Various cool software and more

Alertbear a nice RSS feed reader

,

alertbearI have for a long time been thinking about finding a good RSS reader, I have from time to time stumbled across some good sites with interesting content but the RSS reader in IE does not seem to be quite good enough.  I don’t want to have to go into a special pane of IE to view my feeds, I would like them to pop up by them self.

Anyway, so far I have found this Alertbear (not Alertbar as I first though, but bear as in the animal),  it is quite good – still missing a few customization options (I would like to be able to decide the update interval of EACH feed separately, but Alertbear only offers one update interval for ALL feeds).

thestackAlertbear come preset with a bunch of feeds, and you can add your own feeds quite easily.  Once you have added your feeds you can configure Alertbear to how often it checks for updates (sadly as mentioned only ONE interval, not one per feed) and what should be done once news are received (popup etc).  Mine is set to show headlines for 20sec upon receiving them.

There is also a ‘History’ function, this is more like a regular RSS feed reader but quite a good one (you get it by right clicking the tray icon and clicking “Show history”).

All in all it seem like something very close to what I have been looking for (about 94% of my needs are met I would say), there are some cosmetic and customization issues but they are minor. Anyway, if you know of a better alternative do tell..

.

/by

Writeprotect your USB devices

,

You can quite easily make all USB devices on a machine ReadOnly by adding a key to registry, it is quite easy and painless.

Once the registry key is added and set you may have to wait a bit or eject and reinsert the device but then the device is ReadOnly.  ‘Unlocking’ the drive again is equally easy, you just set the key value to “0” (zero) and everything is back to normal..

Maybe even an ide for a prank on some of your friends 😉

Key to create;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect
Value DWORD; “1” = ReadOnly, “0” = Normal mode.

registryhack1

/by

Extract files/drivers from Install Shield packages

,

So you would like to extract some files from an Install Shield (IS) installer package you have, you may as I just need a few driver files from a package.

Well first you try the extract command from Windows (as some of the Install Shield files come as .cab files) however you quickly discover that the IS.cab files are not compatible with the Windows .cab files.  WinRar is often good at extracting all sorts of files, but not the IS files. You can forget all about -e or -x for extract that does not work either.

But there is a way, you need an utility called “ISCabVu.exe”, sadly this utility is not just lying around on the net, so you need to do a bit of fiddling around to get hold of it.. 

1. Download an evaluation copy of Install Shield (any never version will likely do, do go for the latest).
2. Install it (if you don’t want to pollute your system use SandboxIE (requires 32bit os)).
3. Copy the files under “Program Files\InstallShield\2010\System” to a different location.
4. Now just run the “ISCabVu.exe” file.
5. You may be able to thin out this directory (150mb) but this may take some time and may not be worth your time.

Now the extract part is easy, see image below;
hpquickbtn

/2 Comments/by

S.M.A.R.T hdd self diagnostics

toshibaSo I am looking for a s.m.a.r.t utility to monitor the health of my harddisks..

So far I have come up with;
Drivesitter http://www.otwesten.de/drivesitter/screen.htm
Personal SmartCheck
http://www.urltoy.com/psc.htm
and a open source commandline utility
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/

If you know of a better utility maybe even with additional monitoring capabilities do let me know..

/by

Online DNS tool

I just stumbled across this DNS lookup utility on my way around the net, it seem quite interesting and could provide some valuable info on domain names and ip addresses.

The interface is a bit minimalistic in my view, but the info provided seem good.

Goto this website and enter a domain name in the top left corner then hit ‘I’m lucky’ and watch the magic show 🙂

http://www.robtex.com/

/by

HP Quicklaunch buttons – driver install problem

,

I spend some time on this before cracking the nut, so I thought I’d share with you all in case you ever experienced something similar.

HP_QT

See I was hardware certifying a HP 6930p laptop for SCCM and things was fine until my attention moved to installing the “HP Quicklaunch buttons”, my first issue was that even though I extracted the installed drivers using Driver Magician or Driver Max it did not work – both programs failed to extract the certificate for the drivers thus you would have a ‘drivers not certified’ warning when installing them, well I decided to simply install the HP package with the -s switch and here things became really annoying – the installation proceeded fine and in device manager we moved from “Unknown device” to “HP Quicklaunch Buttons” but accompanied by the text “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)” and no amount of reboots fixed this.  I tried with numerous versions of the install package, just in case it was some issue with a specific version of the package – but all had the same result.

hpqt2

hpqt_dm

A lot of googling led me to this article where a guy named Eric has a very similar issue, he has detected a common denomitor namely  virtualization.  Eric has discovered that if he deploy a workstation using a wim image captured on a VmWare workstation and then later try to install “HP Quick Launch Buttons” he gets this issue with the ‘corrupted or missing drivers’, but if he manually installs the same machine then there is no issue. 

The solution is simple, all that is missing to make things work is three files;
hidclass.sys
hidparse.sys
hidusb.sys
these files need to be copied to “C:\windows\system32\drivers” (or the equivalent on your system), and after a reboot the “HP Quick Launch Buttons” is now working fine..  But where do you get these files from?  You can of cause get them from a different system (copy them to a usb pen or what ever), but there is another easy way around this – see these three files are all related to “Human Interface Devices” and all you need to do to have them installed (copied to c:\windows\system32\drivers) is to insert an external usb mouse or keyboard (this will launch an automated installation of these three files).  Now where inserting a USB mouse or keyboard may work for a single user it’s not really appropriate for corporate installation environments, so in our corporate setup we will be copying these three files into the C:\windows\system32\drivers folder during installation – having them there will do no harm.

/2 Comments/by

Internetspeed – neat test page

roadrunner2Ever so often you need to test your Internet speed (for debugging speed issues or maybe to determine the actual speed of a new line or a customers line), in Denmark people often use the test page at www.tdc.dk (the largest telecommunications provider in Denmark) however sometimes, during my work, I need to test the Internet speed from other countries and a Danish test page does not give a reliable result in other countries.

Today I stumbled across what appear to be a very neat test page, it offers nice graphs and customization of the test.

Give it a spin at;
http://www.numion.com/YourSpeed3/Run.php

/by

WinRM (Windows Remote Management) – wtf is that

Just finished installing a few patches to a Windows 2003 box and was puzzled about one of the updates “Windows Powershell 2.0 and WinRM 2.0”, now Powershell I knew about but what is this WinRM (Windows Remote Management) all about.

Well from what I can tell it’s rather basic, it’s more or less the corporate (industry standard) replacement of PsExec.exe  from Sysinternals, a way to launch commands, scripts etc. remotely.  WinRM (Windows Remote Management) offers some additional features and can be used in scripting, from what I can tell it may also work on hardware devices that support WsManagement.

For more details look here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-Management
http://blogs.technet.com/jonjor/archive/2009/01/09/winrm-windows-remote-management-troubleshooting.aspx

/by

Forefront Client Security – problems updating

,

ffcsI have just had a few servers that somehow has failed to update their Forefront Client Security client software 🙁  The problem seem to be that Forefront cannot seem to stop the FCSAM service while updating, the service is stuck on “Stopping” and neither taskkill og any other utility seem to be able to kill it.

The errors in the eventlog go something along these lines;

Microsoft Forefront Client Security Antimalware Service
Error 1921. Service  'Microsoft Forefront Client Security
Antimalware Service' (FCSAM) could not be  stopped.

I have tried uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling but this did not help.

The workaround suggested is to set the service FCSAM to manual, reboot, upgrade and then setting the service back to automatically – however this only works for now and thus only postpones the problem.

I have found this article on a similar problem which I will try tomorrow, this includes some additional cleanup steps;
Eg. issuing the command; sc delete fcsam

I will also try to slipstream the installation of Forefront Client Security before I retry the re-installation, description on how to do here (mind you use the latest update and not the one the article refer to);

/by

Bypassing US IP restrictions and/or Surfing anonymously

, ,

If you live in Europe you are bound to have experienced being rejected, when trying to watch your favorite TV show on a US web-site – something in the line of “We are sorry but your IP seem to come from a country outside the USA” bummer – this is annoying as some US TV stations have cool tv shows available for free viewing (but restricted to the US).

ultrasurf9So, as I have mentioned before you can use the TOR network (http://www.torproject.org/) to proxy around this problem – but TOR is an install package that may not always be appropriate to install on a company/school pc etc, along comes UltraSurf (http://www.ultrareach.com/) a simple little portable application you can put on your USB stick.

UltraSurf will once it is started open a browser and you can browse the net with a US based IP (by proxying your traffic) thus giving you access to US based webservices.  Speed is not great but seemed acceptable and I managed to get an ok mediastream from ABC (note you may have to restart the browser when installing activex components).

A word of caution, I would not share creditcard or other confidential information on a proxyed connection, you never know who/what is inspecting your HTTP traffic, HTTPS/SSL/TSL traffic should be secure though (but still think about what you are doing).

Get it here (Free);
http://www.ultrareach.com/

Show your IP (you will notice this changes once UltraSurf is started);
http://showip.net/ or http://www.ipchicken.com/

/1 Comment/by