5 Passwords you should never pick

I wanted to write a post about which passwords are best and how to find a strategy to pick up a good password.
Then I realized that it would be pointless, as at the same moment you tell a strategy to form a good password, it becomes an information manual for crackers and might be implemented in bruteforce methods.

What I will tell you is what are the 5 passwords you should NEVER pick.

1. password, 123456, qwerty and hunter2.

The first two are between the most used passwords of all time. There have been many passwords leaks and the Yahoo leak which was storing unencrypted passwords and usernames (foolish, I know) made possible interesting statistics: on 450,000 passwords leaked, an astonishing 0.38% was 123456 and 0.18% was password. Figure why those are the first passwords a cracker would check.

2. Vocabulary words.

Bruteforcers have already implemented methods to quickly spot those words. Even a random, only-letter 3 characters word would be safer than a vocabulary word.

3. Passwords without numbers.

Using numbers increases the possible characters used from 26 to 36, which becomes hugely significant if combined with a long password.

4. Passwords without capitals.

Using capitals doubles the possible combinations of characters, so from 26 possible permutation we would have 56, which combined with numbers would give 66. Symbols might be used as well to give extra security for smaller words, but many websites do not accept symbols in passwords.

5. L33t speak.

Crackers already know leet speak (even before normal users). They are already used to bruteforce passwords. If you don't know what it is, it is a technique to exchange letters with numbers which look like letters:

O -> 0
I -> 1
Z -> 2
E -> 3
A -> 4
S -> 5
G -> 6
T -> 7
B -> 8

This methods bypasses the vocabulary word check and potentially makes a good encryption, but it has become too popular.

This is the reason for which it is not good to tell encryption methods to form passwords. They will be used in the future generations of bruteforce software. It is much safer to create your own encryption.


Still, I can tell you a common good method which will not spoil much to crackers:

use mnemonics!

Transforming a sentence only known to you into letters and numbers will be as good as a totally random sequence of characters and numbers. For example: 

I hate to wake up at 8 o'clock every Monday

will become:

Ihtwua8o'ceM

which will give ~79 bits of entropy, which is safe enough. It might seem hard to memorize but it's very easy to retrieve if you forget it and as safe as it can get. It would be one of 5.4036 x 10^23 possibilities and would take 1.7135 x 10^13 Years to discover with 1000 checks per second.

Even if this is an excellent method enough (the only problem occurs if someone manages to guess your initial sentence, which completely destroys the safety of this method, but if you did not pick up something common as the first lines of a popular song or poem, it will be safe enough) there are many other ways to create passwords which are easy to remember and require one (or more) encryption methods as the one used above. I will let you have fun with finding your own method.

But why using encryption?

It is a good method to have easy-to-remember but difficult-to-guess passwords. Of course the encryption method must be only known to you and should be memorable enough.

Another good suggestion would be not to use the same passwords for many websites. This is because some websites might not care to store passwords safely (even Yahoo, as we have seen before) and a leak will give your ultra-safe and encrypted password away, which you also accidentally use for your internet banking. Surveys say that around 60% of people use the same password for every service.

There are, of course, also methods to encrypt a memorable password for different websites and then have a set of different passwords with only one encryption method to remember. I will leave you the fun to find a good one.

Now, quickly go to change your password!

The Past and the Future of Computing

It is curious how deeply computers are entering into our life.

Think of only 60 years ago and computers were very young and as big as a room. Most of the people did not own one and did not even know what was that beeping and flashing "devil's machinery".
The high potential of computers was understood soon and they grew big (not in size!) very fast to reach the consumer market in the 80s. They were still very hard to use and the graphical interface was not so graphical at all, as input and output was still mainly text.
For a decade, computers were still in a niche market of electronic lovers and programmers, and they slowly started to enter into families only in the 90s, where one computer was enough and hardly used as well.
The birth of internet was another milestone, which potential only came out later, when bandwidth started getting larger and could be used as a better method of communication than land-line phone.

Today we have smartphones. You can bring them in your pockets, they have quad cores inside and are far more powerful than thousands of old personal computers.
They are incredibly popular and, most importantly, cool.
We use them to perform loads of small tasks and we are getting always more dependent on them. They are our map, our calendar, our camera, our newspaper, our encyclopedia and, mainly, our connection to the world. We can keep in touch with a friend almost instantly, if we wanted to.

As our dependence on technology is increasing, many people wonder if this is a good thing. People are scared that technology is making us dumber, because we let them do tasks, that otherwise we would have to do ourselves, and because we know that we have a source of knowledge readily at our hand. This would let us give up on thinking about the resolution of a problem, as it could be easily looked up over the internet.

Should we give up on technology, then? I do not think that is the right approach to face this problem.
I think the problem lies in how companies are presenting technology to us, and making it addictive, for profit. What are smartphones mostly used for? Sadly, Facebook and Angry Birds. This is a bit of a downer if you think that mankind went to the Moon with computers thousands of times less powerful than our smartphone.
Unfortunately companies are making profit over games on smartphones and I think it is a big waste, as time could be well spent to improve other aspects or make "smarter" programs, which would stimulate better our brain in a less flashy and noisy way.

Also, they should teach us to use it responsibly. Technology has a great potential for doing the most amazing things, if directed in a good direction, and this is a good enough reason to not let it stop from galloping.

This reminds me of the same question we faced with calculators. Using them will not let us practice on simple math which stimulates the brain. Are they a good tool, then? Surely they are, and thanks to them we can do a much better job of calculating, in an incredibly quicker way, but the problems arise when they are getting abused. They should not be used for calculations that can be easily done mentally and, most importantly, they should not let be used to children, who need to learn fundamental mathematics.

At the same time, calculators, and computers, opened up a whole new branch, which otherwise would have not existed: programming, which stimulates logic.
Despite popular belief, technology is not a brain-killer. It can stimulate logic, design and problem-solving skills in ways that were never found before. What kills the brain is the way we use technology, how do producers present it to us.

Computers can now do a number of tasks that we could have never imagined ten years ago. We are way closer (and in many aspects, even over) to the robots age we imagined in the past. Computers can recognize human speech and work out an answer. They can crawl the web to search for information and memorize things in a much better way than humans. Many computers already are unrecognizable from humans when chatting to some testers.

But what about the future?

What scares me most is the potentiality of computers of even programming for us, in a future, which might not be that distant. Like it happened for calculators, doing basic mathematical operations for us, it might as well happen again for programming. It is already becoming easier thanks to graphical editors making it more intuitive, and its evolution could lead to completely eliminate the intervention of the user writing the code.
A smart enough computer could listen to our speech, understand the basic functions we want in a program or a script and build it for us.

This could seem like an end to programming, but if we take the comparison to calculators again, mathematics did not just die with the advent of calculators. The same way, programming could become more accessible to everyone, when the syntactic (and logical) part will be left to do to computers themselves. Creativity would surely benefit from such a change, as everyone would be able to "program", and computers will almost be like servants, being able to potentially write programs that respond to our needs.


In conclusion, I think that we live in very unique and exciting times for technological advance and the future still holds many surprises for us. Stay tuned.

The Ultimate guide to install a broadband wireless dongle on Linux

Yet another mobile broadband dongle is not working out of the box on your beloved Linux distribution.

If you are new to Linux, this might be one of the most annoying problems you will face, as there is a sea of different kinds of these internet dongles and they usually all require different drivers to be detected.

Fortunately, as almost every single wireless broadband dongle user seeks for help on Linux forums for his particular hardware, there is lot of help around from which you can guess and work out what is your problem.
But this makes the search messy, as often beginners get easily lost and reading discontinue posts on what to do is sometimes more difficult than trying to work out a solution on your own.


Check out the post on my other forum about Linux:

http://www.greplinux.net/2012/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html

Advertisements and How to block them

I have been recently using a web-browser different than mine to perform some tests and I have noticed the copious amount of adverts which I was missing. I am using an ads blocker and, without it, I have found ads even in websites I did not expect having them.

For this reason, I decided to follow the masses and join an advertisement program. Not that I want to make money from it, but I need some more motivation to keep writing.

I do not have lots of readers, even if people say I deserve more, and I always do a long work of gathering info to provide accurate information about science and technology. Do not get me wrong, I really like doing it, but it takes time, and it is well known that time is money.

For these reasons, I will put adverts in this website.

But, since I feel guilty and I know that you might be an usual reader if you are reading this, I will tell you how to remove them!

How to block ads in your web browser

I use Firefox, and the easiest and more efficient way to block ads is using an extension called AdBlock Plus.

To install it, you just need to click the install button following the link I gav above and it will handle your ads automatically.

I am sure there are extensions similar to this one also in Chrome and other web browsers.

A really neat feature is that it also blocks YouTube adverts (the ones inside videos) making generally the web-surfing experience a great deal better.

iGoogle is closing down. What now?

I have been a faithful user of iGoogle for years. I did not consider it something vital and did not spend much time on it, but when I've heard the news it will close in 16 months ( November 2013 ), I realized that it was my (only) daily source of world news, weather and recipes.

Even if, by far, not the most used website, I think Google is doing a bad move here. I know many people that use iGoogle, more than Google+, honestly, and even if I understand the choice, I think Google is pointing exactly in the direction that I do not like (promoting more profitable Google products).

This is an extract from the news page:

I really like iGoogle -- are there any other alternatives?
On your mobile device, Google Play offers applications ranging from games to news readers to home screen widgets.
If you’re a fan of Google Chrome, the Chrome Web Store provides a similar range of options like productivity tools and applications to check the weather. In addition, just like iGoogle, you can personalize Chrome with a theme.

This is as helpful as convincing users to set the blank page as homepage.
First of all, I am sure there is a big number (the majority? They should know) of people using iGoogle from PCs, including me, so Google Play is useless.
For the rest, they just suggest to use Google Chrome. Please tell me where is the bit where they suggest alternatives, if you can find it.

Since Google didn't do a great job providing alternatives, I went looking for them and I can suggest a few. As trying them out is worth a thousand words, I will not spend much time describing them.

-   Netvibes: maybe the second most popular after iGoogle
-   Protopage: very easy to use, but less implementations
-   Favoor: clean interface
-   uStart: there is no possibility to share content (which I regard as good)
-   Webmag: similar to Netvibes, promoted even for non-smartphones

How to recover a deleted post in Blogger

It is very easy to accidentally delete a post in Blogger, especially when mass deleting posts, as it is common that a precious post keeps a previous selection and gets deleted with the unwanted ones.

It happened to me as well. Unfortunately, Blogger does not provide any help for restoring a deleted post, but fortunately I kept a backup copy of my blog and just re-posted it again. I noticed, though, that the html link to the post was different (even if re-posted with the same date and title of the old one). It was the same as before, but with a -01.html at the end.
This is bad, because everybody who made a link to the old post now linked to a 404 Error (non existent URL).

This gave me the suspicion that Blogger stored the deleted posts somewhere, and I found a way to restore it fully, with pictures, number of views and comments.

The 5 steps to recover a deleted post in Blogger

1. First of all you need to retrieve your deleted post ID. If you have it, you can skip to step 4. If you don't have it, the only solution is to find it in cached web pages from search engines. For this reasons, this procedure will not work for very new posts or private blogs.
   
2. Find your old post in any search engine. For example, for my previous post, I googled "natural selection and prime numbers" and I have found the URL "http://www.badscientist.net/2012/06/natural-selection-and-prime-numbers.html". Now you need to access the cached content (click on Cached in Google when hovering with the mouse on the >>).
   
3. Access the Source code (in Firefox, right-click anywhere in the page and "View Page Source") and find this line:
   
   

   <div class='post-outer'>
   <div class='post hentry' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
   <a name='2003347239440929962'>a>
   <h3 class='post-title entry-title' itemprop='name'>
   Natural selection and prime numbers
   h3>
   
   

   Here, the post ID is 2003347239440929962.
   
4. Now that you have the post ID, create a new post in your blog, the usual way. In the URL bar you see above the editing fields, for example:
   
   

   http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4658705474308031765#editor/target=post;postID=2231649307872317536

   
   replace the number after postID with the deleted post ID. In this case, I will replace  2231649307872317536  with  2003347239440929962  .
   
   
5. Press Enter and your old deleted post will (magically) reappear. You can edit it again or just press Publish to have it back.

Hope this helps, let me know if there are easier ways to do that.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I revert to draft posts, instead of deleting them directly. The posts, this way, will not be on the web, but it will give me time to see if I did any mistakes before deleting a post completely.

Microsoftian Rhapsody

Is this the hard drive?
Is this ram memory?
Caught in a bootload,
No escape from SCSI
Open your ROMS,
Look up to the BIOS and see,
I'm a read-only, I need no fixing,
Because I'm easy run, easy load,
Little Hz, little clock,
Any slow the boot loads doesn't really matter to
Me, WinMe


Inspired from this video.

How to circumvent the Pirate Bay censorship

The annoying screen many people are
experiencing when trying to access
the domain piratebay.org.

I wrote a post about Pirate Bay being censored in Italy a few years ago. I was disgusted at the time and I provided some methods to get around the block.

When I've heard the same news here, not so long ago, I could not believe it. How ignorant and naive must a government be to think that blocking a torrent website should stop piracy?

I will not go into describing all of the copyright problems and morality of using Pirate Bay, as the debate is big and still going on, but I must comment on how stupid is the choice of blocking it.

First of all, I am against any form of censorship and this alone puts me against that choice.
Most importantly, though, Pirate Bay is only one of the million torrent websites. Stopping one is like vaccinating one person against malaria and thinking of having eradicated the bacteria forever.
On top of that, people will always find way around to such puny barriers, and I will list a few down:

1. This is the most hilarious. There is already a new domain with Pirate Bay on it for UK people:
   
   tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
   
   This might be brought down as well, but no worries.
   
2. Use a web-proxy, such as Anonymouse. This is the "anonimized" link to Pirate Bay:
   
   http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thepiratebay.se/
   
   It's as easy as that and safe on the long-term.
3. Use a proxy (there are many) or VPN services as TOR or Hotspot Shield. Which might be even useful to bypass other country-dependent blocks. 

If you want to stop piracy, you need to think of other smarter and indirect ways. We are in 2012 and it is still much easier to download a pirated version of a movie or a game rather than buying it. This means that a service provided by pirates, for free, is better than any one provided by big money-eater production companies, which only good job is putting irrelevant locks and pointless anti-piracy videos on their products.

Take as an example a person wanting to see a movie already out on DVD:

Legal way:
- Find movie on Amazon.
- Look for cheapest price and buy.
- Wait a few days (or more) for the DVD to be shipped and arrive.
- Put on DVD and watch 10 minutes of trailers even if you didn't ask for it (and can't be skipped).
- Watch the same anti-piracy video for the billionth time, even if you know it by heart, and even if, to watch it, you must've bought your beloved DVD in the most legal way possible.
- Finally watch the movie, if you still have some time left.


Illegal way:
- Find movie on any torrent website.
- Look for positive reviews and download torrent.
- Wait 20 minutes.
- Enjoy movie.


Honestly, I would pay for the illegal way.
A big applause to the incompetent, narrow-minded governments, production companies and anti-piracy associations around the world.

Semplice metodo per aggirare la censura di Pirate Bay

 

Se usate costantemente client torrent per il condividere files in una p2p, sarete venuti a conoscenza del recente blocco del sito The Pirate Bay in Italia, uno dei più grandi distributori di torrent a livello mondiale.
Quando tentate di accedere a thepiratebay.org vi dovrebbe uscire un "Connessione fallita" o una irritante schermata della Polizia di Bergamo che informa del blocco del sito. Blocco? Io la chiamo censura.

Il sito, anche se ha subito centinaia di accuse riguardo la violazione di copyright da molti paesi, è sempre uscito vincitore dal tribunale, poiché i file .torrent sono solo dei link a file che circolano nelle reti peer to peer. In quanto link, non è illegale distribuirli, ma scaricare il file in questione, se protetto da copyright, lo è.
Non è da nascondere il fatto che la maggior parte dei torrent riguardano files protetti da copyright, ma non per questo tutto il sito deve essere bloccato, dove circolano anche files molto interessanti, soprattutto per utenti come me che usano sistemi operativi UNIX.
Tra questi si possono trovare diverse distribuzioni di Linux, programmi open source, album musicali non protetti da diritti (tipo "In Rainbows" dei Radiohead) o di piccole band che cercano popolarità, film di più di 70 anni fa (sui quali c'è diritto di copia) e soprattutto il più recente scandaloso "ACTA Agreement".
Un prezzo sacrificabile, secondo lo stato italiano. Con questo gesto ci è stato sottratto un piccolo pezzo di libertà di espressione. Possiamo riprendercelo? Sì, e anche legalmente.

Il primo blocco sul sito è stato effettuato a livello di filtro sui DNS. Niente di più semplice di aggirare, basta digitare l'indirizzo IP di thepiratebay invece del link, ed il gioco è fatto.
Tuttavia, recentemente tutti gli IP del sito sono stati bloccati, quindi questo trucco non è più applicabile. Aspettare che il sito cambi IP o ne prenda di nuovi non è conveniente, anche perché non costa niente mettere un IP in più nella censura.
Un trucco è quello di usare un' intermediario, che si trova in un altro paese dal quale si può accedere, e fargli fare il compito di connettersi al sito, inviandoci i dati al nostro pc. Questo intermediario si chiama proxy.
Un'altra soluzione è quella di criptare i pacchetti, nascondendo i siti ai quali ci stiamo connettendo, quindi non facendo sapere che stiamo accedendo a thepiratebay: una rete vpn.


*LA SOLUZIONE*

La soluzione più pratica e veloce per accedere senza problemi a thepiratebay è usare il sito Anonymouse (che non centra niente con Anonymous, se vi stavate già facendo qualche domanda).
Basta cliccare su questo link diretto per thepiratebay . Potete anche salvarvelo nei preferiti.


Se Anonymouse vi da problemi con i magnetic links, potete usare questa versione mirrorata inglese del sito a questo link: https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/


Per saperne di più:
The Pirate Bay sarà di nuovo censurata in Italia 
Sigillo IP per The Pirate Bay

Shower

Having a shower is a relaxing moment of the day. Some people sing, others just imagine, but whatever you do, the mind is surely free to think about anything and fly (freely) over a lot of disparate topics, often non-related between each other.

I don't know how, but when I was showering, today, I happened to think about an awesome quotation from Tanenbaum (besides, a Physics doctorate and one of the man that "triggered" Linus Torvalds to write his famous UNIX operative system):

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

What's so interesting about this expression?
Even if it has been used in 1981 on a different context, its irony could still be up to date, since Sneakernet is a still very common practice and couldn't (still) be easily substituted by virtual data transfers (p2p, ftp...).
I've heard new versions of this quote with "hard disks" instead of "tapes", indeed.

The next step on my train of thoughts - during the shampoo - was the realization that I can calculate the actual bandwidth, a kind of average in kb/s, of a car bringing an hard disk.
How? Dimension analysis, obviously!

The dimensions of velocity are: [Length] / [Time] , so to obtain the dimensions of bandwidth [Data] / [Time] it is just necessary to multiply by the data carried and divide by the distance covered.
The result is a formula for the bandwidth depending on velocity of the car v, the distance travelled l, and the data carried d.
${b = \frac{v \cdot d}{l}}$
(if you see incomprehensible signs enveloped by dollar signs, Latex script is not working properly)

If we pick a car travelling a distance of 1000 km at 130 km/h carrying a Terabyte:

${b = \frac{130}{1000}\,TB/h \sim 133\,GB/h \sim 38\,MB/s}$

Quite satisfying.

This is useful (maybe not) but it's not finished.
If you can calculate the bandwidth of a bunch of data travelling in a car, why don't we calculate the velocity of a bunch of data travelling through the wires knowing the bandwidth?
In this case data should be considered like a solid packet, and d is the distance between the host and the server. After some easy math:

${v = \frac{b \cdot l}{d}}$

Wow, you're still reading... crazy. Anyway, that's not all, not yet:
if you pick a value for d (data) smaller than b (bandwidth), it almost doesn't make any sense and the result could be a velocity higher than the speed of light, indeed.
Since the speed of light is an upper limit:

${v = \frac{b \cdot l}{d} \leq c}$

and so:

${b \leq \frac{d \cdot c}{l}}$

that is the absolute upper limit in bandwidth.
If we put numbers, the result still doesn't make any sense.
For example, since the net works in small packets, for a 64 byte packet from a server 7000 km far, the upper limit speed is about 2.7 kb/s.
This result could be useful if we make a small modification to find the time required to transfer that packet at c (dimension analysis again):

${t = \frac{d}{b} = \frac{64\,byte}{2.7\,kb/s} \sim 0.02\,s}$

That is 20 milliseconds: the lowest time physically possible needed to receive something from a distance of 7000 km.
Real timings are about 150ms for good servers, to send and receive, so about 75ms one way, that is in the limits...

Now I ended the shower and then also this small trip around physics and the internet. The result of this brainstorming thoughts? I really don't know, but I still like it.

100 points for the first who analyse relativistic effects on the packets and find how much kilobytes the file loses travelling at that speeds.

Stellarium: night sky simulation software

Exploring the educational section of softwares for Gnome, I stumbled upon this incredible program: Stellarium.

You just enter your location and it simulates the sky over you at that moment. Very useful for amateur astronomers or night sky passionate.

There are also a lot of cool features to make the sky similar to the real sky: you can regulate the magnitude and the light pollution, or you can accelerate or choose the time, you can label costellations, stars or nebulae (so you can learn star's names or costellations), make zooms and a lot more.

Practical, easy to use and interesting.
It is also available for Windows.

Incremental Backup using BATCH commands

There is an easy and geek way to make incremental backups in Windows using just the bloc notes and the command-line. There are just a few steps, easy to follow:


Copy this string into a new text file with bloc note or your favourite text editor:

@echo off

xcopy “C:\Folder 1” “D:\Backup Folder 1” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 2” “D:\Backup Folder 2” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 3” “D:\Backup Folder 3” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

pause

Save it with the .bat extension (it can be done in the bloc notes selecting "All Files" as extension and naming the file such as backup.bat).

It's done!


If you run the file just created, a command-line will open and it will make an incremental backup of Folder 1,2 and 3 (the source folders) into Backup Folder 1,2 and 3 respectively (the destination folders).
You can remove or add more folders to make simultaneous backups.

New files in the source folder will be written in the destination folder, existing files will be kept, updated files will be overwritten, deleted files wont be deleted in the destination folder (from this the name "incremental").

From Windows to Linux?

I haven't been writing for a while here, since I've been busy particularly with installing, using (and enjoying) Linux.

I decided to install the Fedora distribution (a free Red-Hat product) in a dual boot with the intention of using Linux sometimes and keeping Windows as the main OS. I also decided to try Windows 7 RC, so I built 3 partitions and installed each operative systems:

The reaction to Windows 7 was not so exciting as I thought. The user interface is very similar (if not the same) to Vista. Yes, it was much better than Vista under a lot of aspects, so I was almost convinced to swap to Windows Seven, even if it did not really bring many improvements from XP.

What really shocked me was the compatibility with hardware and software. A lot of programs were not working under Seven, and this is quite acceptable since it is still a RC. But what made me upset were the ATI drivers for Seven, made only for the newest graphic cards (and not for my ancient but still working Radeon X600).
Without the drivers, the "powerful" Windows 7 didn't even recognize the resolution of my display (1440x900) so I was constrained to use a crappy 800x600.
I immediately removed Seven.

Then I installed Fedora 11! In less than 20 minutes the OS was on the hard drive ready to be used, with all the components installed automatically (and the right display resolution).
There are no accurate words to describe it: flexible, light, fast, user-friendly.
I'm not planning to use Windows again from that day.
Maybe one of the few drawbacks is the lack of programs (untrue! I could never be more wrong, repositories are full with programs and much cooler ones than Windows) so I decided to keep Windows for that, but often there are good, if not better, alternatives and there are a lot of more interesting applications.
I can't list the benefits of using Linux here, it is seriously difficult to list them all!

Anyway, I'm not using Windows any more, so I'll write quickly some post about some Windows programs that I planned to write and then I think I'll begin to write IT posts exclusively about the Linux world.

Modify background and transparency in Blogger templates

I decided to change template: the old one was too opaque and most importantly it was just a default template.
I made this template by myself modifying some pieces of the same template with a computer-graphic program and the result is not so bad.

For those who are interested, I suggest a few tips to modify colors and background images in the layout, editing the html and css.


In the "Edit HTML" menu there is the source code of the current template.
After the body tag there is the interesting part: the strings for the graphic of the blog.

body {
background:#123 url("LINK OF THE BACKGROUND PICTURE HERE");

is the main background and you can substitute the link with another picture to change it. The picture will be repeated automatically over the page.
If you are interested in just a color as background, this can be helpful:

body {
background-color:#000000;

in which #000000 is the hex color code.

The background in the panels can be modified too using the same procedure; the links for their backgrounds are situated under the "Page Structure" section. I modified: outer-wrapper, main-wrapper (the panel for the blog), sidebar-wrapper (the panel for the sidebar), post header, comment-link, sidebar bullet.

Transparency can be obtained for the wrappers pasting this code after the link or color for the background:

filter:alpha(opacity=70);
-moz-opacity:0.70;
opacity:0.70;

in which the number in red are the grade of transparency and they should be equal (50-0.50-0.50 or 30-0.30-0.30 etc...).

Hope this helps a bit.

Google Maps: Street view in London

Firstly only in the US, but now Street View is spreading out in a lot of countries and from the beginning of 2009 is also available for London. Basically, it's a very fascinating Google Maps gadget that permits to have a street view instead of the traditional satellite view, such as you are walking in the streets. This is not only funny, but in some situations could result very handy if you have to move in unknown places. Yet the problems faced with privacy (360° street photos are patiently taken using a car and it obviously takes also pictures of people walking... or robbing) Street View became popular in the US and in few months it issued from the States to approach Europe, but also Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Alaska. In particular, I've tried Street View in London and I've found it very useful. I've noticed the photos date back to last summer (some clues such as movies ads on the buses or works on buildings that now are finished can prove it) so they are very recent. I really admire the patience to take photos of almost all the city, that's a tough work (not for the multimillionaire Google, obviously). Now enjoy some funny things found with street view (almost like the odd things found with Google Earth in some YouTube videos) here!