Well today I’m on the iPhone 4, however when I had my HTC Wildfire Android phone I was missing a good Audiobook player but never did manage to find one.. Now when it is not that important I by accident stumbled across this one; http://www.astroplayer.com/ which seem to support the very important .M4B format (the format for most of my audiobooks as I had an iPod before).
I do find this quite useful as I often start Windows File Explorer via “my computer”.
And as with most good things it’s free 🙂
more info here;
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/03/10/companel-manage-my-computer-control-panel-items/
This is, as with many of my other posts, mainly a reminder to myself to remember something cool I once stumbled across. More than once I have had to search high and low to remember this site, it is cool but not something you need every day.
This site offers many different server, user and other management solutions, common for all is that they are integrated as webserver services – thus you can delegate management (Provision) assignments (server management, user management, self service and what not) to AD users without escalating their AD rights.. An example, you can assign “Joe the plumber” (a regular Domain User) rights to reset passwords for all the other Plumbers in his department – thus freeing help-desk personnel to do more important assignments.
How it works, well it’s fairly simple actually – the solution/product run on a web-server, here a service account has “Domain Admin” rights (or lower if required) and can thus perform the various tasks that users ask it to do via the web-interface – the solution/product (web-application) then manages who can do what and furthermore logs all that is done and by whom.
The site offer several 30 day free evaluation versions some of which will even work as free versions (limitations apply) after the 30 days.
The solutions are used by numerous large companies (NASA, Sony and GE Capital just to mention a few) so it cannot be completely off.
See more here;
http://www.manageengine.com/products/ad-manager/index.html
Other tools in the same product range;
http://www.quest.com/active-directory/
A YouTube web-cast of Quest’s solution (1 hour);
A YouTube video intro to AD Manager Plus (not super good nor official, but it may give you some idea);
Microsoft is also about to release solutions that can perform some of these tasks;
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager/sm-end-user.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials/sce-overview.aspx
I just stumbled across this nice little free util, it’s sort of a taskmanager for your Hyper-V server..
Cool it’s free, however I’m slightly sceptical when it comes to the performance it reports – I feel my server should be under a more heavy load – but hey I’ll give it a spin and see how I like it.
get it here;
http://www.manageengine.com/free-hyperv-performance-monitor/download.html
A barnch office in China had a virus incident where a workstation was infected with a virus, this virus created two directories on a server share named “con.” and “nul.”. I quickly discovered that “con” and “nul” (and also “aux”, “lpt” etc etc) are protected names in Windows and you can’t create directories with such names, well you can actually by ‘cheating’;
Create dir;
md \\.\c:\con md \\.\c:\nul
Remove dir;
rd \\.\c:\con rd \\.\c:\nul
This is all well and good, but it does not work for folders named “con.” and “nul.”, my next thought was well perhaps there is a ‘hidden’ character after the “.” (eg. the ALT+255 char) so I piped a dir to a text file for examination (dir c:\ > output.txt) however no luck it simply ended with the “.” and that was that. Checkdisk had no luck and utilities to unlock files had no luck.
Anyhow I put it on Technet forums and “Brent Hu” was kind enough to offer some useful advice, he pointed to a utility called “DelInvFile” from here; http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/dldelinv.htm and in seconds the two directories was gone 😀 nice… and as the software came with 3 free deletes it did not even cost a penny, excellent. Anyhow, if you experience invalid files/directories in your directory structure take a look at this util, it may just save your day 🙂
If you have ever worked with MS-SCCM then you may have faced the problem of creating a new distribution point!? You will need to copy a lot of packages to the new distribution point, but just which packages will you need and how to copy them in an easy way?
Well some clever guy (Cory Becht) actually wrote an excellent app for this;
http://www.myitforum.com/articles/42/view.asp?id=8904
Util to convert PDF to eg. MS-word, seem useful (and free, well at least for now :-))..
Offer expire February 5th 2011.
http://www.pdfzilla.com/giveaway.html
Name: PDFZilla
Type: Shareware
Size: 5.8MB
Price: $29.95 USD
Now For Only $0 USD
Registration Code:
8061822TWDV6YUK
We all know of different image/cloning software, this one however is free AND can image on-the-fly via VSS (meaning you can run it while you work, well more or less naturally)..
I was suggested this by a friend (R. Tastesen) as just the tool for my forthcomming harddisk upgrade to a hybrid disk.. it seems quite promising..
Just stumbled across an interesting utility a partition resize utility, you are right I have mentioned many of these (including free once) however this offers something interesting convert “dynamic disk” to “basic disk” (something that I could have used recently).
Anyhow if you are on the marced for a disk-partitioning-software you should take a look 🙂 there is even a limited free edition.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-magic-free.html
MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional Edition is a magic partition software optimized for business environment with advanced features such as Merge Partition, Convert Dynamic disk to Basic disk and Change cluster size. Business users and system administrators can use our magic partition software to Resize and Move partitions, Merge Partition, Change Cluster Size, Copy Partition, Copy Disk, Create, Delete and Format partitions, Convert and Explore partitions, Hide and Unhide partitions, Convert Dynamic Disk to Basic Disk and much more. Our partition magic softwaresupports Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. And MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional Edition could be used in business environment.
So you would like to Multiboot your USB stick, DVD or ISO file!?
Well sure why not, there are lots of interesting boot images out there these days and if you need a usb stick for each and every one of them you’ll end up with quite a collection 🙂
Anyhow, introducing Xboot..
Purpose of this software is to create multiboot USB/ISO from various ISO files.
Support for some ISO files have been added , support for some other ISO files will be added later on the request of users.
http://reboot.pro/13246/
Anohter interesting utility you may want to take a look at is;
RMPrepUSB, it’s a utility to format and partition USB Pens, it is quite advanced offering imaging and other cool stuff, it also claim to be able to format FAT32 up to 2tb.
http://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/
