Archive for November, 2008
Where can I find a good free screen saver to display my pictures?
Nov 16th
Being a new parent and having many computers that stay on I have configured them all to be digital picture frames when not in use. Originally I did this by simply activating the built in “My Pictures” screen saver from Windows. This left my options severely limited. I could only use a folder on my desktop and not use pictures that live online.
Weak.
This sent me looking for another free more configurable solution. And I found it on my first shot.
Google has downloadable applications that they call “The Google Pack”. I won’t go into all it’s other offerings right now but, we will focus on the Google Photos Screensaver. This 4.4 MB install packs a lot of wallop. The Google lists it’s main features as being:
- Display photos from your PC and photo sharing sites
- Watch cinematic slideshows
Those two innocent lines look rather boring until you actually try them out. Now I can not only display pictures of my daughter but how about my niece’s and nephew’s updated photos?
I sure can! Just by configuring in multiple RSS locations or Flickr feeds. Then when the newest cute pics are uploaded they are automagically in rotation on my many rotating pictures.
And the “Photo Collage” option seen below is really cool as well.
This is just one of Google’s many offerings in it’s quest to take over the world! What do you guys use for screen savers? Hit us up in the comments.
_TheCollagedAdmiN_
How can I tell who is listening to my shared iTunes on Windows?
Nov 14th
So you like to share you music eh?Don’t worry we wont narc on you and we will even help you to find out who on your network is listening to your tunes. When you go to close iTunes down and it yells back at you that someone is connected to your library – what do you do?
Leave it open so they can continue to get their music on? Close it even quicker because the concept of sharing scares you? Look to disable sharing all together?
Either which way this simple dos command will point you to who is listening to your music.
netstat | find “:3689″
This will return any connections to your machine on port 3689 (iTunes)
You will see something like this if you have someone connected to you:Update: Apparently there is an installable app that will do the same thing on Windows or Mac.
You will see something like this if you have someone connected to you:Update: Apparently there is an installable app that will do the same thing on Windows or Mac.
Now you can make an educated decision depending if its Bouncy Betty in HR or Smelly Mark in Editorial… :) It attempts to resolve net-bios names but that doesn’t always work. But hey an IP is as good as a name around my office. And here 192.168.1.108 is a fugly intern. Can you guess what I did?
Murphy’s Laws of Computing
Nov 12th
I was given this by my first manager in an IT gig. I came across it again during a late night search trying to solve a downed production server without going into the office… Turns out I glanced @ it, got to number 10 and a light bulb popped over my head. I hate consultants and I hate tech support. Hope this brightens your a day – and let me know if you know the REAL author.
Murphy’s Laws of Computing
- When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
- When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it?s probably obsolete.
- The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
- When the going gets tough, upgrade.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
- To err is human…to blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human, it is downright natural.
- He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
- If at first you do not succeed, blame your computer.
- A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
- The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
- A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want it to do.
Admin’s Arsenal: BareTail
Nov 11th
As someone that works with Linux systems on a daily basis I have sort of a love/hate relationship with tail.exe (it can be frustrating trying to get it to display exactly what I want, though piping out to grep usually fixes that straight away).
One thing I have always wondered though is why it is not a native Windows utility. It is freaking useful!
Well all is not lost, as there are a couple of solutions available. The “just like on Linux!” alternative for Windows is Tail for Win32. This is a port for Windows systems of the “tail -f” command on *NIX systems.
My preferred solution is BareTail.exe, a more full featured offering. This is basically a GUI version of Tail which allows you to define syntax highlighting. This utility can also be run from the command line.
This utility is chock full of functionality, and is natively portable (meaning you can run it from a USB drive, yes!). BareTail offers many other useful features, including:
- Optimized real-time viewing engine
- View files of any size (> 2GB)
- Scroll to any point in the whole file instantly
- View files over a network
- Configurable line wrapping
- Configurable TAB expansion
- Configurable font, including spacing and offset to maximize use of screen space
- View the end of a growing file in real time, no matter how fast the file grows
- Like “tail -f” on Unix systems, but with many more features
- Simultaneously monitor multiple files for changes using tabs
- Visual indication on each tab of file status and changes
- Tabs may be positioned on any side of the window and oriented horizontally or vertically
- Lines containing particular strings can be highlighted to help you notice important text
- Highlight colors are fully customizable
- Windows / DOS text files (lines end in CR/LF pairs)
- Unix text files (lines end in LF)
- Microsoft IIS logfiles (and other files terminated with a string of nulls)
BareTail comes in two license formats: Free, and Registered ($25 at the time this was written). The Registered version offers all of the features of the Free version plus:
- Regular expression text search (including line numbering for search results)
- Searching while you type, to find results quicker
- Feedback on regex syntax errors while you type, to build regexes quicker
- Filter tail mode (include or exclude lines)
- Frequently used text search patterns may be saved, named and edited
- Export/copy of search and filter results in many formats
At only $25 for a license this is a worthwhile upgrade, but the free version is imminently usable as well.
You can download BareTail here. You can also read Karl’s full review of it here (via MakeUseOf.com)
Admin’s Arsenal: BareGrep
Nov 10th
Ok, here is the situation: you’ve got 1200 script files in a particular directory on your XP workstation, and you need to find any script that references “\\atl01\share” (queue Dennis Hopper voice), what do you do?!
Traditional convention is that you spend several hours opening each file in notepad and doing a “find”, or you might be able to cut it down to an hour or so if you opened several dozen of the files at a time in Notepad++ and did “find in all files”, or you could take about a half an hour and move the files over to a *NIX machine and use grep. I’ve got a better answer: BareGrep.exe from our friends at Bare metal Software. BareGrep is basically a GUI version of the *NIX grep command for Windows machines, and it works wonderfully.Much like BareTail (which I reviewed here), BareGrep is fully portable, meaning you can run it from a USB drive!
Here is a short list of some of the features in BareGrep:
- Regular expression text search (that’s inside the files)
- Wildcard and regular expression file search
- Files to find or search can be specified with a regular expression
- Multiple files can also be specified with the mouse
- Recursive directory search
- Frequently used text search patterns may be saved, named and edited
- Searching while you type, to find results quicker
- Capturing groups (using bracket characters ‘(’ and ‘)’ in a regex) extract strings from files
- Tabular presentation of search results
- Export/copy of search results in many formats
- Search files of any size (> 2GB)
Not only will this utility do all that, but it is usable from the commandline as well! What more could you want? Wait, what? You want… more features? Well you’re in luck, as BareGrep comes in two forms, the Free version (what we’ve covered so far), and the Registered version ($25 at the time of this review), which offers all of the features of the free version, as well as:
- Selecting a search result line shows that line in context in the file
- Tabs display files recently viewed
- Tabs may be positioned on any side of the window and oriented horizontally or vertically
- Lines containing particular strings can be highlighted to help you notice important text
- Highlight colors are fully customizable
Now I can’t even begin to cover the colossal amount of time that this utility has saved me, but I can tell you that it is well worth the price of admission. BareGrep can be downloaded here.
What do you use for Backup Media? Tape, DVD, CD… or Paper?
Nov 8th
Hello AtA! You read that title correctly, paper can be used as a form of backup media. I am not talking about printing out your documents and filing them away in some nondescript binder to gather dust, no this one is a little more complicated than that.
I first want to point out that I would probably never use this as I don’t really think that paper makes for a reliable backup media. The main reason for writing about it is that the particular program I am about to talk about is simply fascinating as hell.
Without further ado, on today’s what the fluck o’meter, I present PaperBack. Like it says above, this program lets you backup all your files to…PAPER. Very weird. To say the least!
What it does is it converts the binary data of your files and converts them to over sized bitmaps that you print out. To restore it all you need is a local scanner. If you want to try it out, I created a paper backup of a cool new FREE anti virus software I am testing out called PC Tools Antivirus. You can download the file in PDF format, print it out and try to restore it using PaperBack to try it out. Careful though, it is 88 pages. Here is the file if you are brave enough: (Free Antivirus In PDF Form).
Another cool thing about this weird little program is it doesn’t require any installation. It is a self running executable so you can run it from your USB thumb drive if you want.
So you are probably saying to yourself, “Why the hell would I want this utility El Di Pablo?” and to be honest, I asked myself the same question. Here is the answer the creators give on their website:
You may ask – why? Why, for heaven’s sake, do I need to make paper backups, if there are so many alternative possibilities like CD-R’s, DVD±R’s, memory sticks, flash cards, hard disks, streamer tapes, ZIP drives, network storages, magnetooptical cartridges, and even 8-inch double-sided floppy disks formatted for DEC PDP-11? (I still have some). The answer is simple: you don’t. However, by looking on CD or magnetic tape, you are not able to tell whether your data is readable or not. You must insert your medium into the drive (if you have one!) and try to read it.
Paper is different. Do you remember the punched cards? EBCDIC and all this stuff. For years, cards were the main storage medium for the source code. I agree that 100K+ programs were… unhandly, but hey, only real programmers dared to write applications of this size. And used cards were good as notepads, too. Punched tapes were also common. And even the most weird codings, like CDC or EBCDIC, were readable by humans (I mean, by real programmers).
Do I expect you to run out and start using this program as your primary means of data backup? Hell no! Do I want you to check it out because of its unusual nature? Hell yes! Give it a try, tell your friends about it. If it is good for anything, it is certainly good for a laugh.
This article was written by El Di Pablo a guest contributor on AskTheAdmin.com. You can keep up with his high tech antics at his blog http://www.Bauer-Power.net!
