The easy way of “Show me how!”

Have you ever had the need to show someone how to do this and that, its easy you say – just click on “browse” and then select “This and that” and then click “ok”…  You as well as I know that the person in the other end will say, where is that – no I don’t show that…  in other words, a Video is worth a thousand words..

Introducing; http://www.jingproject.com/
This is a very easy and simple “screen grabber”, it will allow you to make screenshots and screen’videos’ in a second, and best of all allow you to share these with others instantly (via the something called Screencast)..

Visit; 
http://screencast.com/t/MvC6djgp

for a live demo of a video capture (there is no sound here, but that’s only because I did not have a microphone nearby)..

For now the service is free, but I suppose that will not last forever. The driving force behind the product is Techsmith, known for products like SnagIT and Camtasia Studio.

I use Jing for documentation all the time now.

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“Cross reference” your E-Mails

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Xnobi 3
www.xobni.com If you as I recieve and send a ton of mails daily you quickly loose ‘the big picture’, when did you send that mail to whomever@whereever.com well, here is a plug-in for Outlook that will assist you in “data-mining” your email contacts.  It is very simple and cool, but also somewhat hard to explain in a simple manner.

Basically, once installed you can click on any mail and the plug-in will immediately give you a lot of information about the sender (what ‘contacts’ you have in common based upon CC’s in e-mails between you, a list of the latest mails to and from this person and finally a list of files exchanged in e-mails to and from you and this person)..  Go to www.xobni.com website for a more detailed presentation.. 

I’m sold to this concept.

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The remote assist challange

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teamviewer.png
Have you ever had the need to assist your friends or family on their PC’s, sure if they live nearby its always nice to drop by and get a free dinner or beer and fix their problem, but should the trouble pc be located in say Milan and you are in Denmark that approach could prove costly..

Messenger claim to be able to do remote assist, however my experiences show that once you pass the first router (that is leap anywhere but in your own home) this proves impossible.. Anyway, take a look at;
http://www.teamviewer.com/products/firststeps.aspx
its simple, works and its free 🙂  You can now do remote control of pc’s on the other side of the world if you need…

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The good, bad and ugly way of managing productkeys

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ProductKeyExplorer
Here is a tip for backing up all those product keys you have on your system today (be that the key to your CD burner software or the latest version of World of Warcraft).

We all hate to reinstall our PC, but every now and again it is necessary.  One of the very annoying things are all those serial keys you enter for your products, where DID you write that down or print it out to when you bought it.

Well this product will assist you with this, it can extract serial/product keys for a ton of programs all in one convenient sweep and at a price of just 29$ it is a bargain, just run in before a reinstall and print a report, that was the good news.  Good news often is accompanied by bad and this is no exception, the very same product can be used by evil doers to extract YOUR serial/product keys from YOUR machine all they need is to have physical access to it, or if they know your credentials they can even do so via the network.

http://www.nsauditor.com/product_key_finder.html

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MS-Steadystate

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steadystate.jpg
Microsoft has (some time ago actually) released a utility (or security addon if you wish) for Windows XP called Steadystate;

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

What is does is basically to add very strict control to your desktop and to allow for guest or kiosk pc’s.
steadystate2.png
Lets say you administer a library pc, and daily have to deal with users changing settings downloading strange software/malware and basically just giving you a hard time.  Well with Steadystate you can inflict strict rules on what a user can and can not do, you can add time-limits for usage and finnaly (and this is the neat part) you can have the computer restore to a predefined setup at fixed intervals (or at every boot/logoff if you prefer).

In a corporate domain setup the software does not seem that interesting as many of the settings can be set via GPO’s, but for kiosk pc’s it’s neat.  And as the author of a commercial predecessor I should know 😉 www.security-setup.dk did basically the same thing just not in the same dept and detail.

If you have a kiosk pc environment, hared pc’s or your kids just keep messing their installations up this may be worth a look.  and the final good news, ITS FREE!!

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More on conversion UIF, DAA -> ISO

Ever met files with the extension UIF of DAA, these are likely CD/DVD images saved to a file, the idea is that they (as opposed to ISO) can be compressed, however not everyone has software installed to deal with these files.

Well good news come in small links, here is a link to a blog with links to utilitys to convert these files 🙂

DAA;
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/12/27/free-daa-to-iso-converter-gui/

UIF;
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/12/30/uif-to-iso-converter/

or the software source itself; http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz.htm

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Splitting up CUE files to MP3

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I recently got a CUE file containing a whole Audio CD album, but as I wanted to transfer the music to my Ipod I was puzzled how to do..  I could burn a cd and then rip it, but this felt like a de-tour .  A little browsing the net came up with a neat little freeware utility “Medieval CUE Splitter V1.0”, this neat utility split up the CUE to mp3 files in no time. Nice.  But why someone need to create these CUE files in the first place is beyond me.

http://www.medieval.it/

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HDD recovery

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468x60_uk.gif

PC Inspector a free HDD recovery software, I have not tested this (hope I never need to 😉 ) but it does sound quite nice and feature rich.

Thanks to: Torben Slaikjer for the link.

http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?Language=1
or just http://www.pcinspector.de/

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Consumer warning: Keepit.com

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Just a word of caution in conjunction with my previous description of the online backup service KeepIT.com

I bought this service after a short test of their free 2gb offering, the price seemed fair and they offered unlimited storage space.  Things did not go smoothly though, at first their client software 1.0 was very poor, the client software seemed utterly unstable;

  • VERY slow (up to 10 minutes) when you tried to select what to backup. 
  • It was as good as impossible to tell what had been backuped (logging was very inadequate).
  • Client software would connect and disconnect from the server totally outside your control.
  • And the final nail in the coffin, when you need to restore you have ONE option – ALL or NOTHING, yes that is right you need to restore EVERYTHING it is not possible to just select the one file or files you need.

To top everything off a few extra actions was added to the story that forced me to discontinue my account; When I ordered the product I read the description on their website and downloaded and tested their product on my Win 2003 server, and everything seemed to be in order, however after returning from a weeks vacation in Milano I found that the backup job had stalled.  All attempts to get it back up and running failed, so at last I contacted their support mail.  The response was surprising, “our software do not support Windows 2003 server – have a nice day!” and then a link to a sub-page on their web site where this was stated.  Well what surprises me was that I never saw this while ordering and testing (we all know it is impossible to make the installer software not allowing installation on unsupported systems, sarcasm ;-)), so I can only come to the conclusion that this restriction was either added after I bought the product or very poorly described.  Anyhow the story ends somewhat satisfying, after a lot of writing back and forth KeepIT.com has agreed to return my payment and cancle my service.

A final word of caution, and perhaps the most important;
If you read the FAQ on KeepIT.com website (at least as it is today) you will find that if you loose your crypto key there is NO WAY of restoring your data, I found this very reassuring when I bought the product (as this meant my data was 100% private and secure).  However upon reading the “Terms of usage” VERY closely you will be surprised to find that not only do KeepIT.com have a ‘sparekey’ they also reserve the right to decrypt and examine your data without prior warning if they so see fit, unless you explicit request that they do not store a ‘sparekey’ (this if however NEVER an option during the orderprocess).  I find this option utterly disturbing.

I suggest you take a look at www.idrive.com instead, this service is cheaper has better client software and seem to respect your privacy.  I will see if I cant make a short review / comparison later.

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SCCM 2007 – more “drivers”

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I earlier mentioned “Driver Magician” as a great tool for “extracting” drivers for use with Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager OS deployment.

knudsen-consulting.com was kind enough to mention another tool “Drivermax.com” with somewhat similar capabilities as “Driver Magician“, althoug Drivermax does seem more suited for debugging than extraction, as it shows ALL drivers and not just the ‘non native windows’ drivers, but still a great supplement for debugging those stubborn drivers 🙂

And Jesper my office college was kind enough also to share this link: http://totallydrivers.com which may prove equally useful.

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