Archive for December, 2009
Is your Mouse Broken? Use this cool trick for a short term solution.
Dec 31st
Ok, so it really doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. Yeah, drat, your mouse has broken after you used it by accident on top of that peanut butter smudge on your desk. Here’s an obscure yet real windows tool you can use to make your keyboard act as a mouse until you get that replacement. To do this, you push at the same time, Alt+Left shift key + NumLock . You’ll get a pop-up window saying to
1) Use Mouse Keys, click OK
2) Cancel MouseKeys, click CANCEL
3) Deactivate, click settings….blah, blah blah.
When you get the popup you can click the settings button and customize the feature as well.
How many of you knew about this? We all knew about the OSK I wrote about here but not this one!
Kerry is a wanna-be geek who periodically writes on the the AskTheAdmin website. Her favorite website is callcatalog.com which is a reverse phone lookup website that allows you to do a reverse phone number lookup.
How can I ANNOY the hell out of someone in my office legally?
Dec 28th
This was brought back from the AtA archives for several readers! We normally stick to our computers and such but REVENGE is always a good topic! Lets put our love of gadgets to good use…“Alright let me start out by saying there is this woman who works in my office, who is SUPER annoying. She annoys everyone around her. She has her own office but comes over to “Visit” with everyone spreading the urgency to kill her. Now I don’t want to resort to violence is there a Techie way I can annoy her?”
We have something that sounds like it might be what you need. For $10 this will be hours and hours of fun loving entertainment / revenge And AskTheAdmin gets a whole $.89! for every time someone uses this link.
Check out this information pieced together from their site:
The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron would be useless against an army of Snowbots, but it’s very effective at disturbing that guy in the sales department or your “friend” down the hall. With its thin design and embedded magnet for easy hiding, the Annoy-a-tron can be placed in a variety of locations. Select one of the three sound choices (2 kHz, 12 kHz, or alternating) and push the switch to the on position. Place it in a proper hiding spot and let the “fun” begin.The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name) beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time ‘timing’ the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight ‘electronic noise’ built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown Admin wonder where his packets are.
3 simple steps.
- Turn on.*
- Hide it.
- Muahahaha…
Assuming you have done your part in selecting a suitable hiding location for the Annoy-a-tron, it will do its part to drive your co-workers slowly mad with its short and seemingly random beeps. And when someone does locate the Annoy-a-tron, they’re really not going to know what it is – which is almost as much fun as watching them search for it. Muahaha.
The Annoy-a-tron takes one CR2032 battery (included) and measures approximately: 2.5″ x 1.25″ x .3″. It will run for 3 to 4 weeks on a single battery.
Some Recommendations:
- Don’t hide it inside of food (the chemicals in a burrito are known to be quite destructive to electrical components)
- You should probably avoid the area near your local BOFH (we understand that most likely you are the local BOFH, but still please take note)
- Yes, we realize you could buy a dozen and hide them all inside someone’s office (oh, did we say that out loud?)
- Please reserve the use of the Annoy-a-tron for deserving subjects only (we’ll leave it up to you to determine who qualifies)
- * Note: Please remember to remove the small plastic tab underneath battery.
Not convinced of the Annoy-a-tron’s evil powers?
Read this letter we received from a satisfied customer and be enlightened:
Dear friends at thinkgeek.com,
I recently acquired the “Annoy-A-Tron” from your web site. Actually, I acquired two, thinking that perhaps two devices might be necessary to truly splinter the minds of my friends and co-workers. How woefully did I underestimate this powerful tool.
I have watched this simple device transform an (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dread beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep.
He has set a timer on his computer to track the duration between beeps. It hasn’t been much help.
My favorite quote so far, nearly bursting that vein on his temple as he shouted it: “That beep has been F***ING with me for HOURS now.”
He has called the facilities department to schedule a maintenance worker to investigate.
He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? Replace a battery? Call the authorities? Evacuate the premises? Scrub ourselves with disinfectant and put on haz-mat suits and call our families to give them our tearful goodbyes?
I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker’s mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.
My best to you,
John
Seattle, WA
And for another way to Annoy the hell out of some one legally check this out…
Remotely Wipe your hard drive for all of our schizoid friends.
Dec 28th
I love when other sites incorporate what we do here at AskTheAdmin.com and we also love sharing them with our readers. So here is Paul Bauer from Bauer-Power.net using our Make Outlook your biatch with rules and batch files for those of you that have not seen that post check it out here. Without further ado here is the post:
My buddy Karl over at AskTheAdmin.com once wrote an article about running a script from Outlook when a particular email comes in. It got me to thinking if there was a way to remotely wipe a hard drive when an email comes in. I couldn’t find a program that could be scripted to remotely wipe a drivebut I once wrote about a program called HDD Wipe that can at least wipe a drive while Windows was running.
So all that was left was a way to automate HDD Wipe. Well, HDD Wipe is GUI only, so that got me thinking about another program I wrote about called Autoit that lets you automate GUI programs. I decided to write my own program that automates HDD Wipe to wipe out a hard drive remotely. Here is a teaser video of me wiping a drive using an email. I will get more into that in Episode 18, but in the meantime here is a teaser, and below is the link to my Autoit program RemoteWipe!
http://www.youtube.com/v/iiAn2FaqDZ4
Download RemoteWipe here: (RemoteWipe.exe)
To use it drop it in the HDDGURU FreeWipe Tool programs file directory, and run it via script, double click, PSExec or however you feel you need to run it!
Do you know of a better way to remotely wipe a drive in windows? If so, let me know. Preferably a scriptable program please.
[Via Bauer-Power]
Video Phone from 2005 is AWESOME! OJO Shadow.
Dec 27th
As a lot of you know I have a baby and I have a full time job. So I do not get to spend as much time with her as I would like to. I have tried setting up Skype Video so that we can see each other.The Tablet that HP hooked me up with also has a built in camera and microphone. But alas little Kayla just want to mash the keyboard… Could it be because of baby Smash? Probably!
So the computer video phone was out of the question, I took a look at stand alone Skype phones like this one but they were too rich for my blood. Then I found something called the OJO Video Phone created by Motorola way back in 2005. They have shown these things on shows like 24 but I never knew what they were.
They used to cost $400 and $20 a month. Now you can find them on eBay for ~$150 and the service is $10 a month.
EDIT I FOUND IT NEW FOR CHEAPER HERE $130:
It is what it says it is – a stand alone video phone that works over broadband. Now i can see my baby whenever I want… She loves it!
Do you have a way to connect with your kids while you are at work? We would love to hear about it in the comments! And those links above are affiliate links so we will see some money if you guys decide to buy anything via our links.
Backup your Opera Data with OperaBackup
Dec 22nd
If you are using Opera Browser and want to back up all the browser data to another PC, then the free utility Opera Back up should be useful. OperaBackup is smart and easy to use application that lets you create and restore backups of all data as bookmarks, passwords, configuration, etc. of your Opera browser. Once installed, it can take a back up of all the user profile or a specific user profile.
The interface is pretty simple and it provides you with two options, Backup and Restore a back up. You can select the user profile from the list of available profiles.
F you are selecting the define user profile option, then you need to manually profile the path to the opera folder, preferences and also the email and RSS folders. Opera Backup is a pretty useful utility to back up and restore Opera profiles which includes bookmarks, configuration etc.
[Via LifeRocks 2.0]
