Archive for February, 2009
How can I tell if my ISP is flucking with my BitTorrent downloads?
Feb 17th
Going back as far as 2006 I have been hearing the word BitTorrent flying around the media like it was a four letter word.
Do you hear Mission Impossible theme music playing while you hunt your torrents down?
Shortly after the man (Pictured Left) had his way and the fall of the first generation of File Sharing applications came and went, the ISP’s have taken it upon themselves to throttle down BT related traffic.
Hey we know the media industry has been messing with our torrents via ZipTorrent or Media Defender but now a lot of ISP’s are flucking up your BT downloading ability. We have also see that almost 70% of ALL Internet traffic is P2P. But what is the ratio of legal vs. illegal content?
Even when there are companies using BT for good rather than evil like Azureus and its VUE network they still get throttled down with the common criminals! Now is this fair? Hell no!
How do you know if your ISP is doing you dirty?
Check out this plug-in... NOW! It plugs into Azerus and tells you how many times your connections are interrupted while doing the BT thing.
Author’s Description:
Help Azureus (Vuze) gather data on Internet traffic throttling.This plug-in works with your Azureus (Vuze) application to gather information regarding interference with your Internet access and send it to Azureus (Vuze).
Specifically, this small piece of software monitors your network connections and every ten minutes measures the number of interrupted connections (called reset tcp connections) and then displays the results to you. By selecting the share results check-box you can also share these results with our central server, which enables us to then aggregate the results and compare them with customers of other ISPs. We strongly encourage you to mark the share results setting.
Sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. Azureus (Vuze) may aggregate the data collected and talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed. Use of this plug-in has a negligible impact on your network usage.Right now the plug-in only works on PCs, not Macs, but we are actively working on future versions. Users from all countries are welcome to participate. Alternatively, if you rather install the plug-in using the plug-in wizard built into our application, go to our Wiki to learn how to do that.
Thank you for your cooperation in this research. We hope that contributing more complete factual data to the debate over appropriate network management will lead to better regulatory solutions.
Is your ISP trying to bend you over with out taking you for dinner? Find out now and come back and let us know! I love BT for all sorts of stuff including downloading of HUGE LEGIT files. Do you hear me Cablevision? The latest Red Hat Distro is legit and distributed this way among others…
_TheShiverMeTimbersAdmiN_
Have you ever wanted to create your own font from your handwriting?
Feb 12th
(NOTE: They started to charge for this. You can try pilothandwriting.com while it is still free! Please post alternatives in the comments below. Thanks for everyone who let me know about this!)
This is a cool little 10-15 minute activity that will keep on giving back to you for years to come. That’s right add that final customizing touch to your Windows, Linux or Mac machine – Your handwriting as a font!
With some free time a visit to a website called YourFonts.com, a scanner and a printer you can create a font for use in any application on your computer. To me this sounded way too cool to pass up. I went and downloaded the printable template from here and carefully followed the steps.
The template looks like this:
You print it out and add your letters to each corresponding box. What you see above is the first page. There are two pages but the second one contains only special characters. Anything that you omit will not be included in your font.
So if you just wanted to have a font contain numbers, letters or characters just fill in those. The font file will be smaller for it.
I was pretty excited, I grabbed a sharpie and went to work on my page. Here is what it looked like when I was done:
Now I messed around with the scanning properties and decided to use the grey scale you see above at 200dpi. It gave it a pretty cool look. You can of course scan in color as the site recommends. You will have to convert that scan to a JPG, GIF or PNG file (If yours spits back a PDF).
Most scanning programs can save as for you. Now that I had my template filled out I was ready to upload it and have YourFonts recognize each of my characters and spit back a font.
They ask you for your file and to name your font and add a copyright line to the file as you can see below:
You are not required to fill in these fields and you can leave the default if you don’t want to be identified as the author of this font.
I filled in the fields uploaded and then waited about a minute to be show this:
That add custom text line at the top will add just that to your font file. This will be displayed when someone previews the font. Again it is not necessary to complete your Font. I clicked on Download and was ready to rock and roll.
You hit that download your font now button to do just that. You can grab my font here. (It is a rapidshare link) After you click on the button to Install & Use you will see brief information on how to use your newly created font on your computer. Share your fonts with us in the comments!
We would love to see what you guys come up with!!
How to Rip DVDs with ImgBurn.
Feb 11th
A previous article explains how to use the awesome VLC player to rip a DVD to an MPEG-1 file. Technically, it gets the job done, but there are other options. Storage is dirt cheap so why not retain the full image quality and size as well as all the menus, languages, subtitles and bonus material from the original DVD. Using ImgBurn you can rip the entire disc to an ISO file and then use the VLC player to watch the DVD just like you had the physical disc in your drive.
After downloading and installing ImgBurn, a wizard will offer a few choices.
The one you want to choose is Create image file from disc.
Before we start ripping, we need to prevent ImgBurn from splitting the file into multiple parts since we want to end up with a single ISO file of the entire disc. Go to Tools > Settings and click on the Read tab. Under options, change the value of File Splitting from Auto to None. Click OK to go back to the main screen.
The main screen shows everything you would want to know about this disc. Under Destination, click the folder and navigate to a location where you want to store the image file. Be sure you have enough space. Look in the window on the right, the value for Size is how many bytes the disc contains (this disc is 4.6 Gigs).
When you are ready, click the button at the bottom with the green arrow. The ripping process will begin and the screen will give you a progress indicator including the estimated time remaining.
Go do something else while this runs, it’s going to take a while. A dual layer disc can hold more than 8 Gigs and you should rip at the lowest speed you can bear for best results.
When it’s done you will have a file called ‘Name of the disc’ .ISO.
Now, start VLC player and select Open > File. Navigate to the ISO file and select it. VLC player will start playing the file and the result will appear just like you were playing the physical disc.
Now you can enjoy the full quality and functionality of the DVD without having to lug around all those discs.
ImgBurn is a very powerful piece of software that does a lot of other things, including burning image files to disc, and it is completely FREE (I know the Admin loves free). It runs on all versions of Windows, including Vista and all 64-bit versions of Windows.
One thing ImgBurn will NOT do is rip encrypted discs (discs with CSS and/or Macrovision). For that task you need a tool called DVD Decrypter. The developer of DVD Decrypter is no longer working on the software due to issues with the Macrovision corporation and the obvious DMCA violations the product allows. It wouldn’t be proper to advise you on how to rip protected material or commit DMCA violations, but if you do happen to obtain a copy of DVD Decrypter, you will see that its interface and operation is very similar to that of ImgBurn.
Top 5 reasons Admins FAIL at Group Policy.
Feb 10th
I have been thinking about why administrators sometimes report "issues" with their
Group Policy system. As I thought about it, I decided to jot down some notes to share
with you and your team and managers. The result was five reasons people fail with
Group Policy, and I’m going to share them with you:
Reason #5: Not understanding how Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista,
and Windows Server 2008 are all different.
You started out with Windows 2000, but do you know all of the ways that Group Policy
applies differently to Windows XP? And, what about Windows Vista and 2008? Can you
be confident in explaining to the boss why settings don’t work exactly the same across these
operating systems?
Reason #4: Not using Group Policy Power to its fullest.
Did you know there are 18 categories of settings and options you can perform in the box for
Windows XP (and even more for Vista)? But what happens when you introduce the new
Group Policy Preferences? You get another 21 new CATEGORIES. If you’re not up to speed
here, you’re spinning your wheels; driving changes into your images, when you should be
doing it dynamically using Group Policy. Oh, and losing money each day you don’t implement these free new goodies.
Reason #3: Not knowing WHEN Group Policy applies.
This is a huge one. People throw their hands up in the air when it seems like Group Policy
isn’t working. But I bet it’s working fine; you just need to understand WHEN Group Policy
applies across different conditions and operating systems.
Reason #2: Not knowing how to find settings that do what you want.
How many policy settings are there? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Depends
on who you ask and how you classify them. There are 2400 policy settings for Vista in one
category (the Administrative Templates section), but what about the others? What process
are you using to figure out which settings you should use for your environment?
And the number 1 Reason: Not everyone is speaking the same "language."
This is my favorite one, because it’s not even a technical one. It’s just human nature. We’re
all too busy to figure out what our common "language" is going to be. If you’ve ever had a
co-worker say to you "Do me a favor and modify that Group Policy for me." You need to stop
and ask yourself: "What is he talking about? The GPO itself? The settings contained within
the GPO? Something else?" Having you AND your team be on the same page is simply
priceless.
It’s that "Human Broadband Connection" you only get when everyone on your team
is speaking a common language.
Thanks go to Jeremy from GPAnswers for this one!
What problems do you and your organization have with Group Policy? Who is using 2008 Policies? Let us know in the comments kiddies!
See what’s going on when you are away from your pc using a simple search.
Feb 10th
When the cat’s away the mice will play!
Ever get the feeling someone has been messing with your machine while you were away?
Your trusted Anti-virus isn’t telling you there is something wrong but you know deep down in your gut something is off- and chances are it is! After all an unprotected windows machine can be infected on the Internet in under 10 seconds now-a-days so if you are missing some patches or have an easy password… Whoa Boy!
This is what The Admin does when he gets that not so secure feeling aka the “I think I have been hacked” panic.
So now you have that not so secure feeling? You can follow these easy steps with no software other than windows search needed.
- I open task manager with Control Shift Escape and sort my processes by CPU usage from high to low – I kill what i don’t know ( I do know a lot of process names and such but even I don’t know every process in the world – if you are unsure Google it! – FYI – Windows will not let you kill system processes.)
- Next I open a search box and look for modified files within the last 24 HRS (or however long you were away for!)
- Now you have a perimeter to cordon off – your crime scene so to speak. Scrutinize these files as your jump off point.
- Open Log files, examine exe files, read text files to make sure they don’t contain your personal info in them, new user profiles and directories, funny file or directory names. Hackers like to use names you would think are system processes like winservice.exe or MScontrol.com.
All from a simple search… The power of simplicity. If you need assistance send us screenshots or the file name in question and The Admin will get right back to you!
All of this is CSI like evidence to help you piece together what is going on. If you find files or directories you cant access, large amounts of space are missing from your machine and still don’t come across anything using this method re-install your anti-virus software and run a full scan. Still turning up nothing and still paranoid? Install a different antiviral package like Kaspirsky and scan scan scan.
If you still turn up nada chances are you are clean!
Digsby is down. No it is not you.
Feb 9th
So my favorite IM client/IM communicator on AtA stopped working this morning. At first I thought it was me. I kept getting an error on the desktop client. It was simply failed to connect.
I had recently introduced my buddy over @ Bauer-Power.net to Digsby so I went to his website and saw this:
Are you using Digsby? Is it working for you? Are you a Digsby developer? Then let us know what’s going on in the comments!
UPDATE From Digsby:
We are having server-side issues that brought down the service. We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly. If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.
After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week. This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurrence!
11:52 Update: The digsby site is not coming up anymore and the information that was at http://blog.digsby.com/archives/121 is also 404’ing
3:20 Update: They just posted an update (and spelled dependent wrong!):
We are working to restore the databases now so we can bring the servers back online. Part of the team is meeting right now to discuss the implementation of “local mode” so the client is not dependant on servers.
