Mr-F.org

In relative terms I’m a newbie to the Apple Mac world.  One of things I found hard to start off with is finding a guide to “must have apps”, which just make life easier.  As an example when installing a new version of Windows there are several applications that get downloaded and installed immediately like EditPlus, Deamon Tools and Putty, just because they make life easier.  One of the apps I was told to get was “Quicksilver”, which is very helpful.  Another application that I have come across is “SSH Tunnel Manager”.  This little app allows me to easily store all the different tunnels that I use for various reasons, without really having to mess around with command lines.  Not that I’m saying that doing things from the command line is bad, but if you have a nice simple tool that just allows you to press a button to create a tunnel and another button to close it down, why bother.  So if you create SSH tunnels from your Apple Mac then take a look at SSH Tunnel Manager.  You might also want to take a look at the other applications that the author has created.

A couple of days ago, I was asked to help one of the technical demonstrator solve a problem. Apparently the master book record for the machine had become corrupted and they needed to repair it, without nuking the whole machine. Ok, that doesn’t sound too hard, put the Windows XP install CD into the machine, boot it and go into the recovery console. Upon entering the recovery console, you are prompted for the administrator’s password. This is where we came across a small problem. The password had been changed some how, and the user couldn’t remember what it had been changed to. So now we’re faced with the problem of needing to reset the administrator’s password on a machine that won’t boot. After a quick Google search I came across “Austumi”, which is a small Linux distro that allows you to monkey around with windows settings including resetting user’s passwords. It’s pretty straight forward to use, and does the job nicely. I hope you don’t ever find yourself in this situation, but if you do then give Austumi a whirl.

I was taking a break from writing yet another psychology experiment when I came across a post talking about a bookmarklet. According to bookmarklets.com they are simple tools that extend the surf and search capabilities of your web browsers. However, I personally don’t think this definition clearly conveys their full potential and flexibility. In fact in the original post by Gina Trapani at LifeHacker.com, she included bookmarklets for looking up acronyms, Wikipedia lookups, viewing and deleting cookies that a site has sent to you, and a whole lot more. It would therefore seem that you are really only limited by your imagination.

I guess if anyone has been checking on my site recently then they will have been confronted with the message that mr-f.org account had been suspended.  The reason for this was a mess up with the billing from the web hosting company.  To further complicate matters, they didn’t bother to contact me before or after they suspended my account and took four weeks to actually reply to my emails.  Needless to say I’ve moved.

Whilst this is hassle as it means I need to slowly reconstruct my site from backup, it also means that I’ve got the opportunity to make the switch from Movable Type to WordPress.