Courtesy of Jane’s E-Learning Picks, RoundPic is a nifty online tool that can quickly round the corners of images that you can either upload or point to an existing image already online. Once you have your image uploaded, you can then resize it, adjust the radius of the corners, and finally, download the final product.
Microsoft’s SteadyState 2.5 is now in Beta and supports Vista. Admittedly the application is in Beta but for those of you who need the ability to lock down a pc so that any changes made by users get removed on reboot, then SteadyState is well worth investigating. This application was last mentioned back in July, but the new version has recently been released.
For those who actively comment on blogs, you may find it difficult, as I do, to keep track of posts which you have commented on and wish to perhaps keep the conversation going.
The cure to this ailment is co.mments.com. This little service is awesome! You can track any blog posting that you want to follow simply by clicking on the bookmarklet that you add to your bookmarks bar. Even better, you can configure the service to send you an e-mail message when the post that your tracking has been commented upon.
Enjoy!
Kevin Devin located a site that has links to 4 of the Common Craft “In Plain English” videos. The 4 included on this page are RSS Feeds, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, and Social Networks. These are great ways to introduce the newbies in your life to these technologies, without all the techno mumbo-jumbo. 
As some of you may have experienced, sending mail from your email program might not work when you are using public WiFi networking hot spots, such as those in hotels or coffee shops. This is usually due to port restrictions on the network, put in place to prevent anonymous users from using the network to send SPAM or attack other network systems.
Unfortunately, sending and replying to mail is often one of the most-used features when you are on the road. So what are you to do? You could always use the web mail access provided by most ISPs or use web-based services such as Gmail or Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail.com). Of course, this can be cumbersome when you simply want to reply to email you receive.
So, in my own laptop setup, I have done the following:
Now, when I am confronted with an error when I try to send mail, I can change the outgoing email account to my Gmail account and, since Gmail uses different, usually unblocked ports, the mail will be sent. Also, by setting the Reply-To address, any replies will automatically be re-directed back to my standard email account. This allows me to work in my normal fashion, even when the local network puts roadblocks in my way.
Gmail recently added IMAP services to their offering, so now it is even easier to send and receive email while you are on the road.
For more great information on Gmail, check out fellow Friends in Tech member, The Gmail Podcast, hosted by Chuck Tomasi.
Following on from my previous post on disposable email addresses, here is a post on disposable email addresses that come to your REAL email address.
Services such as bugmenot and mailinator are really temporary email address that you check for 5 minutes and do not bother with again. However sometimes you may want to check or receive email for an extended period of time which is where a service such as spammotel.com comes in handy. This service provides you with a random email address such as asda12fasa@spammotel.com that redirects to your predefined real address. It is possible to add prefixes to the email such as SPAM or FWD so you can filter on the incoming emails. A web interface is provided for creating new email addresses (you don’t create one up yourself) and this screen also allows you to put a description for each email set up.
Two added bonuses that come with this system is that if you reply to an incoming email address the email will go to spammotel.com where they scramble your from address so the recipient still does not know your original email (unless you forget to remove it from your signature) . The other benefit is that you can change the destination email address so that if your work email address changes, or you change employers then you have one website to change the email address at and all your subscribed email lists will continue to work.
A screen shot of the interface is below to give you an idea of how it works.
Hopefully you are all aware of bugmenot.com which provides a list of valid usernames and passwords for sites that insist you register before downloading or accessing content. The most common example quoted is the New York Times articles but other (technical) sites might include APCC and techrepublic. If you need to access and article or posting on this site, head on over to bugmenot, enter the site url and it provides you with a username, password and the likelihood that this combination will work. If it works, you click the Yes button, if not you click the No button and a new combination(s) will be offered for you. You can also add your own.
Anyway, if you want to access a site temporarily but do not want to share the details with other people OR get on the sites email distribution/spam list then you can always give a fake email address but typically most sites send a confirmation email to the email address you provided. Clicking the link in the email then authenticates you as a valid user.
Previously I’ve always used a service such as mailinator.com. When signing up you pick a nonsense (or rude) email address ending in @mailinator.com such as IDontThinkSoSpammers @ mailinator.com, check the web interface to read the email that you send, access the site and then forget about it.
Now bugmenot provide a similar service at email.bugmenot.com but the advantage is that you can instantly access the emails from a webpage by adding your email address to email.bugmenot.com/view. In the above example you would go to email.bugmenot.com/view/IDontThinkSoSpammers
A very useful service – it is interesting to see the conflict between using a service such as this and the “morality” of using it. Personally I will provide a valid email address from my own domain to a site most of the time if I expect I will continue to use the site as I can always blackhole the email address if they start spamming but for sites that want your life history when signing up OR I expect they might spam me then this is a good alternative.
What do you think – do you/would you use a service like this – have you used alternatives that may be useful? Do you think providing fake information is naughty or is asking for too much information immoral and companies deserve all the bogus information they get?
Today I saw an article from Computerworld on a Gmail flaw. Basically if you are logged into your Gmail account, then visit a compromised site it can let malicious folks add filters to your Gmail forwarding email or email with attachments to another place.
The lesson here. LOG OUT! When you are done with Gmail, or your Banking site, or any other site that deals with your private information and money. LOG OUT! Find the link on the page and click it BEFORE you do anything else. Particularly if it’s money related. Paul and Larry talked about the same issue over on Pauldotcom. They don’t visit any other site or check email while doing online banking. Then they log out, close their browser completely and open it again for normal browsing. Why not check email? Think how much email you get that acts like a web page (aka HTML Email). Those can cause exploits to run.
So remember. Safety first. When dealing with your private information and money. Do just that task then log out. To be extra safe close your web browser completely then open it again for less important web work. If you don’t log out your session can still be active until you restart your browser. All it will take is one spam email laden with an exploit for a popular service like Gmail or a major bank. Or even a targeted attack at folks who blog with wordpress. They could take over or spam your blog through your own logged in session. Then lots of people will wish they clicked those two words. Log Out.
For those who listen to Victor’s podcast, the Typical Mac User Podcast, you might have heard me talk about this product — PodWorks.
Recently my 6 month old MacBook’s hard drive crashed… and crashed hard! Nothing was salvageable from the drive. Fortunately, I DID have a backup of my important data, to include my iTunes Library.
I had backed up my iTunes library via rsync to a FreeNAS server that I had recently setup. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the on-board NIC of the NAS unit to run at 100Mb/Full-Duplex — it was stuck in Half-Duplex mode. This was causing any transfer to take forever! With a 26GB iTunes library, I was looking at a 16+ hour transfer to restore my library.
So I started looking at the concept of pulling my library back off my iPod instead. Unfortunately, Apple only provides for a one-way transfer of your library EXCEPT for the case of purchased music. If you hook your iPod up to another installation of iTunes you can at least transfer your purchased tracks to that library, but no podcasts nor any other content that you may have ripped from CD.
A quick Google search yielded a couple of hits — one of which let me to PodWorks. I connected my iPod to my MacBook, fired up PodWorks and clicked on a single button (after I paid my $8 registration fee) to copy the contents of my iTunes library (on the iPod) back in to iTunes library.
45 minutes later I was then able to associate my iPod with this new installation of iTunes — which, of course, wipes the iPod clean to do so — and then begin the process of pushing the library back to the iPod.
In just under 2 hours, I was back in business. Not bad for $8!
Pssst… it also works with the iPhone!
Technorati Tags: Mac, iPod, PodWorks, iTunes
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After seeing a number of articles lamenting the Firefox plugin Adblock Plus I decided to try it. It works on Firefox regardless of windows, mac etc. Just save yourself some grief and subscribe to one of the blocking signature feeds.
I can say one thing for sure. It sure works great. I have several IT news sites I read. I was on the verge of stopping from reading them any more AT ALL. Let’s just say their names match the pattern *world.com. It was infuriating to get not just a front page ad BEFORE you could reach the site but then these horribly invasive flash overlays would not let me even read the front page at times. Ad block plus sure took care of that.
The downside. I agree to some extent that sites rely on advertising for income. Podcasters frequently do this since their shows are free on their own. Another thing I have noticed it that it blocks some embedded flash content like video and audio tools for ustream, talk shoe etc. So what I decided to do is leave adblock plus installed. But click the icon for ABP that is in the top right corner of your firefox web browser when I go to sites I want to be sure to support and have the flash tools work. Such as this site, Typical Mac User etc. Just choose Disable on this site and it will add the site you are viewing to be excluded from ad blocking.
Some commerical web sites are definately more readable with the dozens of ads they stick everywhere blocked. I agree on the creator of ad block plus’ statement that too many ads make it a horrible experience for users.
While messing with setting up a Personal Domain option on my Apple dotMac account I had a simple but inspired thought. I use DynDns to make a friendly DNS name for my home connection. But what if you don’t like using a domain name like me.homedns.org? Here is a quick trick and it works. Make a new cname entry for something like home on your registered real domain. Have it point to your DynDns name, like me.homedns.org. Then when you do something like home.mypublicdomain.com it would kick over to your home pc and kept up to date via DynDns. It hides the uglier name of me.homedns.org. Keep in mind it will break if you do not keep your DynDns entry updated for your IP address with their client or other method.
To sum up, make a cname with the alias of home pointing to me.homedns.org as an example.
If you want screen shots for Godaddy check out my posting over at Typical Mac User. Just alter the last step of the cname. Make a new one rather than editing www.
We had an employee termination earlier this week. As is typically the case, upon the employee’s departure, there is a mad scramble to pick up the pieces to keep things moving along in this person’s place. One of the primary issues is access to e-mail.
In our case, the employee had saved most all of his e-mail to a local PST file keeping but about 2 weeks worth on the server. The problem was, he had password protected the PST file.
A quick google search indicated that PST file password protection really isn’t that complex. One of the first products that I located in my search was a utility called PST Password. Even better… it’s freeware!
I downloaded the utility, fired it up, opened up the protected PST file and it provided me with 3 possible passwords. The first one did not work, but the second one did. I was able to quickly hand this 800MB+ PST file back to the manager sans password and harmony was soon restored.
Technorati Tags: PST, PSTPassword, Freeware
I was reminded of the need for backups once again today. One of the folks I work for had a hard drive that wouldn’t boot. We dropped it in as a slave to the “clone” machine we use to do bit by bit cloning of drives for e-discovery, and for a little while it seemed like we might be able to get the data from the bad drive over to a good drive. Unfortunately, that process errored out as we went rather quickly from a drive that wouldn’t boot, to a drive that was completely unreadable. Of course, they didn’t have any backups of all those family photos and movies that were stored on the drive.
Now he’s looking at the choice of paying a whole lot of money to someone with the proper tools to try and recover that data from the physical drive or it being gone forever. Not good choices any way you look at it.
It got some of us discussing home backup strategies. Personally, I keep a backup of all our photos and other important files on an external USB drive, but I’m keenly aware that while that lessens the chances of data loss, it is still possible. Should both drives fail in short order, or if something should cause damage to my home office, I may be in just as much pain as someone with no backups. I’ve been keeping an eye on some other tools to add to the overall backup plan, such as Windows Home Server, and online storage. I’ve also been considering burning the photos to DVD and storing that at the office. I guess you could call Flickr my online storage right now, but only a small percentage of my photos show up there, and they show up in reduced quality from the original. I wouldn’t really want those to be the only photos I wind up with, but I guess it would be better than nothing.
I know there’s some folks out there with similar concerns. What are your backup plans? Any of you using online file storage as part of your backup plan? What has your experience with those services been? If you had a client who took a lot of photos, maybe a few home movies, etc. what would your recommendation be for their plan?
Let us know, after you go do a backup, of course. 
I’ve recently had to conduct two interviews for a Network Engineer at our company and at both interviews I asked questions about keeping up to date with technology. I was surprised at the answers considering the job role. I asked if they listened to any podcasts or subscribed to any blogs. Both answered in the negative. I was really surprised as I can’t see how a person can effectively keep up to date with all the latest updates, patches, bugs, tools, software and tips that a network or systems engineer needs without subscribing to a podcast or at the very least some technical blogs.
Sometimes the excuse given is that people don’t have the time to listen to a podcast or read several blogs but they have the time to watch a couple of hours tv each night or spend 30 minutes at the coffee machine discussing the game or their drinking exploits!
Hopefully the Friends In Tech site helps with little tidbits of information that don’t take up a lot of time but do provide useful feedback – and this tip is about Microsoft’s new Technet Webcast Express – webcasts on various subjects lasting about 10-15 minutes to gain a quick overview on a product or it’s features. Currently there are 9 webcasts, 7 on Sharepoint and 2 on the Office2007 document format but keep an eye open for new Webcasts. If Sharepoint doesn’t get you excited then spend 10 minutes catching up with some product news from other bloggers in an area that you are interested in – and if you have an interview in the future – don’t forget to mention Friends In Tech as the blog you read to keep up to date!
If you happen to be forced to change your password just before a long weekend or holiday, do yourself a favor and write it down on a piece of paper and place it within your wallet or purse. This way, when you arrive Monday morning to begin the new week all refreshed, you don’t have to fear having forgotten your password.
Of course, on your way to get your first cup of coffee after having logged in, be sure to drop that piece of paper in the shredder.
Technorati Tags: password weekend
I believe the very first FiT tip that we published here in audio form was a bit about a litle FREE utility to recover data on Smart Media Cards called PC Inspector – Smart Recovery. Interestingly, back in April of last year I mentioned it on ITT as having saved some photos then.
This time, however, I had a few circumstances that made me wonder if this would be possible this time. First off, I had just finished taking some shots of the neighbors and their fireworks. There were a couple of shots that I was especially interested in as they were extended exposure shots using my tripod and remote shutter release. To my surprise, when I went to process the images, the card showed that it was empty.
Immediately, I thought of the Smart Recovery tool, but I knew it was a Windows only tool — I’m using a Mac. However, fortunately, I also am running Parallels and have an instance of Windows XP in a virtual machine. Now the question became, will the Smart Recovery utility recovery my data from a Compact Flash card? It lists SD cards and other flash-based media, but not CF. Fortunately, it DID state that it could recognize Canon RAW image formats (.CR2).
So I downloaded the tool, mounted my CF card in my card reader and ensure that my XP VM could see the card and then turned Smart Recovery loose on the drive.
The entire process took over 5 hours to complete a thorough scanning of the drive and in the end, recovered over 300 images that had been previously erased (on purpose) and in there were my handful of firework pics that I REALLY wanted.
Transferred the image that I wanted over to my external drive I use to house my RAW images, and I was good to go.
To ANYONE with a digital camera of ANY kind… I highly recommend this utility. This is not the first time it has saved my butt, and my cousin even used it to save data on her MMC card about a month ago as well. You just can’t beat it for a freeware utility.
Technorati Tags: PC Inspector, Smart Recovery, SD, CF, RAW, Canon
Victor from the Typical Mac User podcast and I have a discussion that starts with OpenDNS. We both had it setup in our Apple Airport Extreme N routers. Yet OpenDNS doesn’t work. We talk about why, what the options are. Since we were on DNS we move onto DynDNS and Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an application that lets you easily open ports on your router via UPnP aka Dynamic Port Forwarding.
Links Mentioned:
Sooner or later everyone hears about Dynamic DNS. Good for giving your home network a human readable name. Some but not all routers support having a dynamic DNS account. More often users rely on a software client loaded on a pc behind their router to phone in and update your IP address. Mac users have had a second rate client for a long time. Well recently www.dyndns.org updated their mac client. It is WAY better now. It runs in the background once you set it up. No more having to leave it running under a user account.
So if you are mac user and wanted something like myhome.homedns.org as your DNS name for connecting to things you share out at home give the new client a try.
Links Mentioned:
For those of you who followed the suggestions in the recent ITT Minute about Microsoft downloads, you should know all about Microsoft Steadystate. This is the new version of Microsoft’s Shared Computer toolkit – a very useful utility that allows you to freeze, rollback and control the configuration of pc’s in schools, home or kiosk machines. The new version has several new features and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Steadystate download page. A handbook for Steadystate is also available.
A long time ago back in July of 2005 on the In The Trenches Podcast, Uniform Server was mentioned as a free to download Windows Web server. From the Uniform Server website – “The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server”.
The new version, 3.4 was released earlier today and is well worth checking out. One advantage of this WAMP (Windows, Apache Mysql, PHP) application is that it is completely portable, no installation required so it can be used on a USB thumbdrive on multiple computers with no problem.
Update – Version number changed as it was 3.4 not 3.3 that was released.
