Photo fun

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mmm20091Have a spare minute or two and want to impress your friends? Give this site a go, it will keep you entertained for a while 🙂 http://www.photofunia.com It will allow you to upload a picture of yourself (or a friend) and have it inserted into any of the about 100 backgrounds available..  It works quite good with most backgrounds, but can also cause some quite funny/entertaining outcomes. It’s free, so there is no reason not to go crazy, have your 15 minutes of fame with Paris Hilton or as my picture here on a poster in an Italian city.
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File check-summing – MD5

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winmd5_screenshotSome times you download large files and you might want to verify the integrity of the file, or it could be that you are the distrustful type and simply want to verify the file integrity just because you can!?

MD5 is an older check-summing algorithm, basically you put data through this algorithm and it spits out a long check-sum – change as much as a comma in the file or text and the check-sum changes.  MD5 is no longer considered ‘safe’ as some vulnerabilities have been discovered, however it would still be complicated to ‘fake’ the right check-sum for a file – so for something as trivial as file check-summing I would consider MD5 safe enough – then again it depends what are you looking for corruption errors or deliberate attempts of tampering (for the latter you should perhaps go with SHA1 instead).

Fine, so you got the MD5 check-sum (eg. 73f48840b60ab6da68b03acd322445ee) from the website, how do you compare it to the file you just downloaded?

Well I found this util which is free and fairly easy to use.
http://www.winmd5.com/?rid=winmd5

Direct Download

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KB936181 Windows Update problem

I just had the pleasure of fixing a computer with an update problem, it would not install KB936181 no matter what was done..

I found this guide on some page;

How to fix the KB936181 Windows Update problem:
Click Start -> Run, type cmd and click OK
  1. Type ren %windir%\System32\msxml4.dll msxml4.old, and press Enter
(Ignore any errors stating that the file could not be found)!
Next, type exit, and press Enter
  2. Now, simply visit the official Microsoft KB93618 download
link and manually download and install the update
  3. Restart your computer and if all goes well, your
KB936181 update issues should be history.

 This sounded quite sane, so I decided to try it…  However after renaming the file I tried to run the update and got the three options 1) Modify 2) Repair 3) Remove, and I decided to go for the remove option, after this I reran the advertisement from the update server (SCCM WSUS) and viola it installed without a glitch.

As the user said, what a stupid update 😀  I could not agree more..

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