Have you ever wanted to create your own font from your handwriting?

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!!

Ubuntu Quick Tip: Missing Minimize and Maximize Window Buttons?

Hello out there in admin land!

It is I, El Di Pablo here to bring you a quick Ubuntu tip for the week. I haven’t written on aTa in a while due to my hectic schedule, but I am sure you have seen me milling about the comments quite a bit.

Anyhoo, so there I am last night, screwing around on my Ubuntu laptop surfing porn doing homework when I noticed that all of my minimize and maximize buttons were missing from my windows.

The only way to minimize and maximize my windows were to right click on the bottom task bar and select it from the menu. WTF?!?!?

Well, it turns out that those buttons aren’t completely controlled by Gnome. For those buttons, Gnome uses a windows manager call Metacity. To get those buttons back I had to open a terminal and run the following command:

Once I did that, my buttons came back, and I was able to minimize and maximize like a mofo! Do you have any good Ubuntu tips/tricks you want to share? Hit us up in the comments!

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

Access your Tivo’s hidden webserver! Download, strip and rip. Part One.

After figuring out I could edit Blogger blog posts from my mobile I decided to see what I could do with my TiVo while I am away. I went online and did some research. I found this tid-bit from Dave Zatz (Sling Media) and gave it a shot.

Allow me to bring you kids up to speed. Essentially, TiVos are just nicely packaged Linux boxes with TV capture cards, hard drives, and a cutesy visual operating system that everyone has grown to love. It’s nice to know the open Linux spirit is in full swing at Tivo, because the developers at Tivo have happily included an already running, https, port 80 web server!

You heard me correctly, I did NOT stutter. As long as you enabled the transfer option from TiVo online you can access a web server built into your Tivo. To do this all you need to do is simply point your browser at your TiVo’s local IP address using https://…

The address bar would look like this:

https://192.168.0.3/

I simply entered this address into my browser and it prompted me for a username and password. The username to use is always tivo and the password is your Media Access Key.

Your media access key can be found via your tivo interface or on your TiVo.com account.

Now how can you use this information while you are away?

Point your router to forward port 80 and 443 to your TiVo, Now by typing in your routers external IP address from any where in the world you can download your .TIVO files.

I hear you all saying:

They are encrypted and all Admin what good is that? and How does this help me?

Well these .TIVO files are just MPEG2 files with a shiny restrictive layer of prohibitive crap. But, no worries lets get that file cracked open so you can burn it to DVD or move it around at your own will. TiVo to go lets you do some of this stuff but The Admin hates being restricted to, well, anything.

Lets get you Downloading, Stripping and Ripping… (This is for your own access we are not teaching you to be nor advocating piracy…)

Tune back in for part two of our TiVo - download, strip and rip series tomorrow.

_TheTiVoHappyAdmiN_

What are some good network monitoring tools?

I would like to monitor event logs on multiple windows machines - maybe ping them every so often?

I used to use something called Emon but it seems pretty outdated. I looked at bigBrother but it seems too expensive.

Do you have a solution?

Have you heard of VMWare??

If you are game then keep on reading… It used to be restricted to linux boxes but now you can get your Virtualization on - Windows style as well.

I have played with a few of these in the past, but if you’re managing a decent sized infrastructure you might want to try them. These are VMWare virtual appliances, I will write something on them at a later date, but basically they work with VMWare’s free software(they have a player and a server product, both free).

You download these packaged virtual appliances, boot them up and they just go! Of course you want to follow the directions provided…

But lets be honest most IT people are guys, and what self respecting guy really reads directions anyway?!?

Here are a couple of the network monitoring appliances that I have tried at some point. They all have their strong points and weak points. They all take some time and effort to get your network configured in it. But the rewards are pretty nice!

Without further ado, here are some linky links:

• Unnoc
• Network Management Station
• Zabbix - I liked this one the best
• BaywatchOS - I always thought Nicole Eggert was better looking than Pam Anderson
• You Can Search Here for more virtual appliances…

Feel free to dig into these. Download them and the VMWare player and give them a go. Don’t be shy…one of the glorious things about the VMWare appliances is that you cannot mess up your PC/Laptop by using them as it is segregated from the OS and the hardware, but again…more on that at a later date.

Do you use VMWare? Or how about Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007? Let’s here it in the comments guys! Sound off.

What a Dream Come True! DreamLinux that is!

I mentioned in a recent post that I recently aquired an older Pentium III laptop with only 384MB of RAM. It really isn’t fast enough to run Windows XP without trimming the fat.I originally was going to put Xubuntu on it, because Xubuntu is designed to be more light weight than regular Ubuntu, because it uses the more minimal XFCE interface. It turns out though that XFCE is still a little too beefy for even this computer. Sure it installed, and ran fine, just a little slower than I would like. I did try XP with the fat trimmed like I mentioned above, but that was still God awfully slow.

Not wanting to give up, or revert to an older version of Windows, I decided to keep poking around in the Linux world for a solution. There are a lot of them out there that will run just find on such a machine, but the trick it so get one that my wife won’t mind using when going to the Java Mama’s coffee shop with my little girl.

II found the perfect distro for my wife in Dream Linux! This is one of the many lightweight live CD distros out there that also have the ability to install to hard drive. The cool thing about Dream Linux that I like, and my wife likes especially since the popularity of MAC’s now days (Damn they have good marketing don’t they?) is that this is pretty much a MAC clone complete with the animated launcher bar at the bottom, and yes, that bar works well on the Pentium III without slowing it down!

If you have a relatively newer computer, it also supports Berly and AIGLX, which means sweet 3D desktop goodness!

Of course, I wouldn’t even try using Berly on a Pentium III, but it does make a strong case to test it out! Another cool thing about it is the graphical front end to ndiswrapper, which lets you use Windows drivers for hardware that isn’t supported under Linux! Just open the GUI, point it to your driver inf file, and away you go! I did have to add the following line to my /etc/rc.local script to make some hardware work after boot up, but that is a minor tweak and hardly a deal breaker:

The best thing though is that it is Debian based, so apt-get is in full effect, which means that if something you use normally is missing, you can get it and install it easily! For me, network manager is essential for easy WPA configuration. It didn’t come pre-installed on Dream Linux, but a quick apt-get later and I was good to go!I’m not quite ready to name Dream Linux as a replacement distro of choice yet, for me my favorite is still Ubuntu, but it really is pretty great, and works well on older computers!

Have you tried it out? Do you have a favorite Distro for similar Situations?

Originally Posted on http://www.bauer-power.net

FREE Linux Based Disk Imaging (Ghosting) at its Finest!

I am in love!

That is right, I am not ashamed of it. I am in love with PING (PartImage is Not Ghost). I have been searching for quite a while on a free alternative to Ghost Cast for my personal home network. Well I found it.

I was using DriveImage XML, but PING can do the same job, better and also support Linux!

Not only that, but it is very versatile in that there are many ways you can use it. You can use their boot CD (Download the ISO here), and create/restore images from a network file share, or directly to a disk. They also give you a tutorial on setting up a PXE boot server (On you home Windows XP machine if you want!) and create/store images to the same file share but without the need for boot disks.You can find the full tutorial on using PING here.

Written By El Di Pablo From [BauerPower]