Archive for December, 2008
Are there any FireFox 3 Features I Don’t Know About?
Dec 31st
MozilliaLinks.org has a cool list of 8 things that you probably don’t know about in the newest release of FireFox 3. Here are the top 5 and you can click through to see the rest! They work on any platform that runs FF3.
My favorites are clearly number one and number two. These make my daily browsing SO much easier!
Are you enjoying FireFox 3? Got any tips or tricks for us?
Do you have a favorite feature that was left off the list? If we use one of your tips you may be eligible for some awesome AskTheAdmin.com Swag..
Hit us up in the comments…
Alright, alright enough with the chit-chat here is the list:
- Duplicate tabs. Press Ctrl while dragging a tab to create a duplicate of the dragged tab including its history. Note that this feature doesn’t work on Mac.
- Move tabs to another window. Just drag a tab and drop it on another window to move it. If the dragged tab is the last one in its window, it will be closed.
- Resize the search bar. When the search bar is placed next to the location bar, you can drag the handler between them (invisible on Windows and Linux) to resize it.
- Add keyword search. Select Manage Search Engines… in the search engines menu to open the Search Engines Manager, select a search engine, press Edit Keyword… and enter a few characters to define one. Now you can enter the keyword followed by your search terms in the location bar to search with that plugin.
- Discontinuous selections. Make a selection with the mouse as you usually do. Then press and hold the Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) key to make additional selections and create a larger discontinuous one so you can copy or print just what you need.
[Via MozilliaLinks.org]
What are REAL IT policies vs. What is actually enforced…
Dec 30th
(Evil Sysadmin laugh) Silly Users! You cannot escape my domain!
I have been getting a whole lot of questions regarding… “Can I do this at work” or “Will I get caught if I am downloading…” and my all time favorite “If I look at a little pron will I get caught?”
Here’s a clue, most of the time, if we have the capabilities of remote monitoring, we’re not using them. Unless you do something to draw the Evil Eye of a Sysadmin, we just don’t care, we’ve got other things to worry about.
Now that being said, if you DO happen to do something to draw our attention, you’re dead in the water if you’re doing something wrong.
Here is a list of things that most Sysadmins don’t really care about:
- Light Porn surfing (if it’s playboy type stuff) up to say 10-15 minutes a day, we just don’t care. We might be a bit entertained by your old woman or tranny fetish, but chances are, nothing to really worry about. Unless you owe us money. Just be aware, we know what you’re doing.
- Reading news sites, or shopping online. Again, we just don’t care. Most of our days are spent in one of two modes; putting out fires, or preventing fires.
- Circumventing the proxy to go watch that really funny YouTube video your brother sent you in your corporate email. If you’re smart enough to do it, more power to you. If you didn’t do it exactly right, the Evil Eye is turning your way right now. If it’s just a funny YouTube video, no big deal. If you’re logging into hardcore pr0n sites to download videos, and eating all the T1 bandwith, your fapping is about to be seriously interrupted. It might even be something like total computer failure, which we will conveniently be able to pin to the pr0n you were downloading.
If you have thus far managed to evade the Evil Eye, good job! Here are some things that will draw down the Striking Hammer Of God:
- Illegal pr0n. If she could be your daughter, or our kid sister, you are toast. We don’t just get you fired, we call the FBI and let them arrest you. If you (sick bastards) are unlucky enough to get a Sysadmin like me, you first get the living shit beat out of you, then you get to deal with the Feds.
- Illegal pr0n. If the “man” of the pr0n is named fido, we call the FBI and again, probably beat the crap out of you for good measure. We definitely make sure that EVERYONE in the company (and likely your spouse, and/or family) know what you were doing, and why the men in suits have come to take you away.
- Downloading illegal music. Not cool man. Not at work. Yeah we have a T1, but it’s not your personal playground. Expect to have the music mysteriously disappear from your machine overnight, and forget being able to do anything like that in the future, we just demoted you to the Guest account.
- Listening to streaming music. Ok, so yeah it’s not illegal. But you and your 10 brethren have just filled our T1, and effectively DoS’d the email server. If you want music, bring it from home on a portable hard drive, and don’t copy it to the machines. Just play it from the hard drive.
- Installing or running any port scanners, or downloading anything that might be considered a “hack” tool. Congratulations, you just pissed IT off, and will likely be locked out of the network shortly. I’ve got enough to do without wrangling your script kiddie ass too.
- Heavy pr0n surfing. Like 5-6 hours a day heavy. Dude, just stop. You are likely going to be visiting some websites that are, ummm, less than legit, to get in that amount of pr0n every day. You are going to end up getting that machine infested with virii and spyware. You might even actually inadvertently compromise the corporate network. If that happens, do you really think that anyone is going to let that slide? I’ve actually had to explain to the boss why you need to be fired before your little problem destroys the network, and I don’t really care to discuss what you’ve been looking at (you mean there’s more than one person that looks at THAT?!?!?) with my boss.
Even if I’ve been cool enough not to filter out web content, the boss is going to want to know how you were able to view this stuff. Rather than blow it for everyone, I am going to do the right thing. I am going to lie my ass off. You must be a hacker, because you’ve been able to circumvent every filtering method I’ve set up, and I have logs to prove it (believe me, I have logs to prove ANYTHING).
The short answer is, if we’re watching you, there is no escape. Between hardware keyloggers, and specialty software that is designed to be undetectable (which is extremely hard to find even to buy), we will catch you.
If you are doing something that is in a grey area, take your Sysadmin out for lunch a couple times, or for a beer, and find out what the real policy is (the one that gets enforced, not the one in the manual). Hell if we like you, we’ll let you get away with alot more than if you’re a dick to us in the hall.
[Jglessner via the comments on LifeHacker]
HP MediaSmart Server EX485 First looks and review.
Dec 29th
We have covered more than one Windows Home Server articles in the last year and that is why we were honored that HP let us review their new WHS before the rest of the world even knew it existed. If you missed our initial review of its older brother you can check that out here and here.
The new box is running a Celron 2ghz Processor with 2gb of memory. We also have 2 750GB SATA drives that are easily expandable via the easy access hard drive bays on the front with an additional two slots.
Now you can use your two drives seperately or as part of an array or as a mirror. But get this you can selectively mirror folders or files on two drives and not others. This is a great use of ingenuity as you can mirror your important files and save space by not mirroring your temp files or some other crap. Nice!
We have an eSata port on the front and 4 usb ports for even more expandablility.
The older model was also able to aggregate all your iTunes libraries across your network but this guy can now grab playlists as well as act as a central Time Machine backup location (MACS Only). This is great for restoring the wife’s MAC Book Pro after she nukes it!
It has a 10/100/1000 Gigabit ethernet adapter as well as Wireless capabilites to connect to your network. How about remote access to your internal clients? File sharing? Automagical backups for PC’s and MACS?
This is a sweet box at a sweet price. And the revisions keep getting better and better, because they listen to their users. More and more HP has become a better company than DELL and has far better support than they ever have.
Is anyone else seeing this??
How can I resize windows that are stubborn?
Dec 24th
Adam Pash covered this tiny app on LifeHacker a while back. This Resizeable goodness is ever so cleverly called resizeenable and it lets you resize system windows that you normally could not. You guys always seem to find what I am looking for before I’m looking for it! Thanks LifeHacker…
Some of you may wonder why we are so anal-retentive that we need to do this (is there a hyphen in that – wow now that’s anal)…
Well screen real estate is a commodity (much like sleep these days) that we can never have enough of.
Take your resizing self over to the authors site and grab this app and you will be resizing like a pro in no time. Its 39k and the screen contents scale down or up to what ever size you choose.
PC power users switching to Mac? Mac’s got a toolbox that’s right up your alley!
Dec 24th
HAPPY HOLIDAYS kiddies,
Comodore64 back again to shed some light for any newly ordained Mac users that are carrying over from the M$ world. Since Mac is gaining a kind of strangle hold on the industry, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of guys like myself who have a PC for certain purposes and a Mac for others. In my case, it’s a Powerbook. But not just any Powerbook, this is one of the last Powerbooks made with a PowerPC processor, right before Jobs and Co. made the switch to Intel processors. In retrospect, it was one of my better purchases in life. Worth every penny, and keeps on tickin. Unfortunately, a lot of you didn’t stay on the PowerPC bandwagon, and jumped over (maybe not even by choice) to the new Intel Macs. From what I’ve seen and heard , they are quite the problematic little buggers. But my PowerPC Powerbook has been rock solid since day 1 (gleam.)
Shortly after buying this Powerbook over 2 years ago, I was rummaging around the hard drive for whatever pre-installed goodness I can come across a folder that looks like the image above. This collection of proggies is sure to make any former M$ user feel right at home.
Here is a rundown I’ve found courtesy of http://www.freemacblog.com/exploring-the-utilities-folder-on-your-mac/
Activity Monitor – Activity Monitor let’s you know what is going on with your computer. It can let you know where your memory and CPU is being used most.
Airport Admin Utility – The application will let you configure your Apple Airport products.
Airport Setup Assistant – This app is used when you first set up your Airport product. It’s an easy wizard for setup.
Audio MIDI Setup - You can use Audio MIDI Setup to configure the audio input and output devices you use with your computer, such as microphones and audio playback equipment. If you need this app, you probably already know how to use it.
Bluetooth File Exchange – If you have a cell phone or PDA with bluetooth, this application makes it very easy to send files back and forth. This is a great way to take your photos off of your phone, or to add ringtones to your phone.
Colorsync Utility – This app gives you access to to Apple’s Colorsync specs. In this app you can set different profiles. There is also a nifty calculator that can convert between RGB and CMYK. This is another of those apps that isn’t useful to most people.
Console – Console gives you a “behind the scenes” look at your Mac. While you see all the pretty pictures and graphics of Mac OS X, there is a ton happening in the background. Console lets you watch that. It’s especially helpful to see error or status messages.
Digitalcolor Meter – If you are preparing your work for professional printing and you have an Apple monitor, you can use DigitalColor Meter to match the color on your screen against several industry standards.
Directory Access – Directory Access lists the different kinds of services that Mac OS X can access. The list includes directory services, which give Mac OS X access to user information and other administrative data stored in directory domains. The list also includes kinds of network services that Mac OS X can discover on the network.
You can enable or disable access to each kind of service. If you disable a kind of service in Directory Access, Mac OS X no longer accesses services of the disabled kind. The different services can be found here.
Disk Utility – There is all kinds of power in the Disk Utility. Here you can reformat a disk, check and fix permissions, and so many other things.
Grab – Grab will let you “grab” screenshots of your Mac. Of course, you can already do this with key combinations, but Grab does have one nice feature. You can do a timed grab. Start the timer and ten second later the Mac will grab a screenshot.
Grapher – Grapher lets you create 2D and 3D graphs from equations.
OS 9 came with a graphing calculator. OS X versions before Tiger had no graphing options. But, with Mac OS X Tiger, we now have Grapher.
Installer – You’ve probably used Installer a hundred times and didn’t know it. Whenever you download a new application that comes in a package or a metapackage, Installer makes it possible to install that application.
Keychain Access – Keychain Access gives you access to the keychain. Duh.
Anytime you save a password to a site or a server or anything on the Mac, it is stored in the keychain. If you forget one of those passwords and it isn’t filling in automatically, you can access keychain with this application and find your password.
Migration Assistant – This is simply one of the most amazing applications. If you’ve ever purchased a new Mac and migrated from your old one, this is the app you used. You can also use it to get a use from a different machine.
Netinfo Manager – Netinfo is the built-in Mac OS X directory system. It stores information about users and resources and makes it available to Mac OS X processes that want to use it. This application helps you manage it.
Network Utility – Since I run a fairly large network of Macs this app is great. It makes it easy to ping machines, lookup name server and DNS, do traceroutes, port scans, etc. It also is a quick way to find info on your Network interfaces. (e.g., ethernet, airport, etc)
ODBC Administrtator – This will give you access to database management systems using Open Database Connectivity standards.
Printer Setup Utility – When you get that new printer and hook it to your Mac, this app comes to the rescue. It will lead you along to get the printer working.
System Profiler – If you need information about your Mac, here is the place to come. It will tell you about your RAM and your drives and your processors and anything thing else you’d need.
Terminal – This is the gateway to the true power of Mac OS X. It is a terminal emulator that will let you use the Unix base of Mac OS X.
VoiceOver Utility - Voiceover is a Mac OS X feature that lets you interact with your Mac via voice. It will read the text of websites, email, and documents. It also allows you to control your Mac using audible commands. Voiceover Utility lets you determine how Voiceover will behave.
Well, kiddies I hope this helps you settle into your new Mac a little easier. Some of these Utilities are clutch and definitely make me feel more in control of my MAC.
Til next time,
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
Using Windows Vista Snipping tool (Video)
Dec 22nd
The Admin has covered the Vista Snipping tool recently but, you know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words… How about a video? How many words is that worth?
But here is the second in a series of Video how-to’s By Dan Morrill, on special assignment to Ask the Admin.
If you missed Dan’s first one on Wednesday, on how to use Word 2007 as a blog editor, then here it is.
Windows Vista comes with a number of handy tools, the best one is the windows vista snipping tool. This tool allows you to capture a JPG image from whatever is on the screen, and save it off for use later. This is very handy when you need a logo from a site, that is using a text based logo with no images that you can download and save.
This program can be found under start, all programs, accessories and can really make your day easier when you need to capture an image off the screen. This completely replaces the alt+print screen or function+print screen and is very cool.
