfly reverting to caterpillar?

5. If yes, what's the trick?
Searching the issue of hackers vs. engineers, you can find a lot of commentary. Let's consider some of these opinions.

How to get out of the hacker mindset

A student completing his Master's in Computer Science was worried about jettisoning his "hacker mentality" as he starts his career in the "real world." He took part in a forum in shlashdot.org. He wrote:

Since my academic work has focused almost solely on computer science and not software engineering per se, I'm really still a 'hacker,' meaning I take a problem, sketch together a rough solution using the appropriate CS algorithms, and then code something up (using a lot of prints to debug). I do some basic testing and then go with it… Even at my previous job, which was sort of a jack-of-all-trades (sysadmin, security, support, and programming), the testing procedures were not particularly rigorous, and as a result I don't think I'm really mature as an 'engineer.' So my question to the community is: how do you make the transition from hacker (in the positive sense) to a real engineer… How do you get out of the 'hacker' mindset?"

To this earnest question, one person whose username is mcrbids responded thusly:

An "engineer" is somebody who takes the time to understand a problem, and creates something to solve that.

Having done software from scales ranging from "quick shopping cart application" to enterprise scale organizational relationship management software, the only real difference between the two is that with the latter, you create a large number of smaller projects roughly the size of the aforementioned shopping cart application, except that the "users" are often other pieces of the same system. In larger systems, you'll be talking with other developers who have built or manage the pieces your parts will communicate with. You'll read more documentation, and it will be generally of higher quality than the shopping cart scripts.

Don't *ever* lose the "hacker" mentality - exactly what you described is what software engineering is.

Hacker-developer-engineer evolution

In his blog, Hartley Brody, author of Marketing for Hackers and The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping, quoted from David Mosher's video presentation, "So,You Want to be a Front-End Engineer":

A hacker can come up with solutions, but maybe they can't look back after they've finished and realize how they came up with the solution. They just kinda poke at things until they get something that works…

At some point, you level up and become a developer and a developer understands best practices… and you use those best practices to craft solutions but you don't really understand beneath the best practices, beneath the abstractions.

An engineer is someone who can get things done, craft a solution - they understand the best practices, but they also understand why they're using the best practices… [they] move into an understanding of the platform as a whole. 

Meanwhile, Peter Christensen, in his own blogpost, defined the two as follows:

Hacker: Always trying new things, trying to stretch the limits of what's possible or what exists… Linus Torvalds is a great example of a hacker - he had two giant ideas that few thought were possible - writing a free operating system and doing it with a worldwide collection of volunteers. Once something is functional and successful, the hacker moves on to another hard problem, like a serial entrepreneur.

Engineer: All of the definitions of engineering that I've found were too complicated and missed the point, so I propose this: An engineer is someone who takes something that is known to be possible, and makes it fit within a given, limiting set of criteria. Some common criteria are:
• within a fixed budget
• meet a performance benchmark
• exceed certain reliability requirements
• make it aesthetically pleasing
• must include a certain capacity
• meet arbitrary regulations (accessibility, environmental, paying living wages, etc)
Note that this doesn't mean that an engineer is any less creative than a hacker. On the contrary, the constraints provided by the engineering problem can provoke more creative and original thinking than that of the original invention.

Engineers can become hackers

On the other hand, Kim Guldberg answered, "What is the difference between an engineer and a hacker?" in quora as follows:

For journalists and the general public a hacker is someone who breaks into computer systems stealing information and doing other malicious stuff.

For hackers the term seems to have expanded… Today being a hacker is more a question of mind set than just skill set. It's a curious individual, who has obvious talents and knowledge. He (and today sometimes also she) is somewhat geeky and obsessive in his interests, he is persistent and able to think out of the box. He is not bound by conventions and what is understood as possible or the right way of doing things and he has an open mind.

So the answer to your question must be. If an engineer has the above-mentioned mind set, he can be a hacker if he wishes and work hard at it.

With that beginning, tell us your definitions of hackers and engineers, and explain (if you can) how engineers can become hackers.

Visualization of first 1000 digits of Pi

π visualization.