Jimazing Hacks

Recovery & Antivirus Software

jimazing — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:14:42 +0000

A friend just told me a story about an oops that led to a need to recover some data from a PC. He says, “After searching the Internet, downloading software with potential, and trying out said software, I ended up using a program called iRecover (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm). In my case, I just needed to recover a single folder so the version that is freely available was all I needed and it worked great! I highly recommend it. It turns out that it’s great for recovering photos from flash memory cards used in digital cameras too!”

The other gems I’ve found are freely available anti-virus packages. There are a number of them out there but most have license limitations that prevent you from using them for anything other than personal use. Two packages that don’t have these limitations are Comodo Internet Security and PC Tools Anti-virus.

http://www.comodointernetsecurity.com/
http://www.pctools.com/free-antivirus/ (I recommend this one for anyone that needs the easier to use of the two)

HT - Will Ballance

Scanner Tips

jimazing — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:32:58 +0000

Looking to purchase a new scanner and found this site. I don’t want to have to look for it again

http://www.scantips.com/

Word Has Trouble Displaying Images

jimazing — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:40:33 +0000

Images in a Word Document won’t display properly. If I minimize the window and then restore it, they will appear, but scrolling around or opening another window on top of the Word window can make them disappear. To make the images remain, reset the hardware acceleration. Here’s how:

Right click on the desktop and choose Properties
Choose the Settings tab
Click Advanced button
Choose the Troubleshoot tab
Adjust the slider to a lower setting and click apply
Test to see if it fixed your problem. If it did not, adjust it down lower and test again. Repeat until it works or you reached “None”

Calculate time between dates with DateDif()

jimazing — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:34:41 +0000

Use the DATEDIF when you want to caclulate the time between two dates. The time could be how many days, months or years.

The syntax for DATEDIF is

=DATEDIF(Date1, Date2, Interval)

Where:
Date1 is the earlier date,
Date2 is the later date,
Interval is the interval type to return (see table below)

Interval	Meaning	Description
m	Months	Complete calendar months between the dates.
d	Days	Number of days between the dates.
y	Years	Complete calendar years between the dates.
ym	Months Excluding Years	Complete calendar months between the dates as if they were of the same year.
yd	Days Excluding Years	Complete calendar days between the dates as if they were of the same year.
md	Days Excluding Years And Months	Complete calendar days between the dates as if they were of the same month and same year.

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datedif.aspx

Fix Wordpress Media Upload Errors

jimazing — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:47:32 +0000

WordPress 2.5 upgrades caused HTTP errors when uploading an image. Here’s how to fix it… Add the following line to your .htaccess file:

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI ^/wp-admin/async-upload.php$ MODSEC_ENABLE=Off

Thanks to Vassie.name

Freemind (mind mapping software)

jimazing — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:08:35 +0000

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of mind mapping, Freemind may not be the best place to start. In my own words, a mind map is a way to take notes that is free form and is freeing to the mind. Taking notes using a mind map format frees me to jump from one topic to another within the main topic. If I’m down in the details of one thing and a thought jumps into my head that is part of another branch of the main topic, I can go jot it down somewhere else. If it has a place, I can put it there, if not, I can make a place on the fly.

Freemind allows me to draw bubbles to connect concepts. It is sort of like a mind map in that you can put items all around. It’s not in the fact that it is a software solution and not a piece of paper and colored pencils. The advantages of a software solution are similar to the advantages of a word processor over a notebook and pen. You can edit/delete/copy/paste/drag/drop… You can create large branches and collapse them at a click. This can make a very complex mindmap not so overwhelming at first glance.

I have a mindmap of my life here. I update it every once in a while. Which is yet another advantage… at any time, I can pickup my mind map right where I left off. Lastly, I can publish it on the web.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Keepass Password Safe

jimazing — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:47:40 +0000

Keepass Password Safe is a great free software program that will keep all of your passwords in a single, encrypted file. There’s a port for the pocket PC as well as desktops.

http://keepass.info/

Show the first word on each line

jimazing — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:13:13 +0000

Building on the Not Dir command from last Friday… Andrew asked me today if I would help him come up with a way to parse a text file and show only certain lines that have the words “,smack”, “,my” or “,asprin” (notice that each of these is right after a comma). Oh yeah, the kicker is that he just wanted the first word on each line. Here’s the command:

for /f “tokens=1 delims=,” %g in (’findstr /E /I “smack my asprin” foobar.txt’) do @echo %g

I’ll take it apart and explain what makes it go starting with the inside command…

findstr /E /I “smack my asprin” foobar.txt

This command looks at each line in the file named foobar.txt and displays the lines that have any of these words in it. The words must be at the end of the line and we don’t care whether they are capitalized or not.

for /f “tokens=1 delims=,” %g in (’some command‘) do @echo %g

This is what the rest of the command does. The for command loops through each line. It echoes the first “token” on the line that is delimited by a comma. In English, that means that each line is subdivided by commas (delims=,) and we want to work with everything that comes before the first comma (tokens=1) saved in a variable (%g). What we want to do with that token is display it (echo %g).

So how does it know which “lines” to do all this stuff to? After the “in” word, comes some command in parentheses and single quotes. The fact that it is in single quotes makes the “for” command treat it like a command and use the output.

Special note: If you use this command inside a batch file, you’ll need to change the “%g” to “%%g”. No, I don’t know why.

Thanks to

computerhope.com/forhlp.htm

Not DIR

jimazing — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:59:43 +0000

Looking for a command to do sort of the opposite of the DIR command in Windows today, I asked for help from the team and they came through for me! Here’s what I was trying to do…

DIR *.ini

returns a list of files with the “ini” extension, but what I wanted was a list of files that did not have an “ini” extension. Unfortunately Windows does not include a DIR flag for not matching a pattern

After a few hours, we have a quite elegant solution and a new tool in my toolbox, “findstr”. Here’s the whole command to retrieve files from a directory that do not have an “ini” extention.

dir /b | findstr -v -i -e “.ini”

Thanks Rob Hoffman and Will Ballance. I’m glad you are on my team.

Who’s logged in to a machine

jimazing — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:33:50 +0000

If I want to check to see who is logged into a machine on a network…

nbtstat -a machinename

Output looks like this…

Local Area Connection:
Node IpAddress: [x.x.x.x] Scope Id: []

NetBIOS Remote Machine Name Table

Name Type Status
———————————————
MachineName <00> UNIQUE Registered
Domain <00> GROUP Registered
MachineName <03> UNIQUE Registered
MachineName <20> UNIQUE Registered
someone’s ID <03> UNIQUE Registered

MAC Address = 00-88-99-99-11-22