Category: Geek Stuff

If you’re in IT support, you’ve probably come across same issues over and over again. These three utilities can take some of the hard work off you and make your IT life a bit easier:

The Offline NT Password Editor – How many times have you gone to work on someone’s computer, only to find that they didn’t know their password because they had auto-login enabled? Or maybe they’ve logged in under their own account for so long that they’ve forgotten the local admin password? It’s not something that happens often, but when it does happen, this handy lil’ app is one of the few ways to reset a password. The Offline NT Password Editor comes as a bootable floppy or CD image; all you do is download the file, transfer it to a floppy or CD, then boot into the tiny Linux distribution that comes with the editor. Everything is driven by a command menu, so there’s no way you can screw this up… mostly. The editor doesn’t natively work on domain controllers (although it can be hacked to do so; I recommend this only at your own peril!). Also, follow the advice of the app’s author and only use the editor to reset the admin password to blank within the editor. Although the password editor has the ability to change a password to almost anything you choose, the author says that you will occasionally run into a problem with doing so. It’s much safer to simply change the password to nothing (i.e. blank) and change it from within Windows.

Continue reading “Three Great Programs For IT Guys”

Backup, backup, backup… How many times have you heard a computer guy talking about “backing up your data”? Well, there’s a good reason for it – computers can crash, and when they do they can take down a lot of your personal data. Priceless information like pictures and financial data can all be lost in an instant. Sadly, most of the time it takes a crash with the complete loss of data for people to see the light.

Mozy.com is a website that offers a free backup service for people that use Windows and Mac. The free service offers 2GB worth of storage space, which should be plenty for most people’s truly important files. Mozy also offers an “unlimited” version for just $4.95/month.

To use the service, all you’ve gotta do is sign up on Mozy’s site, then download the backup software. Once installed, the software will automatically choose the most crucial elements to back up, or you can opt to manually choose which files and folders Mozy will back up. Backups then happen in the background whenever files are changed (you can also opt to have Mozy back up on a schedule you set). You can access your files through Mozy’s website, and also manage all of your settings and computers from the site also. Mozy also offers a lot of features that other backup sites either don’t offer or only offer with paid plans, like the ability to back up locked files, the ability to restore files from within Windows Explorer, and support for 3GB (or larger) files.

Mozy is easy to use and is free… so start backing up your data today! Check it out here.

There are a ton of “bookmark synchronization” extensions for Firefox out there. Many of you might have a favorite, but I recently decided to give Google Browser Sync a try… and I love it! As you might guess from the name, Google Browser Sync synchronizes your Firefox bookmarks between different computers. So if you use Firefox at home and work, you could have a unified set of bookmarks between the two computers. Which is cool and all… but Google Browser Sync also has the ability to synchronize your cookies, history, saved passwords… even your open tabs and windows! Imagine sitting at your desk at work. You’re surfing the Internet, but it’s time to go home. If you have Google Browser Sync installed, you just close the Firefox window. All of your open tabs and updated bookmarks will be copied automatically to Google’s servers. So when you come home you open Firefox… and start right back where you were at work! Neat, huh?

The Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox is free.

For years, I used a program called Bootpart to add non-Windows NT operating systems to the NT boot loader. When I played around with Linux, for example, I’d skip installing GRUB or LILO; instead I’d boot into Windows and use Bootpart to add the Linux partition to BOOT.INI. Since I never really got the hang of Linux – or had specific issues with specific distros – I was always going to want to boot into Windows by default. By using Bootpart I could continue using the NT Boot Loader; when the time came to uninstall Linux, I only needed to delete the Linux partitions and make a couple of tweaks to the BOOT.INI file… and Linux was gone!

Sadly, Bootpart hasn’t been updated in ages, and is not compatible with Windows Vista’s new bootloader. So last night, when I installed Windows XP on a system with Windows Vista already installed, I needed some way to add XP to Vista’s bootloader. Enter EasyBCD. This handy (and FREE!) program can add entries for NTLDR-based Windows operating systems (Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP) to the Vista boot loader, and also supports adding Linux, Mac OS X and BSD installations as well. It’s fast and easy, and it does what it says it’ll do. If you need to add a new operating system to your Vista bootloader, EasyBCD is the way to go!

Microsoft Exchange can host email for several domains. Many companies take advantage of this. For example, they may have a domain for their parent company and individual domains for each separate company or product. So the company could use a single Exchange server to get email for PARENTCOMPANY.COM, SUBCOMPANY1.COM, SUBCOMPANY2.COM, PRODUCTNAME1.COM and so on.

This is completely transparent for the end user, and that’s usually a good thing. However, if someone is getting emails from all Exchange domains, there’s no easy way for them to tell which domain the email was originally sent to. Let’s say that Bob works for ABC Company. ABC Company is the parent company of TUV Company and XZY Company. Bob has email addresses in the form of Bob@ABCCompany.com, Bob@TUVCompany.com and Bob@XYZCompany.com. The Exchange server will deliver email addressed to any of those addresses to Bob’s Exchange mailbox… but Bob won’t easily be able to tell which address the email was originally sent to. If Bob tries to create an Outlook rule to “move email with ‘Bob@XYZCompany.com’ in the recipient’s address” to a folder in his inbox, the rule will fail, because Exchange treats all SMTP addresses equally.

However, if Bob enters each email address into a separate rule that searches for the address as “specific words in the message header” the rule will work. This is because Outlook will scan the actual headers of each email for “Bob@ABCCompany.com”, “Bob@TUVCompany.com” and\or “Bob@XYZCompany.com”. Bob can then have Outlook move the email to “ABCCompany.com” “TUVCompany.com” or “XVZCompany.com” folders in his Inbox, or perform any number of other notifications.

This is not new knowledge or anything. For some reason, Microsoft has never made this explicitly clear to anyone, and there are tons of posts on Internet message boards looking for a solution to this very problem. Since Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to explain this clearly in Outlook (or simply make the “move email with ‘Bob@XYZCompany.com’ in the recipient’s address” rule work with Exchange SMTP addresses), this question comes up somewhat often.

Did you know that mailbucket.org will convert emails sent to any of its addresses to an RSS feed? And not only is it free, there’s not even a sign-up process!

All you have to do is go to the following address in a web browser:

http://www.mailbucket.org/USERNAME.xml

where USERNAME is the user name you’d like to use with Mailbucket. If you see an existing RSS feed, try another user name. If you see “No Messages” then you can assume that that user name is available. You can then use USERNAME@mailbucket.org as your email address and http://www.mailbucket.org/USERNAME.xml as your RSS feed’s address. Any email sent to USERNAME@mailbucket.org will be converted to RSS and pushed out to your client.

Why would anyone want to do this? Maybe you’re on several mailing lists, and rather than get 300 emails a day you’d prefer getting 300 RSS posts a day. Maybe you use an “online” RSS reader like Google Reader and want to access the information in the email\feeds from many computers. Maybe your company won’t allow you to receive personal emails at work, but is OK with you getting an RSS feed. Maybe your group\team needs to share information and would rather use RSS instead of email.

Whatever the case may be, this is still a pretty neat trick. I’m subscribed to several Yahoo! Groups, and instead of getting dozens of emails every day in several different folders, they all just come as RSS feeds into a single folder. Neat!

WARNING: Anyone can subscribe to this RSS feed simply by entering any random USERNAME into the Mailbucket address in their RSS client. So it’s best not to forward anything confidential and\or sensitive to your mailbucket address.

Most “hotfixes” (patches) for Microsoft’s Windows and Office products are available as simple downloads from MS’s website. However, many hotfixes – typically those for “just discovered” issues, issues that for some reason only affect a tiny number of computers, or issues that might require long and complex testing before release – required a phone call to Microsoft’s support line. However, as of this week, that policy is no more. You may download those “call Microsoft” hotfixes simply by using this form on MS’s site. Geeks and IT support folks might want to bookmark that page.

If you use Windows Vista, you will probably receive the following prompt when you try to connect to a pre-Windows Vista computer using Remote Desktop Connection:

Remote Desktop cannot verify the identity of the computer you want to connect to.  This problem can occur if:

1) The remote computer is running a version of Windows that is earlier than Windows Vista.
2) The remote computer is configured to support only the RDP security layer.

Contact your network administrator or the owner of the remote computer for assistance.

Do you want to connect anyway?

This prompt appears every… single… time you try to connect to a Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 2003 Server computer, no matter how often you connect to it. And clicking “OK” gets really old, not because it’s hard to do, but because it’s just one extra step that Microsoft added to save us from ourselves.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to make this message go away:

1. Make sure that “Show hidden files and folders” is enabled on your system.
2. Go to your “Documents” folder.
3. Open the DEFAULT.RDP file within the Documents folder with Notepad (or any other text editor).
4. Look for the string of text that says “authentication level:i:2”.
5. Change the “2” to a zero (“authentication level:i:0”).
6. Save the file and exit Notepad.

The next time you try to connect via RDP, that annoying prompt should be gone!

NOTE: If you have multiple .RDP files, you will need to make this change to all of them to kill that annoying prompt.

One thing a lot of Windows users hate about iTunes is that it wants to be your “everything” media player. When you first install iTunes it scans your computer for digital music files; from that point on, the only way to add music to your iTunes library is to buy it from the iTunes online store or rip it from CD (using iTunes, of course). If you’d prefer to use some other program to rip your music, or if you download music from somewhere other than iTunes (legitimately or not), there’s simply no way to add those new files to your library from within the iTunes program itself*. This is unacceptable for those of us that prefer using some other program (such as WinAMP) for listening to music and only use iTunes to copy files to their iPods.

That’s where the iTunes Library Updater (iTLU) comes in. This free program will scan any folder or folders you point it to (and their subfolders, if you wish). It will then add any music files it finds to your iTunes library. It can also delete any missing files (“orphaned entries”) from your iTunes library, so if you delete a bunch of music files via Windows Explorer, it can remove them from iTunes as well. That’s about all that iTLU does, and it does it well. I’ve been using this program for over six months now, and it’s never crashed or screwed up anything in my iTunes library. It does all I ask for, and that’s all I want from it. However, be advised that the program is a little slow on computers with large music libraries. It takes around 15 minutes to update my iTunes library, and I have around 13,500 songs – I expect that it’ll be much faster on systems with smaller collections.

iTunes Library Updater is free and is for Windows only. It worked fine for me in XP and works just as well in Windows Vista.

* – There actually is an option within iTunes called “Consolidate Library” that will do what iTLU does, but (as I understand it) it only works for users that let iTunes control their music libraries. For people like me – who have their music libraries set up in a certain way and do not want iTunes moving and renaming files – iTLU isthe only option.

Meebo.com is a free website that allows you to log on to almost any instant messaging service using only a web browser. You don’t need to have AIM or Yahoo! Messenger installed on the computer you use to access Meebo, so you can easily chat with your friends from work or a friend’s house. You don’t even have to sign up for anything – all you do is enter your AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ and\or Jabber user name and password into the appropriate box. However, if you use more than one instant messaging service you’ll find it’s easier to just to sign up for a Meebo account, since it will remember all your different account(s)  and automatically log in to them each time you log in with your Meebo account. Meebo also offers its own chat rooms, however to be honest I’ve never used them, so I can’t tell you good or bad they are. It’s a great service though… you should check it out!