Archive for the 'Personal Notes' Category

A Moment of Irony

It is December and I am cleaning out a build-up of digital detritus and coprolite. While clearing through some old emails I found the following message that I saved a long time ago.

If you are missing a CD entitled “Where Nothing Can Go Wrong” please let me know.
The cleaning crew found it.

Now I can delete that email.

Clean Printer Cartridges with WD-40

We have these huge efficient printers located throughout the building for everyone to use. They print inexpensively even in gorgeous color. The first time I printed to the one near my office I had accidentally left it set to color and felt ashamed that I had wasted such beauty on horendous web advertisements.

In spite of all these printers located in each of the office areas we still have several dozen expensive, slow, noisy, and lousy printers on everyones personal desk as well. Why bother walking 10 feet when you can get less for more.

My problem with printers is that they soon get to the point that the more-expensive-than-gold ink gets clogged in one of the color channels and I have a dead $40 cartridge that has provided me with $2 worth of value over its pitiful life.

A West Virginia Blogger has posted about cleaning your print cartridge with WD-40. Found via Lifehacker where there are many more cleaning suggestions in the comments.

Changing Remote Desktop Port

I keep looking for this information on the blog here and forgetting that it is actually in the forum here: VPN’s.

So, without further ado, I will post it here as well (note: I am not using the port mentioned here).

Notes: You can change the listening port for remote desktop
Then connect on that port

To set up remote desktop on port 3053 instead of 3389

Using regedit (if you don’t know what that is then don’t do this) change:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\System
\CurrentControlSet
\Control
\TerminalServer
\WinStations
\RDP-Tcp
\PortNumber

to 3053 (or bed in Hexadecimal).
Reboot Windows to make sure the setting took properly
Open port 3053 on the Windows firewall

Set the IP address so that a future reboot would not give me a new IP.

Open 3053 on the router’s firewall and point at the IP set for the computer.

To test it I connected to my home computer and then had it connect back to the computer here using domain.com:3053 and it worked. It was dead slow, but it worked.

Just a note that even a fast internet connection gets sluggish when you are connecting both directions over RDP.

Posting Better Video To YouTube

From Lifehacker: How to Optimize Your Videos for YouTube.

More on YouTube:
Take Care When Tagging
Use its high quality flv conversion.

Username and Password

My assigned username and password for a system I occasionally use:

Username: 106366590E

Password: UZYYGGL9

I feel secure.

Block Posters: Make Images into Large Prints

This is an interesting idea. http://www.blockposters.com will take an uploaded image and reproduce it as a multipage PDF which can be printed and then hung up like a large poster.

I am noting this because I know of some youth and young adults ministries which would be able to make great wall decorations with this. It has an interesting look to it which catches your eye. Sure, you could do this on your own, but could they? It also takes only a moment to produce and is ready for your printer. I would recommend not using a little ink jet for this, and a dot matrix would be right out.

Firefox Inside Firefox

Copy and paste this into your Firefox address bar.

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Yes, it is almost completely useless, but you can have a Firefox window inside a Firefox tab. That means tabs inside tabs too.

Go To Bed: Time Change

I had no idea that the Daylight Saving Time change would catch so many off guard. I am working at the church tonight and have to keep reminding people they will be losing an hour.

So, I hope everyone leaves a bit earlier so I can go to bed a bit earlier.

How to Investigate a Windows PC

I hope I never have to use this and I hope nobody ever has to use it on a computer of mine, but this document from Microsoft looks very interesting.

Fundamental Computer Investigation Guide For Windows

The document includes information for building an investigative toolkit as well as good practices. I was hoping that they would have some good partition duplicators available. Before digging into a drive I would like to make a duplicate of it in order to go back to a fresh start if anything should go wrong. Something like GParted would be good for that.

Cheap LEDs from Best Hong Kong

This is another note to myself that others may be interested in.

http://www.besthongkong.com has some really good prices on LEDs. 50 IR LEDs for $5 with $3.87 shipping is pretty good.