Pocket Professional Pro – I’m impressed January 6, 2009
Posted by Dale in : PDA, Utilities, Windows , Comments
Was on a training course the other day, learning about a piece of Windows Mobile software. The presenter was controlling his Windows Mobile PDA from his desktop.
How cool is that? Seriously cool.
With this software, I can connect my PDA to my computer and remotely control my PDA. Such as send SMS messages from my desktop, using my normal keyboard.
Other things the software can do is:
- Record what you are doing for later playback.
- Macro support, for automating repetitive tasks.
- Access to the Windows “clipboard” on both the desktop PC and the PDA.
You can get Pocket Professional Pro here.
What??? Only 8 WordPress Plugins December 16, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Utilities, WordPress , CommentsYes, only eight WordPress pluigins are used to run the blog. Here they are:
Akismet
The Akismet comment-spam checker. I got sick of the spam ping-bots, which were a daily feature.
All in One SEO Pack
I use it for filling in meta-data, which apparently will help with search engine optimisation as well.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This sitemap generator creates the Category page.
I use the Category page to: a) find something quickly, and b) see if I’ve miscategorised something.
DISQUS Comment System
The DISQUS system is supposed to make comment posting easier for comment posts.
Seemed like a good idea at the time. Hmmm, I’m not sure myself.
Google Analytics
Lets me track visitors to the blog a lot more honestly than even Awstats.
Darn, the Awstats figures really did look good, see: How do I measure thee- … or site stats for dummies.
Google XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps make things far easier for search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live) to check for blog updates. You can see the XML sitemap for Wisefaq here.
WordPress Database Backup
Backup of the Wisefaq blog database. Backups are always a good idea.
WordPress Mobile Edition
Creates a “lite” version of the blog, just for mobile devices, such as BlackBerry’s and Windows Mobile.
4 favourite Google search tips December 11, 2008
Posted by Dale in : How To, Utilities , Comments- Search a particular site.
To search a particular site, use the site parameter.
will search the Microsoft Knowledge Base, for articles about Vista and KBQFE.
(KBQFE stands for Knowledge Base, Quick Fix Engineering. ie. a bug fix!) - What time is it, Google?
So you want to know the time, in say, Melbourne?
- Image search.
You know of a thing, but don’t know what it looks like, try an image search in the regular Google web search box.
(no, I can’t explain the cat either) - Currency conversion
Free paper templates. December 3, 2008
Posted by Dale in : How To, Printing, Utilities , CommentsI find incompetech a really useful site because it lets me create lined paper templates, which I can use to print out on good quality paper.
Why is that important to me?
I hate writing on those 40GSM lined notepads. With a printable template, I can print lines on any paper I want.
The site also offers the following templates:
- Graph paper
- Mailing labels
- Monthly and Yearly Calendars
Running Linux? Using Grub? GAGs easier. October 21, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Utilities , Comments
GAG, the graphical boot manager is a lot easier to use. Saw it over at gag.sourceforge.net
Is the site down, or is it just me? October 19, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Utilities , Comments
Saw this website the other day, and it’s really useful.
It’s useful because it will tell you whether a website is down/broken/doesn’t exist OR whether it’s just you that can’t get to the website.
Making a clone (aka photocopy) of your hard drive - Part 2 October 15, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Utilities , CommentsIn part 1, I only listed out the products which I had heard of, but there are others which I have been told of since.
Legend
40 ft pole – would not touch it with a 40 foot pole.
HGT - heard good things; have either used it, or have been recommended to me by a trusted source.
see part 1 – See part 1 of this post.
Complete disk copy/clone/image list:
- Casper (Future Systems Solutions) - HGT
- CloneZilla – HGT, see part 1
- Clone Maxx (Convar)
- Desktop Authority Image Center (Scriptlogic)
- Disk Image (Active Software)
- DiskImage (DuBaron)
- DiskImage 3 (O&O Software)
- Disk Manager (OnTrack) - HGT, see part 1
- Disk Wizard (Seagate)
- Drive Backup & Hard Disk Manager (Paragon Software)
- Drive Image XML (Runtime) - see part 1
- Drive Snapshot (Tom Ehlert Software)
- DS File Ops Kit (DS Software)
- EASEUS Disk Copy - HGT, see part 1
- G4L (sourceforge) - 40 ft pole
- g4u (Hubert Feyrer)
- Ghost (Symantec & Norton) - HGT, see part 1
- HD Clone (Miray) - see part 1
- Image for DOS / Windows / Linux (Terabyte Unlimited)
- imageIT (Synergix)
- ImageX (Microsoft)
- Partition Saving (Damien Guibouret)
- PartImage
- Perfect Image (Avanquest software)
- PING - Partimage Is Not Ghost (Effitek) - HGT, see part 1
- R-Drive Image (rtt)
- Reflect (Macrium) - see part 1
- Trinity Rescue Kit (Trinity)
- TrueImage (Acronis) - HGT, see part 1
- WinImage (Gilles Vollant Software)
- XXClone (Pixelab) - see part 1
Abandoned(?) software
Seven free Adobe PDF creators October 8, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Freeware, Utilities , Comments
Adobe’s PDF document format is fairly ubiquitous. Ubiquitous is a ten dollar word for “it’s everywhere.”
PDF is really handy as it’s WYSIWYG, ie. What You See on your computer screen Is What You Get out on the printer.*
It’s handy to create your own PDFs when you need to send a document to someone which you don’t want them to change.
Or if you want to be able view your document on different operating system (that’s called being cross-platform)
But creating PDFs has been expensive. Until the advent of some freeware products, it was pretty much Adobe Acrobat, or the highway.
The freeware product I love, and seen deployed to thousands of PCs, is CutePDF Writer. CutePDF Writer is free and good at what it does. Sure, if you want more features, there’s than CutePDF Pro product.
Here are some other products to consider:
- BullZip PDF Printer
- CutePDF Writer (it’s worth mentioning twice
) - doPDF
- PDFCreator
- Primo
- Scan2PDF
- Print2PDF - Free Edition
Other
Open Office and Microsoft Office 2007 have PDF capabilities.
If you don’t have those products, it’s probably overkill to just install to get PDF creation.
Freeware editing tools:
Making a clone (aka photocopy) of your hard drive. September 22, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Freeware, Utilities , CommentsIt’s still Symantec Ghost for me, but the next time around I’ll try free again.
Recently had to build a Linux system out of a Asus EEE Box PC. The first step was to clone the hard disk.
There must be an open source utility I can use!
I thought …
So I tried G4L, and it was horrible. It’s horrible because the user interface is difficult to use.
I wasted 1/2 hour on it. And then tossed the G4L bootable CD hit the shredder. It was so bad that I didn’t want anyone else to grab it off me.
Broke out a WinPE-based Ghost 8.2 disk utility. It just worked, and that also reminds me that I need to create my own WinPE build (I’ll blog about it soon).
Since I was able to copy my Asus EEE BOX PC hard disk, I was able to build Linux on it.
And have a bit of relaxation time, to look around to see what other free hard disk copy utilities there are.
Here’s 8:
- Windows based.
- Free version only does FULL backups
- Linux based boot disk
- Looks very impressive
- Supports IDE, SATAI, SATAII, SCSI, Firewire(IEEE1394) and USB drives
(Some products don’t support SATA …) - EaseUS also have a freeware partition manager
- Runs under Windows, and uses the Volume Shadow Services service.
- supports multi-casting.
Macrium Reflect - Free Edition
- Runs under Windows
- Supports CD/DVD burning.
- available under Windows and as a standalone boot.
- Linux based
- Awful user interface.
Part two lists out all the other utilities I’ve heard of.
Six Eight Nine Password Managers
September 16, 2008
Posted by Dale in : Security, Utilities , Comments
Are password managers a good idea? Well if you get a prompt like the one on the right, “… that your new password differs from last 50 passwords.”
What sort of silly advice is that!?! I can’t remember my last 5 passwords, let alone the last FIFTY!
I’m not the first to notice this. Jesper Johansson wrote about in-actionable security advice in an article series called Passwords and Credit Cards.
So how do you remember passwords?
- Write them down and stick them under a keyboard (aka Koolpin$Gorge*)
- Store them in a password spreadsheet/document?
- Use a password manager?
I use the RoboForm password manager. But here are some others to consider:
- know a large corporation which used, and is very impressed with this product.
- more of a “web form filling” application, but it stores passwords as well.
- There is a Windows Mobile version.
- (a RoboForm superuser: The RoboForm Report – thanks Omarra)
- Free!
- And I’m very tempted by it.
- As mentioned by Jesper.
- Free as well.
- your passwords are stored on a central LastPass Server Your data is encrypted on your PC, and this encrypted file is stored on a LastPass server, and available wherever you’re able to use a web browser plugin.
- There is a portable version called “LastPass Pocket”.
- Does form-filling as well.
- Free! (thanks Ian)
- generate unique secure passwords for each website you login to.
- demo is impressive.
- Macintosh only, as recommended by Leo Laporte.
- Online password manager. I get it the impression that it kind of works like Hushmail, but I could be wrong.
- There is a desktop version available.
- They blog! (thanks Louise)
Many of us are in charge of multiple systems, sometimes multiple thousands of systems. As you are no doubt aware if this applies to you, following the recommendations in “Protecting Your Windows Network” to maintain different administrator and service account passwords on all of them is almost unworkable without help. The passgen tool is designed to help you do so.
* a server, for a sensitive organisation, had the server password stored under the server keyboard.
Koolpin Gorge was where the server guy took his last annual leave.
edited 21 September: let’s make it 8 password managers, thanks for the comments folks.
edited 12 October: added Passgen tool description and link.