Various cool software and more
AV comparison, www.av-comparatives.org has made a rather interesting comparison of how much different AV products slow down your machine, besides the technical comparison they also offer some general advices on how to optimize your experience with AV products in general.. Interesting reading, get their PDF here
A summery of their findings (higher is better);
Trying to manage your huge MP3 collection? Perhaps collected over a long time, well the problem often is that some of your MP3 files has incorrect or missing graphics and or ID3 tags… Well this tool can help you to manage your MP3’s, I have not tried it personally yet but it claims all sort of neat features 🙂 Give it a spin..
Get it here;
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html
inSSIDer is a free Wi-Fi network scanner for Windows Vista and Windows XP. Because NetStumbler doesn’t work well with Vista and 64-bit XP, someone built an open-source Wi-Fi network scanner designed for the current generation of Windows operating systems. inSSIDer was discussed by Lifehacker and Tekzilla!
I’ve not tried this myself, but got it reccomended, it indeed looks cool and worth a look..
get it here;
http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider
Just stumbled across a cool site, it offers quite detailed instructions for port setup for a bunch of routers (all kind of brands and all sorts of applications, games etc).
Now you can just refer your friends here instead of having to write them detailed instructions 🙂 neat..
Give it a spin at; http://portforward.com/
an example for a netgear router can be found here;
http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Netgear/CG814W/CG814Windex.htm
Now this is a difficult one to describe, so my best advice is simply to download and try it – you’ll either think this is engenius how could I ever live without that or you’ll think what!? I don’t get it!?
Ok what it does is to optimize wheel scrolling, lets say you have 5 windows open and you have to scroll a lot in these different windows, now the way windows works is that the window you want to scroll need to have focus – so you have to click the window you want to scroll! Well not if you have KatMouse installed, it is quite clever, KatMouse will let you scroll the window under your mouse focus or not, as I said you’ll either think this is immensely clever or not get it.. Try it out and see what you think. (it’s free :-))..
The free Thunderbird email client has been released in a version 3, it offers some interesting new features eg. emails now open in tabs like in browsers and a whole lot more.
Setup was a breeze as the guide is pretty good and even capable of guessing/testing many settings by itself (server settings like which server and what encryption is supported).
It looks very promising and interesting.
Get it here
We have a few servers that for some reason refuse to update their antimalware definitions automatically, the procedure is then to download the definition update manually and apply it, not rocket science but annoying as hell.
We use Microsoft Forefront Client Security and Microsoft is kind enough to offer a link where you can download a complete definition update file as an exe file, this will then update your antivirus – all you do is download and execute.
So I came up with the idea that if I could download this file via a script then I could apply it via a schedule during the night on the affected servers. But how do you download a file via a schedule/script? At first I leaned towards a VBS script, I even found a few but either they did no longer work (due to added security over the years to IE) or was painfully slow (the latter is not good when downloading a file of 45mb). Further Googeling let me to WGET a simple commandline utility that can be scripted, and sure enough it worked like a charm 🙂
Should anyone have a similar problem then the batch/script file I made looks like this;
(Just modify the parts in red)
cls Echo ************************************************************************* Echo This script will download the latest forefront antimalware def Echo once a day for servers with update problems Echo ************************************************************************* Echo The file downloaded is; Echo. Echo http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=87342&clcid=0×409 Echo. echo.
del D:\Appl\msdefinitions\Definitions\mpam-fe.exe
D:\Appl\msdefinitions\wget.exe -t9 -O D:\Appl\msdefinitions\Definitions\mpam-fe.exe http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=87342&clcid=0×409
More on downloading MS-Forefront definition files look here;
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=84
Drop your USB stick, stop carrying around that dumb USB stick in order to syncronize data from your work pc and your laptop. When you install Dropbox you get a ‘cloud-folder’ in which you can copy data to, a second later this is also available on your laptop.. easy as pie..
Well this is nothing ‘new’ or original, but it seem quite easy and its free so why not throw it at you. If you like it you can upgrade from the free 2gb version to a paid 50 or 100gb solution.
Get it here;
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTMzODAwODY5
According to the Danish online newsletter/magazine www.newz.dk (via link) Bitlocker encryption has been broken/cracked, or at least it has become possible to discover the passwords rather quickly using a third party tool Passware Password Recovery – http://www.lostpassword.com/kit-forensic.htm
And sure enough if you visit their website you will find this statement;
“Recovers encryption keys for hard drives protected with BitLocker in minutes New”
Although this indeed sounds very interesting there seem to ba a catch, you need a memory image on which to apply the Passware Password Recovery utility. Read more here
Imagine this; You are at a public wifi spot, and they have locked down what pages you may visit by simple DNS or URL filtering, and you just have to visit Rapidshare.com where one of your friends have send you this important file!? What to do? Well actually you have to do this before you wind up in this mess, but once it’s done you can use it anywhere anytime to combat situations like this.
The thing you are looking for is PHProxy and the link is;
http://sourceforge.net/projects/poxy/
Basically what this will do is to setup a proxy website that you can browse through, easy as pie.
You need a server or webhotel that supports PHP, you upload the PHProxy files (about 3 files is all it takes), and once you connect to the site where these files are hosted you get your own Proxy start page. It works like this, once you enter the URL on the PHProxy start page then the server on where the PHProxy php files are stored will go get your page for you and display it, from your end it looks like you are just visiting www.YOURSITE.com (the name of the site where you uploaded the PHProxy files) while the content on this site is actually Rapidshare, Facebook or whatever is blocked.
It is utterly simple to setup and use, mind you though not all pages work perfectly with this solution 🙁 but what can you expect from 3 php files 🙂 never the less it is simple, free and work for your basic pages.