Category: Geek Stuff

When you reboot or shut down your computer, you normally have to save all your open documents and close all running programs, because when the computer restarts, your system will restart in “default mode” (no programs or documents open).

Microsoft added support for “hibernation” in Windows 2000 (and refined it further in XP and Vista). Hibernation mode writes the contents of the system RAM to the hard disk, which means that when you “hibernate” a computer, everything you had open – such as a web browser and email program – remain open when you restart your computer. In other words, if you were to type something in a Notepad window and restart your computer without saving the document, the data will be lost forever if you reboot\shutdown, but will remain on your computer if you hibernate.

The only downside to hibernation is that Windows creates a “hibernation file” (HIBERFILE.SYS) on your system that’s equal in size to the amount of RAM that you have. So if you have 2GB of RAM, Windows needs a 2GB HIBERFILE.SYS file on your system.

It can be annoying having that 2GB HIBERFILE.SYS file hanging out all the time if you’ve installed Windows on a smaller hard drive or partition, especially if you’re like me and only hibernate your system when the electricity goes out and you want to shut down your PC before your UPS runs out of juice.

Thankfully, there’s an easy way to create a batch file that will 1) enable hibernation mode and 2) set the computer to hibernate. You’ll need to download PSSHUTDOWN, a tiny (free) utility from the Windows Sysinternals website for this.

1) Download the PsTools collection from the web site above.

2) Unzip the PsTools.zip file and move the PSSHUTDOWN.EXE file to your Windows directory (you can delete the rest of the files from the PSTools kit, but there are some great utilities included with it that you should check out!)

3) Open Notepad, paste the following text into the window, and save the file as a .CMD file:

powercfg /hibernate on
psshutdown -h

The first line enables hibernation, while the second tells the computer to go into shutdown mode. If you wish, you could create a second batch file that has only “powercfg /hibernate off” in it, to disable hibernation with a single click.

Also, if you don’t want to download the PSSHUTDOWN tool, you can force hibernation by changing the second line of the batch file to:

%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate

Note that the above should all be on one line; also, although this “alternate method” is built-in to Windows, I personally find the first option (psshutdown -h) easier to use.

Lastly, remember that you’ll actually need the space HIBERFILE.SYS will take up when you enable hibernation, so don’t go filling up your system partition! You’d need to quickly delete a bunch of stuff if the power goes out, which kind of defeats the hwole point of using a batch file to quickly enable hibernation!

Just when you thought Internet security couldn’t get any worse, a new hacking technique has come along that’s about as scary as it gets: Drive-By Pharming (DBP). DBP occurs “when attackers create a Web page or e-mail that, when simply viewed, results in substantive configuration changes to a home broadband router or wireless access point”. In simple English, this means that there are hackers out that that have written code that can change the settings on your home router simply by viewing an “infected” web page or HTML email.

This is scary for two reasons:

1) All you need to do is view a web page or HTML email. You don’t have to click on anything or download any type of file from an infected site – just viewing the page is enough to cause an attack.

2) The hack changes the DNS server configuration on your router. DNS servers are computers that your ISP uses to convert human-readable web addresses (such as bankofamerica.com) into a numerical IP addresses that computers on the Internet use to communicate with each other (such as 64.192.54.198). A hacker could set up a web server with a bunch of fake (but authentic looking) sites for banks and other financial institutions, then set up a DNS server that points to these fake sites. He could then set up a website or send out an email with malicious code inserted which changes your DNS settings to use his DNS server instead of your ISPs server. What makes this so scary is that the change would be invisible to you. Once infected, you could open a web browser and type “bankofamerica.com” into the address bar, and since your computer relies on DNS to connect to any website, it accepts whatever the DNS server tells it… so there wouldn’t be any way for you to know that you’re going to a fake website!

Thankfully, most DBP exploits are easy to guard against simply by changing the password on your router. As many as 50% of home users (and a smaller, but still substantial number, of business users) never change the default password of their routers. Hackers know this, and they also know what those default passwords are… so hacking in to millions of routers is a piece of cake. By changing the default password to something else – anything else – you can stop these attacks from happening to you!

Read more about it here.

Scunthorpe is a small town in the north of England. Back in 1996, many of the town’s residents were having trouble signing up for AOL’s Internet service. It seems that the company’s profanity filters were rejecting the name of the city since it contains a slang term for female genitalia. Although residents of Penistone, South Yorkshire and Lightwater, Surrey experienced the same problem, the issue has become known as the “Scunthorpe Problem”.

There are two basic ways to filter content on the Internet. One is to have humans do it, and the other is to have machines do it.

The problem with having humans do it is obvious – there are billions of web pages out there, and it would be a Herculean task to have an actual human visit each page and judge the content therein. Plus, web site operators change web hosts, move their content around, and rename pages all the time; every web site – even a tiny site such as this one – would need to be visited on a very regular basis to make sure that any filters were up to date.

On the other hand, machines work 24 hours a day without a salary. Even a modest computer – such as a home PC from five years ago – could filter tens of thousands of pages every day. But the problem is, machines have no sense of nuance. A computer only looks for a string of letters organized in a certain way. It sees web sites like romansinsussex.co.uk (an educational site about English history) and arkansasextermination.com (a site for an Arkansas-based pest extermination company) and blocks them because of “sex” in their addresses – although those sites have nothing to do with sex!

Continue reading “The “Scunthorpe Problem””

As you probably know, Firefox 3.0 was released this week. The good news about the upgarde is that the new version rocks: Firefox 3 has a slew of new features, performance enhancements, and is even less of a memory hog than precious versions! The bad news about the upgrade is that it breaks thousands of extensions (plug-ins that add functionality to Firefox, tweak the interface, and\or overcome some of Firefox’s annoyances).

But just because Firefox 3 says that an particular extension is “not compatible with Firefox 3”, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. In fact, many 2.x extensions will work just fine under Firefox 3 – you just need to turn off Firefox’s compatibility check:

1) Type “about”config” (without the quotes) into Firefox’s address bar. You will then see a screen warning you not to muck about with the settings; click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to continue.

2) Right-click in the list of preferences and choose New > Boolean. In the “Preference Name” box, type the words “extensions.checkCompatibility” (again, without the quotes) and click “OK”. In the “Enter Boolean Value” box, select FALSE.

3) Close all Firefox windows and restart the browser.

You will now be able to install any extension in Firefox 3 (or, if you upgraded from Firefox 2.x, you may activate any previous extensions that were disabled by the 3.0 upgrade).

Again, this doesn’t mean that the extension will actually work – Download Manager Tweak and Clone Window failed horribly on my 3.0 installation, while Save Image In Folder (my all-time favorite extension after AdblockPlus) works just fine.

Over the years, people have levelled thousands of complaints against Microsoft Outlook. To Microsoft’s credit, they have listened to their customers, slowly but surely fixing bugs and interface annoyances over the years. However, a few of these “annoyances” remain, and none is more annoying to some people than the “Business Fax” number being listed in the Outlook Address Book.

Here’s the issue in a nutshell: if you open a new email in Outlook and click the “To:”, “CC:” or “BCC:” buttons on the email, you’ll be presented with a list of email addresses and “Business Fax” numbers from the selected Address Book.

For most people, these “Business Fax” numbers just get in the way. If they’re sending out a mass email, they can’t just select all the addresses in the list, as sending an email to a Business Fax address makes Outlook (and\or Exchange) throw a hissy fit. And it’s easily to accidentally click on “Bob Smith (Business Fax)” instead of “Bob Smith (Email)” and end up sending Bob… nothing.

You might ask why Business Fax numbers even appear in the Outlook Address Book in the first place. That’s because many companies have fax servers – a computer with one or more fax modems installed. Instead of walking across an office to a fax machine, you can simply send a fax over your local network to a fax server, which then sends it out. Microsoft Exchange (and other third-party software programs) have integrated fax servers with Outlook, so if your company has Exchange and a fax server, you can easily fax someone simply by creating a new email, addressing it to a “Business Fax” address, attaching a Word or Excel document (if desired) and sending it on to Exchange, which then forwards it on to the fax server. It’s quite handy, actually.

But for people that don’t have a fax server, it’s a pain to have to sift through fax number when sending an email. Thankfully, though, there’s a simple workaround: just put a letter (any letter, although I use “F”) in front of any “Business Fax” number entries (e.g. change Bob Smith Enterprise’s “Business Fax” entry from “704-555-1212” to “F704-555-1212”).

This will prevent the “Business Fax” numbers from appearing in the Address Book, but you will still be able to view the numbers in Outlook’s “Business Card” view (and, as you might guess, you can also see the information by opening the Contact).

Are you one of those people that always seems to download files to his or her desktop? If so, are you also one of those people that lets files and folders build up on the desktop, such that on a bad day you have 100 icons cluttering your desktop?

If so, you might be interested in a free program called Desktop Teleporter. You basically install this little app and define a set of file types and destination directories for those files. Desktop Teleporter then sits in the background and periodically moves any matching files to the destination you set during setup. For example, you could set all .JPG files to be moved to your “My PIctures” folder, and Desktop Teleporter would move all pictures saved on your desktop to the “My Pictures” folder every few minutes or so.

Desktop Teleporter is free and works with most flavors of Windows.

From the “better late than never” department:

If you’re one of the last people that prefers IE 6 to IE 7, you might want to tread carefully when it comes to installing SP3 for Windows XP on your computer.

If you have IE 7 installed before the SP3 upgrade, you will not be able to go back to IE 6 once SP3 is installed. According to this article, this is “because the service pack includes newer versions of the old browser’s files. If Microsoft had allowed users to revert back to the pre-SP3 version of IE6 – the one saved on users’ PCs when they upgraded to IE7, and what was used until now to back out of the newer browser – Windows would have ended up in a ‘mixed file state’. This state is not supported and is very bug prone. To ensure a reliable user experience, [Microsoft] prevent[ed] this broken state by disabling the ability to uninstall Internet Explorer 7”.

If you want to retain the ability to uninstall IE 7 from your computer, remove IE 7 before installing SP3, then reinstall IE 7 once the Service Pack update is complete.

Have you ever wanted (or needed) to have one of your technically-challenged friends download a file via BitTorrent? It can be a huge pain, because that friend would need to install a BT client, go to a tracker and download the torrent file, and then seed it to completion. Hell, a lot of my “less than technical” friends can’t even wrap their heads around BT lingo, much less actually download stuff.

This is where Torrent2Exe comes in. You upload a torrent to the site (either via direct URL or from a local torrent) and the site packages the file along with a lightweight BT client. All the end user has to do is download (and execute) the packaged EXE file… really folks, BT just couldn’t be any easier!

If you like the desktop animations provided with Windows Vista, but aren’t ready to trash Windows XP just yet, you might enjoy a handy lil’ freeware app with a strange name: Lebendig. Lebendig adds Vista-like animations to program windows in Windows XP. You can have windows fade in and\or out, spin in and\or away, or lots of other nifty combinations.

I really like this lil’ app, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to play well with Outlook 2007. Once you start Lebendig, minimizing Outlook causes the app to “disappear”. You can try to maximize it again (and you’ll briefly see the full-screen Outlook window), but then the Outlook window will simply “disappear”. The only way to get it back is to use Task Manager to kill OUTLOOK.EXE and start the program over again (but remember, you can’t minimize it again!). Also note that I’ve only seen this behavior with Outlook 2007 – other programs seem to work just fine with Lebendig (although I’ve only tested the few apps that are on my system).

I like Lebendig – I just wish they’d fix that Outlook bug.