Do you have a temporary directory on your pc/server, you know one of those places where you put stuff to look at later but always forget to delete again?  It is likely that your answer is yes, but the more important question ought to be how do I automate cleanup of this directory?

There are numerous ways to do this, but I’ll just give you one here – google the rest if you are not satisfied..

It’s actually not as hard as it sound, you need to download a utility called “forfiles.exe” (put  it in c:\windows\system32 or similar) and then create a script much like this (here I presume the directory to cleanup is C:\tempdata);

rem Delete files on the server older than 14 days.
forfiles -p c:\tempdata-s -d -14 -c "cmd /c del /Q /F ""@FILE"""
or
rem Delete files older than 90 days
forfiles -p c:\tempdata-s -d -90 -c "cmd /c del /Q /F ""@FILE"""

And that is about it 🙂

super_orca_screenshot_2If you have ever worked with .MSI files you must have touched Microsoft’s utility ORCA.  Well it proves there is an alternative to this with a few extra features Super ORCA, so if you ever mess with .MSI files you may want to give Super ORCA a spin at http://www.pantaray.com/msi_super_orca.html

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..

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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..

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/

Is your harddisk working overtime and you have no idea why!?  We all know the sittuation, especially Windows Vista 2010-01-25_1231and Windows 7 seem to spend a lot of time working on your harddisks without no apparent reason, and it is very hard determining what process it is that is actually causing all the disk/processor activity.  Well one way of debugging this is to download procexp.exe from http://live.sysinternals.com, another approach is to try a utility I just got hold of that offers an easier overview “What is my computer doing” http://www.itsth.com/en/produkte/Whats-my-computer-doing.php 

 

Download it here;
http://www.itsth.com/download/getfile.php?file=WhatsMyComputerDoing_E.exe

tftpEver so often (or in my case ever so seldom) you need a TFTP server for some equipment that need updating (firmware etc), and as I do so seldom I keep forgetting whitch software I need for this.

Well here is the link you need, a mini server software for not only offering TFTP but also DHCP, TFTP, DNS, SNTP and Syslog ;
http://tftpd32.jounin.net/

 

 

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peerblock-1For those of you that has been using PeerGuardian 2 in the past (PeerGuardian 2 is a Firewall / blacklist that can block certain IP’s based upon lists you subscribe to) here is some good news 🙂

As you may know PeerGuardian 2 has not been supported for the past 1-2 years, and is (to say it mildly) not very stable on Windows Vista/7 etc.  Well some nice people has decided to continue the project under a new name Peerblock, and I do mean continue as the first version is based upon the source from the last PeerGuardian.

As with PeerGuardian the Peerblock application is free (although donations are greatly appreciated).

Get  it here

Just a quick coupple of links if you ever have to debug MS-Exchange OAB OAL replication issues;

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/oabinteg/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=726

http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman/archive/2005/08/28/oabinteg-and-how-to-use-it-to-troubleshoot-oab-generation-issues.aspx

This one might come in handy if you need a nostalgic moment, someone has created a site with old versions of well known and well used software (eg. now you can download Paint Shop Pro Version 1 if for some reason this was just your favorite).  Actually I still use Paint Shop Pro 3.11 from time to time, it is so fast and easy to use if you just need to change a few pixels.

Go here for a browse down memory lane;
http://www.oldversion.com/