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Fixing Amazon EC2 Connection Failure With Error "Caught exception reading instance data: http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/security-groups"

Amazon offers some excellent cloud computing services, but being self-managed at the basic level it can be a headache to diagnose and fix errors. I recently encountered a similar error where all my attempts to login into the EC2 instance failed with cloud-init: runcmd Caught exception reading instance data: http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/security-groups as shown in the Amazon EC2 instance console system log below.

Amazon EC2 Console With Error

How To Fix "Invalid Node Structure" Error On Apple Mac Computer

"Invalid Node Structure" "The Volume Machintosh HD Could Not Be Verified Completely" is one error every Apple OS user must fear, the error is a sign of corrupt storage disk directory structure and the Mac OS X built-in Disk Utility fails to fix the problem. Most of the time a user would get stuck at the Apple Logo with the spinner, even if you are lucky to boot into the operating-system you will find missing applications and issues with your dashboard depending on which part of the directory catalog got corrupted.

Luckily, we do have quite a few tricks and tools up our sleeves to get this handled properly fixing the system making sure maximum possible data recovery. In this post, I will be sharing three possible solutions to get this issue resolved.

Invalid Node Error On Mac OS X

Free HideIPVPN SmartDNS Premium Accounts Giveaway For Our Readers

In the past HideIPVPN has made some great promotions with us of their famous VPN service. Blog readers were able to get Free VPN accounts that allowed them to freely access sites in US and UK (Netflix, Hulu, BBC and more) or anonymously use torrents and P2P. Right now HideIPVPN has told us about brand new service they have just started – SmartDNS.

SmartDNS, unlike VPN is not hiding or changing your IP in order to get you round geo restricted sites but it is redirecting your traffic to selected sites via SmartProxy servers. This way with very simple setup (tutorials are available at HideIPVPN site) you can get the likes of Netflix, ITV, HULU, FOX, NBC, Pandora, Spotify and many, many more on almost any device. Even devices without VPN support built in can benefit from SmartDNS service.

Simply change DNS servers address on your devices and register your IP (it acts as login) with HideIPVPN and surf the web with no delays or even without thinking if site you want to open is in US or UK. HideIPVPN will do it for you! Remember, unlike VPN SmartDNS will not make you anonymous in the internet. This service is solely designed for all streaming services.

Easy To Understand Raspberry Pi GPIO Pin Layout Diagram

One of the major strength and a reason for Raspberry Pi success has been the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) access offered by the mini computer, these programmable in/out pins allows a great of hackability letting users expand the system and get it interacting with other hardware devices. The GPIO pin's are confusing as they are not numbered serially, here are two nice RasPi GPIO pinout layouts for making things easier to understand.

Raspberry Pi GPIO Pin Layout (Revision 1 Board)
RPi GPIO Pin Access

[Free Accounts] SmartyDNS - A Simple DNS Service To Bypass Geographic Content Censorship

We have shared tips and tricks to bypass region based restriction to content using both proxy and DNS method, both of these method allow users to access blocked content from mostly US and UK websites that don’t show their content to users while browsing outside of these two countries.

A new DNS service SmartyDNS comes to unblock restricted websites. A service that offers Smart DNS services meaning that it mainly aims to unblock restricted media websites and provide access to the websites that don’t show their content outside the US and UK. By a simple change of DNS in their devices, users will be able to unblock the restricted sites like Hulu.com, BBC.com, Netflix.com etc with no loss of speed. SmartyDNS is announcing the "Get It For Free" pre-launch promotion so go ahead and grab this for free.

SmartyDNS

Using Full 40MHz WiFi Channel Width In 2.4GHz Spectrum On Apple Mac

Yesterday, we shared a tip to make use of an external USB WiFi adapter on Apple Mac computer's for better wireless experience. Luckily, the experiment Killed Two Birds with One Stone as it made the 40Mhz wide WiFi width usable in 2.4Ghz spectrum which is not made available with the built-in WiFi card. As evident from the screengrab posted below, the external USB card also makes use of full 300Mbps bandwidth resulting in faster file transfers over wireless link.

A guide on how to install and use external USB Wifi adapter on Apple Mac and extend wireless coverage

Apple iMac and Macbook's built-in wireless card is known to have limited coverage as it does not feature an external antenna for better signal reception, however we can easily boost the Wi-Fi signal strength and range of any Apple Mac computer using external USB wireless dongles with external antenna. To get this working make sure you have an WiFi USB Adapter which is compatible with Apple Mac OS X and have drivers available for it, luckily for me the Realtek 8191 Chipset based Mini 300Mbps USB Wireless Adapter we used earlier to hack and make Asus O!Play wifi capable did the trick.

Once you have your wireless usb adapter connected to the Mac we need to identify it and install the correct driver for it, We will be using the Mac OS X "System Information" utility (find via spotlight search) to get our hardware information as shown below.

identify chipset of wifi card

First Ever Video Demonstration Of Microsoft Windows 8.1

Microsoft has finally posted a video walk-through showing what to expect from the upcoming Windows 8.1 update. The video features highlights of new features and improvements of Windows 8.1 scheduled to be released later this year as a free update for Windows 8 customers. This "first look" video for Windows 8.1 addresses improvements and enhancements in personalization, search, built-in apps, Windows Store, and cloud connectivity aspects of the operating-system update.

Windows 8.1 video demo

Raspberry Pi Recovery System (New Out Of Box Software - NOOBS) is here to help you get started...

Making life easier for Raspberry Pi users, the core team has announced a new, feature packed "Raspberry Pi Recovery System" aptly named New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS). The utility allows users to select and install operating systems for the Raspberry Pi on an SD card without technical details like partitioning or card imaging.

The Recovery system creates a FAT partition on user supplied SD card with highly-compressed versions of various supported OS images like Raspbian, RaspBMC, Pidora, OpenELEC, ArchLinux and RiscOS. Just like recovery apps for Mac OS X the RasPi recovery allows users to press SHIFT while booting to launch it and use features like ability to easily reinstall the existing OS, install a different one, launch web-browser for online support or edit config.txt file using a handy editor for troubleshooting.

NOOBS main windows

Apple OS X Mountain Lion Update v10.8.4 Direct Download Links

Few days ago, Apple made OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.4 Final update public. The update is recommended for all OS X Mountain Lion users and features a number of fixes to improve the overall operating-system stability, compatibility, and security. The update is available for immediate download via Apple Mac Store, users having difficulty downloading the update from there can directly download using the links shared below using any download manager with convenience of multi-threaded download with resume support.

Mac OS X Combo Update 10.8.4
This is just one of the many helpful tips we have posted, You can find more stories here,
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