Tagged: Tech

Monitor a site

So a friend of mine is after an old school Toyota Landcruiser, but he’s finding it difficult as it appears he’s not alone.  Any such beast in decent shape seems to sell within 48 hours of being posted online.  As such we were discussing ways he could be notified when one is listed for sale.  Bam!  Google Alerts.  Brilliant.  Simply set up your search criteria as THINGYOURELOOKINGFOR site:SITEYOURELOOKINGAT, eg:

landcruiser site:atlanta.craigslist.org

or

landcruiser site:ebay.com

Set your notifications up, and you’re ready to rock.  If you want to get specific or tricksy about it, check out Google’s advanced search magick.

Prey

Given that I have a multitude of laptops I’m test driving Prey.

Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Hopefully I’ll never have to use it.

Windows 7 Desktop Refresh

Interesting – my work machine, a Windows 7 64 bit box, suddenly stopped auto-refreshing the desktop.  Delete something off the desktop, and its icon remained until you right clicked and chose Refresh.  Save something to the desktop, and it wouldn’t appear until you did the same.  A co-worker had the same issue  and, after some serious Googling, found the culprit.

Teracopy.

Uninstall Teracopy, and viola!  Desktop behaves.  Too bad, as I love me some Teracopy.  I’m currently test driving the alternative SuperCopier, which is uglier than Tera but so far works well and doesn’t fark up the refresh.

Perl PPM etc. through proxy

In order for Perl to work through a proxy (for Perl Package Manager, etc) you need to define the proxy as a system environment variable:

Right click on “My Computer”, click on “Properties” and select the “Advanced” tab. Click the button marked “Environment Variables” and make the following changes in the “System Variables” window:

  1. With the “New” button, add the setting HTTP_proxy, with your proxy name as the value (you must include ”
    1
    http://

    “), followed by a colon and the proxy port, if applicable; e.g., ”

    1
    http://proxy:8080

    “

  2. If you require a user name and/or password to access your proxy, use the “New” button to add the settings HTTP_proxy_user and HTTP_proxy_pass, with your user name and password as the respective values.

From the ActivePerl FAQ.

CMS MySQL Password Woes?

Forget a MODx/MySql database pass for a client?  Me too.  Thankfully, it’s easily located at

/manager/includes/config.inc.php

How about WordPress?  Me too again.  It’s the wp-config.php file in the root.

Speaking of these files, make sure to CHMOD them to 600 for protection.