Okay well it’s not really hacking, just revealing passwords hidden behind those annoying (albeit useful) asterisks. NirSoft has saved my butt many times after forgetting a password, or needing to discover a password on a computer where it was already hidden by asterisks.
Like just then, I had to find out the password for an ADSL connection to access the net. Log-in to a connected computer, use the Dialup Password Recovery program, and voila.
Been wanting to do this for a while, so finally went out and bought a webcam (albeit a Microsoft one…) for use as a security ‘monitoring’ device. Quite a bargain as well - the price was mislabelled so I got $11 off there, and there’s a $40 rebate on the thing as well. Sweet.
So anyway, the next step after the relatively painless install was to look for software that’s able to:
Those were the basic features that I wanted in the software. There’s quite a few free programs out there that can publish webcam shots, like Yawcam (doesn’t do motion detection), CatSpy (great for video, but no still image support), LogiSphere (slow, takes up alot of resources), and WheresJames Webcam Publisher (many features, tricky to set up).
I ended up going for the WheresJames program, and it works quite well. A few spurious features (e.g. decorative frames) but overall well-designed. It doesn’t take up that many sytem resources because it has its own link to the webcam instead of relying on the webcam software (like LogiSphere does). Yet to get the video working though. Also, uploading to FTP isn’t that trustworthy within the program, so I had to use an FTP synchronisation setup using SyncBack which was scheduled to run every 15 minutes with Solway’s Task Scheduler (since the minimum interval of Windows task scheduler is 1 day).
So if you have a webcam, you can easily hook it up for it to act as a security device. Hope this helps someone out there catch the crooks that break in and steal stuff.
In these days of YouTube and Google Video, it’s nice to be able to put up a short home video online without having to use these services. For example on a blog site, which may be still largely accessible to the outside world but at least isn’t on one of these mass video sharing websites. Unless of course that’s what you want to do…
Anyway, the file format these services use is called Flash Video with the file extension flv. A free encoder is available that will transcode AVIs, WMVs, MPEGs and whatnot into the FLV format. Then just upload the FLV to your site, and use the free Flash Video Player to embed your video. You can view an example of these on the 180 videos site. The process is pretty painless if you know basic HTML.
Using IE7 now. Firefox 2.0 sucks bigtime. It randomly hangs about 5 times a day on different websites. I’ve backed up my settings, uninstalled it, downloaded v1.5.0.7 from the releases directory on the Mozilla site (thankfully all the releases are there), and am installing it now. I guess this is an example of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, or don’t rush to install new software but wait until the next minor version is released.
- Update -
Reversion to 1.5.0.7 went fine. No need to restore bookmarks or other user data, these are not removed during uninstallation. No hangs yet on 1.5.0.7. A few extensions and themes weren’t backwards compatible, but a quick visit to the Mozilla extensions site and a bit of trawling through the extension version histories spat out older versions of extensions that were compatible with 1.5.
So, spilled some sugary sweet potato soup liquid onto my laptop keyboard yesterday. It was okay to start with, but as the water evaporated, the keys got more and more stuck, and the spacebar along with the Ctrl and Alt keys refused to go down, or up for that matter.
Good news is that I could remove the keys and the flexy support things that hold the keys in place. To do this, shut the laptop down, unscrew the keyboard screws from the back of the laptop, and click off the plastic holders on the face of the keypad. Then, using a small flathead screwdriver, pop the key tops off. All keys use the same type of mechanism to hold them down. The spacebar is similar, but has guide wires that are also connected to the keypad base and need to be removed. Once the keys and the structures that hold them in place are removed, give them a good clean with warm water.
Now for the bad news. Don’t use nail polish remover, even the ‘non acetone’ type. The one I used had something acetate in it, and look what it did to my spacebar
Nasty. The flash makes it look worse than it does under ambient incandescent lighting. But the nail polish remover burnt little holes in my spacebar and corroded the plastic. Not good.
But at least the keys work now, hmm.
After cleaning, just pop the key supports back, and then pop the key tops back onto the supports.
Meanwhile, Firefox 2.0 sucks. It has crashed so many times, but at least comes with built-in crash recovery. It even remembers what you type in textboxes, to an extent. I say stick with Firefox 1.5 and wait until the next 2.x version is out before upgrading.
Yeah, couldn’t think of a better title. Random g33k stuff here really.
New updates to software. Firefox 2.0 is out - it’s not that good; a few new features like spell check in fields, but many extensions are incompatible with it. Evernote 1.5 is out - not much change either apart from largely cosmetic updates that I can tell. IE 7 is also out - beware when installing, there’s no cancel button! The status bar just does that scrolly thing, doesn’t even represent the true status, it just tells the user that something is happening.
Meanwhile, if you want to automatically hibernate your computer at a set time, use the Scheduled Tasks in Control Panel, and set it to run the command:
C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState
Set a date and time and click OK and it’s set. Of course you need the proper power management settings on your computer, but if you can hibernate normally (manually) then this should work.
Well, IE installation is telling me to restart. I think I’ll shut down and play with it tomorrow.
It’s scream time!
Lessons of the day: learn how to colour-match screen and printer output before crucial printing needs to be done. Also, laptop displays are very bad at reproducing colour. On the Photosmart 3110, the ICC profile that came with the updated printer drivers is the way to go, along with the ‘absolute colorimetric’ setting, whatever that means.
Still waiting for updates from my supervisor but I think she’s called it a day, so will have to wait until tomorrow morning. Then will need to frantically update the thesis with her corrections, send it around to supervisors for them to have a read, and then hopefully make final corrections, print and check over a final draft, and then should be done.
Well, save for all that printing. Publishing four copies of a 150 page thesis on two colour inkjets is quite, erm, interesting.
…and counting.
How cool is DHTML and Javascript? Ok maybe not that cool. Anyway, not long to go now. That’s a bad thing. Still have most of the introduction to write, a bit of methods, all the results and all the discussion. Stuffed? You bet.
For the past week the Optusnet cable connection has been intermittently dropping out at the most inopportune times, like when I’m submitting a database search or an article request.
Finally had enough and called Optus tech support (twice, mind you), only to be told (twice) that the problem was on my computers and that I may have spyware. Pfft. They nonetheless detected “anomalies” on the network, but there was no problem with my nearest neighbour who was also using Optus cable, so they figured the problem must be on my end. They told me to “monitor” the situation and to call if it got “really bad”, and were “sorry [they] couldn’t do anything more”. Right.
But then a dig through the cable modem log file (192.168.100.1) came up with many entries marked Critical, Warning, Error, and even one Emergency.
************ 5-Warning D520.2 DHCP Attempt# 9 BkOff: 5s Tot DSC:9 OFF:3 REQ:3 ACK:1
************ 3-Critical D1.0 DHCP FAILED - Discover sent, no offer received
************ 5-Warning D520.2 DHCP Attempt# 7 BkOff:11s Tot DSC:7 OFF:2 REQ:2 ACK:0
************ 3-Critical D2.0 DHCP FAILED - Request sent, No response
My problem? Yeah, right.
So anyway, it’s working now obviously since I’m posting. No problems so far tonight. I changed the MTU setting on the Linksys WRT54G v5.0 router to manual 1450 instead of the automatic 1500 after Googling the problem. Some users found 1450 works better; the recommended range is between 1200 and 1500 for cable. Don’t know if it’s because of the new MTU setting or because Optus finally fixed itself up.
Internet speed, of course. If you’re one of those geeks who like nothing better than to prove your manhood by your internet connection speed (not saying I’m one of them…), www.ozspeedtest.com provides a few benchmarking tools to test your Australian and international internet access speeds.
But of course, if you were one of the geeks, you probably knew this already.
My speed is an emasculated 640KB/s.