Fort Technology

One thing I really wanted with my new iphone was a belt holster. I had used a blackberry for years and really missed the convenience of a holster. Then just last week, I had a ‘well duh!’ moment.

My old blackberry holster works nearly perfectly for the iphone, and I suspect for many other new smart phones as well.  Sure, you can purchase a holster for the iphone for $40+. But my blackberry holster was lying around unused!. What I like most about the blackberry holster is the magnetic closure strap. I haven’t seen any iphone holsters that have this.

Have a droid and want to get your itunes on another device, like a droid? Check out doubletwist !

An update to this older entry, I’ve found another pdf reader / editor, pdf xchange by tracker software. From my testing, PDF Xchange integrates with browsers better, for more reliable in page pdf opening. PDF XChange also has an upgrade for around $70 that allows full editing capabilities.

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There’s a better pdf viewer in town, foxit reader. It’s a free download! The installation is quicker, opening and viewing pdf documents is quicker. Just all around better than acrobat reader.

All but the most complex pdf documents I’ve seen will open and work fine for most folks with foxit reader.

Next time you need to install acrobat, reach for Foxit Reader instead!

Do you have a load of files or photos that you need to rename? I found a great utility that has a ton of options and works great. See http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

There are many products and ways to help protect kids while they’re browsing the Internet. OpenDNS is a simple and effective tool that can help, and it’s free!  See www.opendns.com.  Their basic plan is free and can be a great solution for younger children. OpenDNS’ system offers web content filtering that is advanced yet easy to use. All that’s required is to sign up, change your dns settings and download a small app on the computer(s) you want protected. You can choose from different categories to filter, add sites to always allow, or always block.

One level up from this is their $10/month plan which allows greater control and more protection options to help prevent bypass of the filter.

I’ll agree that older and more computer savvy kids can often find ways to bypass or change web protection like this, and in my opinion its important to educate kids and have some agreed upon limits on what’s acceptable and what’s not. This gets into a trust area and will vary between children and their maturity levels.

Not many folks use outlook express any more, most have migrated to some form of webmail, the full version of MS Outlook or Windows Live Mail that’s available with Vista and Windows 7.

If you are one of the few stragglers left running outlook express, here a couple links worth bookmarking, written some years ago but may still be of use to you.

- Outlook Express Repair

- Outlook Express File Corruption

- Wikipedia article on Outlook Express

In the Internet technology world, a bot is typically a program that infects a computer and performs hundreds of thousands of additional infections or malicious actions directed at other internet connected computers. They’re in the news occasionally, most everyone has heard about them by now.

Properly configured routers and firewalls protect most folks from these kinds of activities, but analyzing log files and monitoring internet traffic from time to time is still a great idea. Many vendors now offer automatic monitoring and alerting of these types of traffic as well.

I encountered one of these ‘more typical’ bots tonight while working on a customers linux server. The bot was making connections about every second or two, to port 22 (ssh) in an attempt to break in to the server.

Interestingly, after I blocked the connections with a “iptables -A INPUT -s 202.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 22 -j DROP” command, it made 60 more connection attempts, then stopped. It’s interesting to me how these bots are created and designed. Obviously some human designed the bot to try 60 more times, then move on to another target. Maybe the 60 corresponds to 1 minute of once every second attempts? Hard to know.

Another example of why it’s important to protect ssh services by using tcp wrappers and the hosts.deny file.

As web pages become more complex, there are often multiple scripts running on a page or in the background. On long or detailed pages with many components, you may see the error from Internet Explorer that reads

“A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?”. It looks like this in IE 8-

There is a fix for this, so IE will will stop popping up this goofy prompt.  In registry editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Styles. If the ‘Styles’ key isn’t present, add it. In the ‘Styles’ key, add the following reg_dword value – MaxScriptStatements. Assign it the hex value 41ffffff. (that’s 41 followed by 6 F’s) Restart IE, and voila, no more stop running this script error message.

Ever wonder about the difference between HP’s  printer drivers ? PCL5, PCL6, PS ? Here’s a quick link that summarizes the differences and when to choose the different types of drivers. HP Printer Drivers

Another good link with a little more detail here – laserquipt

Had a scenario today where I needed to edit a lot of text by hand, and there wasn’t an easy way to do it in bulk or automate it. There were some redundant snippets of text that I thought I could probably use a hot key to insert, speeding up the process some.

I’d looked at some the hotkey utilities in the past, decided to take another look today to see if there was a good one available that would make this job easier. Google turned up AutoHotKey.  It works great, has a ton of options to customize, and apparently can do damn near anything when it comes to automating the MS windows user interface. The help they include with the software is pretty complete, given that it’s free. Good stuff.