Rants & Ramblings & Other Rubbish

Where's the blog gone

Haven't updated here in MONTHS! Mostly because I've been testing drupal and wordpress. Those sites are somewhat harder to find, and the work is very preliminary.

Extended iTunes tags

iTunes Extended Tags -- Edit w/ mp3tag

ALBUM =

ARTISTS =

BAND =

COMMENT ITUNNORM =

COMMENT ITUNPGAP = 0

COMMENT ITUNSMPB =

ENCODEDBY =

GENRE = Podcast

ITUNESPODCAST = 1

SUBTITLE =

TITLE =

TRACK =

YEAR =

RELEASETIME =

Attempting to stop the information leakage

I run the Firefox plug-in or add-on as you'd have it, No-Script.

It makes browsing a little difficult at times, but it stops alot of activity I don't want, and it queries as to whether to allow cookies to be set.

Today, I learned that the Macromedia Flashplayer can set cookies as well, and since so many security conscious people will do the "Delete cookies" thing as well as many tech support representatives, the shift to Flash Cookies makes some sense.

If you'd like to control this, see which sites have left cookies, or take control over the flashplayer plugin, you might want to Google for "flashplayer settings manager". This will get you to a webpage Macromedia provides to take control over YOUR player.

I'm still reviewing the options, but it looks promising.

Drive Imaging, Ghost, Backups...

FOG - Free, Open-Source Ghost: Version 0.04

PartImage

Linux installs

Clonezilla

Acronis TrueImage

DriveImage XML

trinity rescue kit

Firewall issues

Uploading yesterday, I had issues w/ my firewall. Testing today to see which config, if either, works!

So, the question now answered, as this posted just fine. Using the config I prefer anyway. Curious whyTHAT was foobar yesterday, but whatever...

The winmail.dat dilema

Previously, when receiving an email from an Outlook user with an attached winmail.dat file, I'd either ask for a "resend" if I was somewhat interested, or it would go in the "round-file".

Today, I had to fix the problem for somebody else. Generally, requesting the attachment in a different format is more trouble than it's worth. A little Googl'ing was very helpful. I came up w/ multiple solutions.

The first, is a website www.winmaildat.com is a service; save the file, go to the website, upload the file and you will be provided with the attachment to save. The other option, is at www.fentun.com which is even more interesting as it provides solutions for both Windows and Linux. I can attest to the fact that the Linux static version works very well, the Windows option still remains to be tested, but I'm hopeful....

Let's use the BLOG for a TODO list...

The following caught my eye in an email the other day. I just KNOW I'm not going to get around to it anytime soon, but I don't want to lose it. Got to thinking that the best way to do THAT would be to park it in the BLOG. This will either get "messy" or maybe it'll be "just the trick"

 MySQL Workbench

DBDesigner4 

Toad Data Modeler 

EMS it's for pay, but has a 30-day trial.

The Latest and more of the oldest...

I've uploaded autoruns from Microsoft and mp3tag to the websites /winfiles folder. I cleanup up a lot of OLD programs that were stagnating there. I heard something the other day that indicated that you could d/l mp3's and get iTunes to put them into the "podcasts" folder by editing some of the extended mp3 tags. It sounded interesting and thus, the mp3tag program from the German website, http://www.mp3tag.de

The autoruns utility was just something I heard about and thought I'd add it to the toolkit.

I'm struggling w/ pmwiki at present. There's a LOT to read, and I'm just starting to grasp some of it. I suppose if I'd just USE it, rather than jump in on the customization side, I'd be MUCH farther along.

Cleaning up a list of things...

Checkout MusicBridge, it looks pretty good for keeping an iPod and Windows Media content lists in sync. I'd offer a link, but the one I found was from a Google search listing download.com I'm afraid if I listing something it would change.

Checkout eRightSoft.com: SUPER © (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. Player and Encoder of various types of multimedia files.

PageDeFrag: from Microsoft, this link should be good.

More diverse audio content, now, horror stories to GO, or if you're into science fiction ...

If you're into home automation, PVR's , more home automation , home automation from HomeSeer

Multi-factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication was first discussed extensively on Security Now podcast, Episode 90. In Episode 101, during the reader-mail section, the Paypal Security key was mentioned, and was thoroughly discussed with Michael Vergara, PayPal's Director of Account Protections, in Episode 103.

I've gotten a Paypal security key, and I'm studying the specification as outlined in the OpenID Book by Rafeeq Ur Rehman.

I think it's an excellent idea and encourage all who read to follow-up and implement personally. The proliferation of OpenID could really help reduce the confusion of multiple passwords and login IDs that may of us have, AND, reduce the number of weak passwords we use.