Category: Personal

Um… personal?

Mapping drive with a system account

I needed to do this to test Crashplan.  I keep my photos archived on an external drive hooked to, and shared off of, my router.  Since Crashplan’s client runs as a service under the Service account, this was the solution to get it to see these shares.

psexec from the sysinternals suite is required.

Open a command prompt as administrator.

Path to psexec’s location and enter psexec -s cmd.exe.

Mount the drive via its UNC: net use DRIVELETTER: \\server\\folder /persistent:yes

The share will probably show as disconnected.  Click it – it isn’t.  It should also show up for all users of the machine it’s mapped on.

 

(Killing the share requires the same steps, only with net use DRIVELETTER: /delete

Windows 7 Search Files And Programs

Rebuilt my laptop thanks to lazily allowing a rootkit to hit it and discovered that the Windows 7 Search Files and Programs function wouldn’t work.  No good, as this it is the default way I launch everything on my machine (no desktop icons FTW).  Turns out deleting one registry key does the trick:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}

It’s user specific, obviously.

Multiple Pidgin Profiles

  1. go to start-run, and enter “cmd” – this will open the command windows
  2. in the command windows browse to “c:\program files\pidgin”
  3. now enter in the command window “set PIDGIN_MULTI_INST=1″
  4. create a second profile by entering this into the command window “pidgin -mc <path of where you want to keep that new profile>”
  5. another instance of pidgin is opened with its own profile settings
  6. enjoy your two instances of pidgin

Return to Chrome

I used Chrome occasionally in the past.  I liked its speed but, at the time, was put off by its lack of customization.  I couldn’t surf without FireFox and its AdBlocking, XMarking, LastPassing, NoScripting powers.   Visiting the web without them was a jarring experience, akin to watching “real” television – like commercials, I’d gone so long without intrusive ads, popups, hijacks and javascript silliness that I forgot they’re out there.  And oh boy are they.

Fast forward a bit.  XMarks announces it’s going under.  Sadness ensues.  Switch to FireFox sync.  Fast forward a bit more.  FireFox begins releasing its beta builds of FF4.  Sync is built in.  4 seems delicious – and then I tried to manage my bookmarks.  Slow.  Painfully, mind numbingly slow.  Inoperable, in fact.  It seems that FF4 uses SQLite for its bookmark containment, and everything went into the shitter as of SQLite 3.7.x.

Meanwhile LastPass purchased XMarks (probably for a song, having waited until the 11th hour to do so) and Chrome has since opened up, finally supporting 3rd party plug ins.  Time to try again!

So far, so good.  Word of warning, however.  If you configure data sync in Chrome (Options > Personal Stuff > Sync) and you install XMarks, the two services will begin a bloody battle, duplicating and triplifrying your bookmarks.  From what I’ve sussed both of them insert a unique bit of unseen markup to each bookmark, effectively making them unique again and again and again.  Like this:

Xmarks: Hey!  I found a bookmark!  I’ll sync it and slip a date string in it!

GSyng: Hey! I found a bookmark with a funny date string in it!  It must be new – I’ll sync it and put my own bit of something in it!

Xmarks: Hey!  I found a bookmark that’s startlingly similar to the one I just synced, but it has a new little bit of something!  It must be different – I’ll add it and update its date.

GSync: Holy cow!  There’s a familiar looking bookmark – but that funny date string is different.  I should totally add that!

…and so on and so forth.  Long story short, only use one bookmark sync method lest you wind up like me, writing a script to identify and strip duplicates from your 5000 item large bookmarks list.

TuxBoot

Tuxboot, a bootable USB drive for Clonezilla, DRBL Live, GParted Live and Tux2Live, is a lifesaver.  I cannot recommend it enough.   I got a new, 3x bigger drive for my laptop and cloned it with Tuxboot/Clonezilla and resized the primary partition with Tuxboot/GParted.  All went without a hitch.  I love free things that work.

Safe(r) Surfing

I don’t do a whole lot online that really warrants anonymity, but I still don’t care for the idea of being watched.  Further, I’m no fan of the growing trend of linking logins, such as the ubiquity of Facebook, or of browser tracking.  Just because I’m not doing anything wrong doesn’t mean I don’t want privacy.  Regardless of the existence of darknets and freenet I don’t think there’s a way to really hide online if the right (or wrong) people really want to find you – but there are definitely ways to make it more difficult.

  1. Use Firefox (or, conversely, Chrome) and not IE.
  2. Install the Adblock Plus addon for Firefox.
  3. Install the NoScript addon for Firefox.  This one’s a pain in the ass to initially configure, but soon you’ll get used to it and find approving (and not approving) sites will become second nature.  NoScript not only covers your tracks, it prevents other nasties like malicious code execution and cross-site scripting.  You’ll be amazed to see just how many connections you’re actually making when you hit a single site.
  4. Install and use HotSpot Shield, a free IPSec VPN solution that masks your originating IP address and encrypts your traffic.  Bonus:  although HSS is ad-revenue based, you’ll never see a single banner pushed from it if you have the aforementioned Adblock Plus installed.  Good times.

There are other paid options for online anonymity as well as TOR – which is almost unbearably slow in its default configuration, not to mentioned riddled with its own dark corners and dangers – but the above represents the easiest free as in beer way to cover some of your tracks online.

Disabling comments on WordPress posts

Done to this site because of the amount of absolute garbage coming in.

To kill the ability to comment on all existing posts, hit your database and zap it thusly:

UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’, ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’;

To turn off future, log into WP and head to Settings > Discussion and uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles.

Post greenpois0n – appsync

Not that I’m suggesting anything illicit or illegal.

Add the appropriate repository in Cydia:

  1. Cydia -> Manage -> Sources
  2. Edit -> Add -> http://cydia.hackulo.us
  3. After it completes downloading:
  4. Search for appsync for 4.1 and install.