FiT Member, Douglas E, Welch, offers these Step-by-step instructions on installing the latest (and future) IOS updates for your iPhone or iPad.
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The Scripting Guy blog has a great article called Beat the Auditors which is something that most Sys Admins want to do (and in some cases it might also be in more ways than one!). The article has a powershell script that audits the computers on the network for services and accounts that may have very old passwords (or no passwords) and provides the output into a nice excel file for reporting. The article steps through the script line by line to provide assistance in understanding the script which should allow you to tweak it as required for your environment. Subscribe to the blog posts to follow the next couple of articles in the series where the script will be expanded upon and developed.
I especially liked the tagline – “if the barn doors are wide open, why look for mice holes!”
Before iCloud there was MobileMe from Apple. I had setup my google mail account to download my MobileMe mail via pop3, set it to read status and archive past inbox. So I had a nice hidden searchable backup in case MobileMe lost my data.
Like most folks I moved my MobileMe to iCloud. Turns out starting Dec 21 the pop3 access quit working. Best I can tell is iCloud is now only supporting IMAP syncing.
So how to restore my backup. After talking with @johnfbraun I gave the forwarding option in iCloud a try. It works when paired with an appropriate filter rule in gmail.
You want to use a label so you can quickly jump to all mail that came to your iCloud account.
That is it. Works fine for new mail, though we have noticed a few delays in mail making it over to google. Perhaps Apple is batch processing forwards.
I made a brief tutorial on two factory authentication here on the Friends in Tech Blog last December. So I wanted to make a follow up post for this December.
In the previous post I mentioned you can use two factor authentication with Paypal, World of Warcraft and Google. There are a few new places that have added the feature.
Logmein for remote access lets you set your account to send a code by sms to your cell phone. This even works with the iPad application Logmein Ignition. Just start to log in normally. As soon as you enter your password it will send a code and prompt you to enter the code as received on your phone.
** UPDATE CORRECTION** Logmein lets you email a code. Just tell it the email address matching your phone’s sms address and you have SMS based codes.
Yahoo just added sms code authentication to your account as well. You need to log into Yahoo, on your name and choose to enter your account settings. Once in scroll down to the Sign-In and Security section. Click the Setup your second sign-ing verification. Now you can tell it to send to your phone as an sms code and even force prompt you for the answers to your secret question instead of the code. The point of two factor though is to tie something you know (password, question answer) to something you have (your phone). So I opted to use only my mobile phone number for verification. From now on when you log onto Yahoo from a new device or computer it will also send a code to your phone.
Personally I like Google’s two factor implementation best out of those targeted at the non uber geek set. But even SMS is better than passwords alone.
Today was the annual Christmas cookie event of my nieces coming over to make cookies. I always take photos for them. This year it was easier than ever. I used an Eyefi X2 pro in my Canon camera. That is setup to sync automatically onto my iMac into iPhoto. Now that Apple has put out iCloud with Photo Stream anything that imports into iPhoto is propagating to my Photo Stream. Then I can easily show them off to the girls within a few minutes of shooting a photo.
GeekTool has been around for years for the Mac. It is a great utility for overlaying information onto your computer desktop. Recently it was released through the Mac App Store. A friend of ours Don McAllister of Screencastsonline.com also recently did a members introduction show to GeekTool.
I have been playing a lot with IFTTT.com and Yahoo pipes. But what if we want to monitor some site and web service statuses directly and have it show up on our Mac desktop all the time?
That is where GeekTool comes in handy. Just add a couple of Shell Script objects to your desktop. Make sure to set the display status to feedback image, choose a reasonable refresh period and a suitable title via the override text fields as seen below.
Here are two shell scripts. One monitors status for a WoW Realm I made for some friends. The other is the example of monitoring the FiT Web site status via downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
WoW Realm Status:
curl –silent http://us.battle.net/api/wow/realm/status?realms=t
horium-brotherhood | grep -m1 -E ‘status’ | awk -F “:” ‘{print $5}’ | awk -F “,” ‘{print $1}’ | grep true
FiT Site Status:
curl –silent http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.friendsintech.com | awk -F “</span> is ” {‘print $2}’ | grep up
I know it is way early. But my dad gave me one of these Swiss Army Victrorinox multi-tools years ago. I had actually lost mine. At the time I lost it they had quit selling the tool. But it has been back for a while and I have a replacement. The thing I like about this design is that when you fold it out to use a pliers nothing else is in the way. A bit reversed from cheaper design. It is even solid enough I have used it as a hammer before.
Yahoo pipes has been around a number of years. I have only played a little with it up until last week. I discovered a new site called ifttt.com (If This Then That). IFTTT lets you perform various actions based on what data is detected in various online sources. Those sources can be RSS feeds, mail matching tags in your gmail etc. You can have it send you sms, email, google talk IM and various other alert actions.
We accidentally let the friendsintech.com domain name expire briefly. Fortunately I noticed it fast enough to get it renewed. So I wondered how could we detect when the site is not available. I am sure you have seen www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com for checking if web sites are really down or is it just a problem on your end. A great way to check site status.
So it made me wonder. Can I scrape downforeveryone for site status using a yahoo pipe and feed that to IFTTT for automatic alerting?
The answer is yes. The real work is all in the yahoo pipe. You can find the FiT pipe: HERE at Yahoo.
Now for the explanation:
With information coming at you from all directions how do you keep up with the news that is interesting to you? Do you use RSS feeds, social networks, Google Alerts, or do you visit a bunch of sites by hand. There are so many ways it’s almost over whelming and if you don’t do it right it can be just that.
I recently asked this question on Google+ to see if people were doing it different from me. I mean to say..if RSS is dead (not true) like some have said I wanted to know what everyone else was doing then. Of course it looks like most everyone is much like me, I use RSS feeds for sites that I want to make sure I read regularly, Social Networks for more immediate, timely, or “Breaking News” information that can come and go, and some Google Alerts for things like searches of my day job company and of course myself.
I am going to assume that you know what RSS, Google Reader, etc. is. No need to reinvent the wheel here.
My primary use for Google Reader is to share out stories that I think are interesting enough to use in my Podcast Technorama. Chuck Tomasi (my co-host) will look at the things I have shared (see here) and will look at things he has shared (see here) also and grab items to put together our shownotes. I have a list of about 159 sites that I currently read (its been as high as 200+). Some I read infrequently and others I take notice when they post things. I found most of these sites by seeing what others were reading, and just finding them on my own. Google Reader can help you with both.
Google Reader has a section at the top left with information about your stuff. One of the options is Browse for
Stuff, this is where the rubber meets the road and you will get ton of feeds to read. Here you will find bundles to get you started such as News, Sports, Staff Picks as well as bundles from your friends if you are also following people with Reader. Above the bundles, you can search for feeds and look at recommendations. Recommnedations are “new feeds are generated by comparing your interests with the feeds of users similar to you.” (quote from Google). There should be plenty here to get you going.
Also note the People you follow section. Once you start sharing items and you have a share items page (see my link above) others with Google Reader accounts can follow you. This gives Reader a little bit of a social network feel. If you start following people you will see when they share and like items in the articles themselves. This section, once you follow some, will also let you only see items that others have shared so if you follow people that are similar to you there is a good chance you will see topics that you are interested in. You can also filter out and see items that they commented on and not just reshared!
As you end up with a lot of articles popping up in your reader, you will find that you just don’t have enough time to read them all, and that is ok (remember to breathe!). I regularly Mark All as Read when there are a ton if items especially after I have been on vacation or not been on reader for a few days. Remember, if something is important and happening and you miss it the first time around, it will come around again. So don’t try and kill yourself thinking “What did I miss!”
I have an older Mac Mini that I use for recording my podcast, Quicken, iTunes and other typical uses, but lately I have taken to working on my Macbook Pro while ensconced in my easy chair. I figured I could make better use of the screen on the Mac Mini so I went looking for possibilities.
When I first saw mention of DEXTR, I thought it might finally provide an easy way to get the “lean back” Twitter ticker I always wanted. I can’t always have my Twitter client in the foreground. (I have to work SOMETIME (LAUGH)), so DEXTR provides a great way to casually monitor and consume my Twitter feed while I doing other work. It is especially great for monitoring when breaking news is happening and I like it a lot better than leaving the TV tuned to CNN as the news I find in Twitter is directly related to me.
Even better, DEXTR requires no software downloads or install. It runs in your favorite browser. To try it out, visit http://dextr.riglondon.com, login to your Twitter account using OAuth (so DEXTR doesn’t need your actual password) and resize the window as large as you wish. In my case, it runs full screen so I can read it from across the room. If I really want to geek out, the Mac Mini is also connected to my big screen TV, so I can make it big enough to read from the Moon (well, almost).
I find that DEXTR can run for hours on end with no crashes of the browser or slowing of the computer — something that can’t be said for some Mac apps, or even some Flash-based web sites.
How do you consume your social media? Do you use tools like this to make it easier? Let me know in the comments.
Douglas writes on a variety of topics on several blogs and podcasts including TechnologyIQ, the original source for this article.
Do you know what two factor authentication is? Typically to gain access to a system you provide what we call a factor of authentication. Usually this is a password. Which is something you know. And hopefully only YOU know. Here is a quick introduction video based on something I made at work to get the point across.
For those that are curious. I made this with nothing but Camtasia for the Mac and Apple Keynote. The animated FiT logo was already created by Victor Cajiao using Motion from Apple’s Final Cut Studio.
Do you have a problem like I do? Remembering to do the things necessary in a geek home like checking UPS batteries, smoke alarms etc?
Try making a sub calendar in your favorite calendar app with recurring reminders. That will help you group all recurring tasks together and hide them from view as needed. But even with alerts those are easy to ignore on their own. I then used a google doc to make a form that records the results in a spreadsheet. Now I can track exactly when I did the various items on my list.
Really you should perform backups on a regular basis. But the fall is a good time to get started. I picked up one of these NewerTech Voyager drive dock to make it much easier to slap in a sata drive and backup the large files I tend to neglect in my regular backups. Things like audio and video project files. These unit come in a variety of configurations. I picked up the quad interface because I use firewire 800 with my large external RAID drive where I keep my big files like my iTunes library, final cut and audio files. But you can even get one in a new USB 3.0 configuration.
Just remember to use something like a Brother Ptouch labeler to label your drives with what you have backed up on them.
I learned about these great cleaning cloths from Clayton Morris. I went and picked up the three pack of cloths from Home Depot’s cleaning supplies department. They are large enough and made slightly different than most microfiber cloths. So a couple of quick swipes and your iPad screen looks new again as it takes all the finger prints away. You can find them over at Home Depot for about $6.
Friends In Tech was mentioned on the Mike Tech Show in reference to our Child Friendly Surfing Flier – here is the link and our original posting information.
It is the return and refresh of the Friends in Tech Child Safety Flier. Feel free to share this flier with anyone whom has kids and is concerned with online safety. We have links for everything from blogging, cyberbullying to advice for parents. We managed to toss in a couple of software and podcast picks that are family friendly. The flier looks great printed out as well as the electronic PDF. Please respect all the sites we cover and do not modify the flier if you share it. FiT nor any of its members derive any financial benefits from this flier or its mentioned sites. We are simply tech geeks with children, nieces, nephews and young friends we want to be safe and happy.
Most of the time my Firefox browser will have many tabs open, but at the minimum it will always have gmail and google reader open. This morning my memory usage for Firefox was hovering at 900mb and reached over 1gb. Needless to say the performance in the browser was horrible. Even closing Firefox took about 3 minutes. On restarting Firefox the performance would be better but eventually the memory usage does creep back up again.
I read in a recent blog post from The Windows Club about the free SpeedyFox – this compresses the sql-lite database that Firefox now uses for internal storage. Download the program, quit Firefox and run the small executable – no install necessary. It will show the default Firefox profile but it is also possible to select other profiles in a drop down box. It took about 20 seconds to run on my profile although the more information page mentions it could take 5 to 60 minutes to run.
The author also recommends that the program is also run about every two weeks. This can be done by creating a scheduled task using the case sensitive /default_profile switch or using /profile:name or /profile:path (needed when Firefox portable is being optimized. Slightly more information is available within the Help menu of the program. Note that if you were running this automatically you would have to exit Firefox first – this could either be accomplished using autoit or by just killing the program with “taskkill /im firefox.exe”
After the program was run I relaunched Firefox and the performance is so much better. Granted I’m running from a new launch of Firefox but I was able to stream a Youtube video immediately with no buffering requests, I was able to type this post in the browser without having to wait for the text to catch up with me and so far everything works great (my memory usage is currently up to 126mb with 3 tabs open.
I’m not going to promise that this program will do the same thing for everybody’s browser but it is definitely worth running. Currently the program is Windows only, but a Mac client is in development.
There may be a few of us left out there who don’t have an iphone, but WordPress for Blackberry v1.0 is now available. Although this is a 1.0 application, it has gone through several 0.xx versions so should be stable enough to use.
The blog posting at the Blackberry WordPress blog has the full details including the over the air installation link. This means you do not have to download the blackberry app store to the Blackberry just to download the WordPress application.
The one big feature I like about this new version is that it shows pending comments so you can now approve them from the Blackberry without having to log into the main website.
I am a big fan of two factor authentication where possible for high value logins. This is where you enter a changing number to go with your password. This number comes from a device you carry with you. In particular I use the free Verisign mobile token on my iPhone. They make it for many other cell phones. You can install and use it for free with services like paypal, ebay, some banks and even with the free service called PiP (Personal Identity Portal) from Verisign.
The free token program can be found at:
https://vipmobile.verisign.com/
You can get a pip account and use it for any site that supports openID. Giving you two factor authentication even for a lot of blog commenting and forum systems. PiP can be found at:
https://pip.verisignlabs.com/
Verisign has a quick demo video of the mobile token on youTube. Check it out and add some extra protection to your accounts. Especially if you use eBay or paypal.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast from David Allen, the man behind the “Getting Things Done” methodology, and he recommended (paraphrase) “…to be more effective, Outlook users should start their app in calendar mode. ”
It’s true. Each morning, I find myself getting side-tracked by the inbox when I should first be looking at the “hard landscape” of the calendar first. An hour can easily pass while I process my inbox before I realize what the rest of my day looks like, that’s just wrong – and I knew it. When I heard this tip, I had one of those slap-your-forehead moments and said “Of course!”.
Here’s how it’s done:
[space] /select outlook:calendarOnce you are done reviewing your calendar, use the normal means to go to your inbox and start processing. Congratulations, you just became a little more effective.
(I typically launch Outlook from the Quick Launch bar since my desktop is usually obscured by one app or another.)
Over the past several months, I have to say that I’ve been pretty darn lucky. It started out where after having worked in the IT department for most all of my professional career that my job was going away, a victim to outsourcing. I pretty much expected it when we were first acquired by “Giant Corp” — it was just a matter of when.
Fortunately for me, I was able to cash in on my podcasting experience and parlay a position within our User Education department. My IT skills, coupled with my podcasting experience, meant I was able to continue working at the same company with the same people I enjoyed working with but just doing something else — something that was equally, if not more, exciting than what I’d been doing for so many years before.
They today, lady luck was on my side yet again. Upon making my move in to the User Ed department at work, I’ve been working on my eLearning certificate from the University of Washington. During that time, I’ve kept a blog (off and on) of my endeavor. During these last few months I’ve been working with all sorts of eLearning software — one piece of software I’ve become very fond of, but unable to convince my boss to purchase a copy.
Well… this evening, my blog was stumbled upon by an individual from the company who makes the piece of software that I am so fond of and asked me if I was interested in participating in an upcoming beta of their product.
So, you just never know… There’s a good chance what you blog about or podcast about may work in your favor at some time in the future. A new job position or a chance to play with some cool software, you just never know.
