1. Computer
2. Thoughts

Power up the NOVO

Creating One Key Rescue partition and backups by hand.

Recently I have bought a new notebook – Lenovo V570c. Like many laptops these days it contained a hidden service partition (called LENOVO_PART) which I have immediately dealocated (the disk was partitioned weirdly in the first place – it had 2 parts and 1 hidden with unallocated space scattered before and between them).

But one thing was bugging me: this laptop has a small button with a rotated «undo» image on it near the power button. It's called «NOVO» and is used to restore the system instantly with a single click (if we don't count the confirmation). I have read that it depends on the hidden partition in some special way and was already thinking of downloading images of it captured by other people (sice I have already deleted mine) until I have come across One Key Rescue 7.0 engineering disc.

Judging from its name it is used by Lenovo staff to create those hidden partitions. I have given it a shot and it worked for me so I thought I'll share how to do this on my blog as well.

Some notes before we start:

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1. Computer
2. Thoughts

Creating bootable USB sticks from ISO images

Surely we all have heard or even used various Live CDs (or now they’re often DVDs). As the name suggests they are meant for burning on a CD/DVD media and then loading your computer regardless of what has happened to its stationar OS.

However, those discs are really becoming old fashioned (unless you’re willing to burn a Bluray to load Slitaz). USB sticks, however, are having triumphant march over the computing world since they’re especially cheap and have ridiculous capacity (64 GiB? No problem, way better than 16 DVDs). It would only seem logical to use them for creating «Live CDs».

But how to do that? There are various manuals that involve Linux loaders, PE2USB or other flash formatters, etc. For me they didn’t always work and were troublesome to begin with. Is there any way to transfer an .iso with boot sector already prepared to a USB stick?

Well, there is. And it’s called UltraISO.

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1. Computer
2. Enchanting

Native LESS CSS on Windows

A simple way to get official LESS JavaScript compiler run on Windows without using any 3rd party tools.

LESS CSS is a nifty extension to CSS. It adds variables, style nesting, classes-functions (snippets you can embed into other classes respecting nesting), math expression calculator and other features. It was initially written in Ruby and available as a gem but now it's officially switched to JavaScript (see GitHub). It's implemented in Python, PHP and other popular languages.

For several years I have been using old Ruby gem parser (version 1.2.21) – partly because it worked even if had some flaws (nesting of variables didn't properly works, there was no & «merger» support, no %~%% escaping, pattern matching, etc.), partly because I couldn't upgrade since 2.x branch required Python (apparently for some obscure JavaScript interpretation).

When starting a new project a few days ago I decided it was enough and went searching for some easy way to use LESS on Windows. At first I was sceptical – installing Python just to make Ruby gem run JavaScript (no kidding) wasn't an option; other projects suggested at StackOverflow were either outdated (Simpless) or required .Net (which I'm trying to avoid on my new laptop).

Still, among other alternatives WinLess looked more suitable even if I had to install .Net just to run it. Before doing so, though, I have tried it on a virtual machine I have for this purpose… I'm happy that I did because now it turns out we can run official JavaScript LESS parser on Windows without installing any 3^rd part software.

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1. Health
2. Rawfoodism

Green salads

Give that old meat grinder a new, humane gloss :)

Usually I’m writing my health-related posts in Russian but since one or two of my English-speaking friends might be interested let’s try it different this time…

Several days ago I’ve discovered an interesting raw dish – greenery passed through a (meat) grinder (looks like it’s the most humane way this device has been used in my house throughout its lifespan). In regards to green vegetables we all – or at least the majority of rawfood-aware people – have heard that it’s immersely healthy thanks to chlorophyll and high number of minerals and other stuff.

However, how do we consume this «hay»? Everyone who’s ever tried to chew a dill’s stem understands me pretty well.

As one of the options (or, likely, the main one) we can use a blender. However, it’s dubious how many vitamins and minerals survive the mixture of oxygen, iron and biomass during a 60-second grinding with a speed of tens of thousands of turns per minute. I’m also biased against a homogeneous, sticky mass since childhood – I can’t stands its look or taste.

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1. Computer
2. PHP

Encoding choices as a secure string

Inspired by this post on Laravel forums.

In short, suppose you're writing a simple oldschool browser quest game where the user makes choices to advance in the story. Or perhaps you're making an online testing resource and want the user to be able to save his progrss without the need to register or keep track of his sessions – by simply bookmarking the current page.

Choices can be saved directly like this:

…However, it's not really great:

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1. Stuff

Bullfinches

I still have two feeding boxes hanging besides my kitchen window – surprisingly, birds are still helping themselves. Looks like the ground is too cold yet for easy feeding… albeit people are already planting out the seedlings.

And just recently I’ve seen a flock of bullfinches – I thought they would fly away when the air becomes warm but looks like I was wrong.

1. My programs
2. Web

PHP Feeder

A personal RSS/Atom feed in every home.

Feeder is a syndication framework for PHP 5+. It generates RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds from single data source. Bundled Text Feeder generates feeds from text files so you don’t have to do any coding at all to get your channel running. And, since it’s part of Feeder, it outputs in all three supported feed formats.

Download & license

All Feeder classes and related data is released under public domain. If you use it I’ll appreciate a backlink to this page; if you have feedback – feel free to drop a comment.

Last Feeder update was on 30 May 2012 – version 1.2.

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1. Visual Novels

Reversing «Kimi ga Aruji»

General overview of the game protection and some helpful files.

One of the readers of my visual novel hacking tutorial has asked me to check on the protection of «Kimi ga Aruji de Shitsuji ga Ore de» (君が主で執事が俺で). Here goes a brief technical overview and some handy files to help in the translation of this game for those who're interested.

Update: thanks to someone's comment it's now clear that Kimi uses an industrial cryptography which is the same both on its .nsa archives and nscript.dat. Here is located the tool for decrypting them – run it as shdecrkansa.exe arc.nsa decoded.nsa and use any standard NSA extractor like NSAOut from Insani.

nscripter.dat can be decoded in a similar manner except that you'll need to use a hex editor to apply bitwise XOR by key 0x84 on each of the decoded file byte.

And since this is symmetrical cryptography you can encode the edited files back into original format by passing it to decrkansa again.

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