If it ever happens to you that you need to restart old computer which you have not logged on for 2-3 months and you find out you have no clue what the password could be, do not panick. Exactly this happened to me yesterday. Fortunately I have remembered reading something on lifehacker few days ago about bootable CD which contains live Linux distribution with password cracking open source software Ophcrack. It runs from CD only, does not touch your file system, only loads local SAM and tries cracking the hashes. And boy, it works !
With great horror I have discovered that from my 80 GB hardrive in Macbook already over 76 GB was full. Mostly because of the hidden activity of iTunes and silent downloading of new podcast episodes. Especially video podcasts - such as Mac break - are disk heavy, since they are produced in HD - and as result, look remarkably beautiful on the screen.
While cleaning up, I have decided to burn few of my very favorite podcasts to the MP3 CD and keep it in the car. Doing that is really easy in iTunes - all you have to do is to select MP3 CD in Preferences -> Advanced -> Burning, create a playlist that will contain all MP3's you want to burn, control-click it and select Burn. So far so good. There are some situations when yu want to have more control over the process: for example you want to put the files to subfolders or need to adjust / cleanup the names of files before burning.
As I mentioned before, I am keeping all my bookmarks in del.icio.us account. Thanks to excellent Firefox extension and available bookmarklets, posting new URL's is very comfortable. After using the del.icio.us for some time, here is few tips how get best of it:
- use the post buttons - they are available for Firefox as well as IE
- post often and tag a lot. Tags are the only way how to search the non-public posts
- keep consistent approach to tag names. I use singular, replace the '.' with word dot (dotnet) and write all lowercase
- follow the crowd - consider using similar tags as others, it makes it easier to be part of community
- use wisdom of the crowd. Look what else did other people tagged with the same tag as you did. You will be surprised what you may discover.
I have to admit that I am suffering from severe case of installophobia. Every time I start installation program on Windows, I am very vividly imagining all the terrible things that may happen in next few minutes. Like overwriting some system DLL's with some old or wrong version which will break half dozen of other programs. Or messing up my registry so badly that I will have have to spend few days of backing up my system data and installing XP from scratch (and inevitably loose something very important in the process). The introduction of the system installer and MSI format few years ago helped a little for a while - up to the point when I wrote my first own installation program and fully understood what exactly can be done with it :-). Then it come back. I guess this may have contributed to two major shifts during last year - moving to Mac platform (which has no registry) and moving on-line (which has no install at all).
when it hangs and does not react. I am posting it so that I do not have to google it out again :-). Key is Menu + Select combination.
Here comes the detailed version (saved from Google Notebook):
Toggle the Hold switch on and off to avoid "hold trap" Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step. Tips:
It was Rod who started this by saying how great it is to replace slow typing with faster speaking and mentioning some kind of magical software package (appropriately named Dragon Naturally Speaking) which does transform your voice to written properly spelled English text with amazing accuracy. I was pretty sceptical, after seeing few years ago similar software from IBM with not-so-great accuracy, and even more recently the famous Vista speech wreckognition. Then Peter bought the software as well and had similarly good results as Rod. Now I got really interested. Both Peter and Rod and native speakers of English and I was very curious how will the software deal with my very own version of English pronunciation and fairly thick Slovak accent. So we did try it today.
The 2006 was truly amazing year. We have accomplished so much - we have created the West end development centre, brought in and started several projects, completed phase 1 of employee conversion, started benefits program, ESOP program, redefined the company visual presence, grew the business and the company size considerably and created foundation for future growth.
Most important achievemnt is the fun factor - I am again looking forward to go to work - and again since the Montage days the synergy is coming back. Thanks so much to all of you who helped it happen.
Today's topic is dealing with sensitive information - such as logins, passwords, PIN numbers, credit card numbers and so on.
Up to last week, I was using the SplashID software to keep everything worth securing secure. I started to use SplashID back in 2001 when I bought the Palm based Sony Clie SJ30 (as replacement for wonderful Palm IIIxe). The Palm based program came with desktop counterpart that allowed editing of entries. Later in 2004 when I switched to Pocket PC, I simply purchased Windows Mobile version of the same software.
I have decided to stop using Microsoft Outlook. No, I did not have any major issues with it, no horror stories of crashed, unreadable emails or viruses. As long as you use decent anti-virus (for example this one), switch off automatic loading of images and never do anything stupid such as clicking on an attachment or a link in email, you are reasonably safe. What got me to switch was lack of interoperability between anything non-Windows and Outlook and headaches of synchronization with on-line information. Using Outlook-only everywhere is not an option for me, because I need to use Mac as well as Windows and buying license of Outlook for every notebook, PC and virtual machine would be prohibitively expensive.
In certain sense, people and companies have one things in common. If have been around for few years, you collect, acquire or create very strange collection of tools, platforms, software and data formats. In short, you end up with lots of digital mess. I am planning to make major cleanup and streamlining in 2007 - consolidate the hardware, software, data formats and workflows both at home and at work.
I have read the GTD book and many interesting articles and blogs on how people implement it. I noticed that the best way how to succeed is try to follow and customize the GTD approach for own circumstances, and build set of tools and processes that would make dealing with stuff easier, faster and more efficient.