And You Thought Your Email Address Was Long…
Nov 25th
Many moons ago, right around the time I started blogging on Bauer-Power, I worked for a company called Newland Communities. Simple enough name, but when you cram that name into a URL, it now becomes a pretty long domain name. Now add that to the end of your user name, and you have a really long email address. Try calling support with that email address, and the technician asks you to spell out your address phonetically. Needless to say, it sucked!
Well, I found a place that puts the long-ass email address I had at Newland Communities to shame. Oh, and by the way, you can get an email address with them if you like for free! The site is, and I’m not kidding here, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, and they are giving away free mailboxes so you too can have one of the worlds largest email addresses!
Take a look at their selling points from their home page:
With each account, you not only get an obnoxious email address that is sure to piss you friends off, but also you get 25MB of storage. True, you’re better off with Gmail, but then again, you won’t have an email address that won’t fit into some web forms. Your call I guess.
-=El Di Pablo=-
XKCD: A little geeky laugh for you…
Nov 24th
Happy Thanksgiving everyone from everyone at AtA!
Here is a little humor for all our Linux friends out there… The text on mouse over was: Ew, gross you moddified link()? How can you enjoy abusing a file system like that! – [via XKCD]
How To Reconstruct Shredded Paper
Nov 24th
What the hell did that title say? Reconstruct shredded paper? Yeah, that’s exactly what it said. You know those little machines you get at Office Depot to turn your banking and financial statements into spaghetti? Well, now there is a new service that easily lets you take shreds of paper from a paper shredder and scan them into your computer. You then run it through this software, and like a friggin’ jigsaw puzzle, it pieces it back together into a legible document.
This tool is called Unshredder, and luckily it’s not free. It’s sold as a monthly license subscription for $90, or an annual package where you can save a little on the monthly cost. Since this package is aimed at criminal investigators, I’m sure that cost in nominal. For the average teen hacker, they may try to find a different method of getting your info instead of dumpster diving.
From their page:
Unshredder is the first commercial document reconstruction tool in the world! A desktop software application that will put all of the pieces back together in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. Unshredder is as simple to use as a word processor but it unleashes the power of your computer to achieve quick, accurate results. If you are a professional investigator Unshredder is an essential tool.
Putting shredded paper back together isn’t really new. When I was in the Navy, I learned that the Iranians did this to the American embassy back in the 70′s or something. They got a hundred old ladies to sit down with shredded American secret documents and scotch taped them all back together. Nowadays the US Military uses special shredders that doesn’t turn paper into spaghetti, it turns it into friggin’ confetti… Then they burn that s#!t!
Most of us at the office aren’t going to use incinerators though, but still using a shredder with cross-cut functionality is harder to piece back together than the simple spaghetti making shredders. Just some food for thought.
Know of a free tool that does this? maybe something open source? let us know in the comments!
How To Spoof Email in Linux, iPhone and Android
Nov 23rd
Greetings fellow Admins! It’s me, El Di Pablo from Bauer-Power and Tech Chop taking the reigns here at AskTheAdmin for a little while. I was chatting with Karl, and apparently he is working 70 hour work weeks lately, and hasn’t had time to keep up with the posts here. Me being the nice virtual online friend that I am, I volunteered to write up some posts for a week or two to give you guys some original content.
Now, today isn’t going to be one of those days though. Today, I am going to post my latest video from my monthly video show Tech Chop. In this episode I show you three ways you can send spoof emails using your iPhone, Android, and also from Linux. Spoiler alert! Sending spoofs from your iPhone or Android phone is way easier than Linux. However, since you are using the terminal to do it in Linux, that automatically boosts your geek cred by +5 and in turn makes you look cooler.
Here’s the video:
Links for the apps and commands used can be found here: (Spoofing Email For Dummies)
Sending out these spoofs is actually a pretty funny prank you can play on someone. In the video I mentioned sending one to the desktop tech that works for me, and he almost had a heart attack. He says he is saving it for blackmail purposes now, so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. Anyway, still funny if you ask me.
If you want to check out more videos from Tech Chop, visit TechChop.com. If you want to watch the videos on your TV using a set-top box like Boxee, or Roku, you can catch Tech Chop on the Tech Podcast Network!
Know of other tools that will allow you to send spoofs? Are they easier to use? Let us know about them in the comments!
Review: HP EliteBook 2760P
Nov 23rd
As usual I would like to thank the good people at HP for sending over another review machine to check out. This time it is the HP EliteBook 2760p the big brother of the 2710p My daughter and I reviewed way back when. The biggest gripe we had back then was processor power and no real touch screen. The 2760 changes all that with an awesome i5 processor and a full on touch screen. Throw in a USB 3.0 and a eSATA port, with a little display port action and topped off with 4g internal and a 320GB Self Encrypting Drive you have an awesome laptop with a convertible tablet built in (not the other way around!)
I was amazed that the system is MIL-STD 810G standards for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude and warmth. We have also found the system available on Amazon for ~$1200USD. Not too shabby seeming the MSRP is around $1500. The screen is very responsive, the computer is pretty quick and meets all our HD Video/On-line gaming necessities.
Check out the available Specifications:
- Processor: Intel Core i7/i5
- RAM: upto 16GB DDR3
- Hard Disk: upto 320GB
- Graphics Card: Intel Integrated HD3000 Graphics
- Display: 12.1 inch matte (anti-glare) LED backlit display
- Operating System: Windows 7 Pro
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth, Ethernet LAN, 4G Internal Modem
- Hi-Speed USB, VGA connection, two-in-one combo headphone/microphone jack
- RJ11 and RJ45 modem/LAN ports, SD/SDHC card slot, Smart Card reader, Express Card 34 slot, Memory car reader
- Firewire port
- Webcam
- Weight: ~6 lbs
Firefox advises users to disable McAfee’s ScriptScan software.
Oct 5th
t’s the last thing McAfee would want users to hear about one of its products, but the Firefox browser is advising users to disable McAfee’s ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause “stability or security problems.”
SriptScan ships with McAfee’s VirusScan antivirus program. It’s designed to keep Web surfer’s safe by scanning for any malicious scripting code that might be running in the browser. But according to Mozilla it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause Firefox to crash… a lot.
In a note posted to its website, Mozilla said that the add-on “causes a high volume of crashes,” and is “strongly encouraging” users to disable the software. The warning applies to all users of version 14.4.0 and below of the plugin, Mozilla said.
The Firefox browser started popping up warning messages Monday, advising that users disable the software
In McAfee user forums, there is a smattering of complaints about the Firefox problem.
The problem affects Firefox 7 users, according to Francie Coulter, a McAfee spokeswoman. “McAfee has identified the cause and is working actively with the Firefox team to resolve this issue and expects to roll out an update shortly,” she said in an email message.
[Via ITWorld]
