Ari’s Blog

I have to deal with a lot of passwords. Server passwords, website passwords, personal passwords, and more. It used to be very difficult keeping track of all this information. I would commit them to memory and hope I could keep them straight. Now I am much more organized. I use KeePass. KeePass is an open source password manager for Windows. You set a master password on the KeePass databse and store all the indiviual user names and passwords inside.

The Database is encrypted. You can also store the database on the network so multiple people can have access to it. KeePass can create multiple databases (for exapmle – one for personal and one for work). KeePass is extremely flexible and a great password manager.
http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

Road warriors know what a pain it is to have to move there laptop from network to network. Especially when that means manually setting up IP addresses and other settings. What is worse is that when you get back to your own network nothing works because all the settings are wrong – They are set for the previous network.

NetSetMan – The Network Settings Manager is one answer. NetSetMan is a free utility that allows you to set IP information, DNS server, Workgroup and other configuration details with 2 clicks. You can set profiles and switch between them easily.

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Ever have a need for a piece of paper – even though you have a PDA? Or wish you had a calendar handy just to glance at – even though you are surrounded by computers hundreds of time more powerful than the ones that sent man to the moon? I have – enter PocketMod.

PocketMod is a free online application that creates a CUSTOMIZED single piece of paper – that when folded makes a nifty little pocket sized PAA (Personal Analog Assistant).

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For most of us, the idea of buying Adobe Acrobat in order to create a PDF file from a document every now and then is absurd. The program costs craploads 449$. Especially when there is a free and open source alternative. PDFcreator is a program that creates a PDF printer. This lets you turn anything you can print into a PDF file. Have an MS word document you want to turn into a PDF? No Problem! Simply print the document to the PDFcreator printer. PDFcreator will ask you to fill in a few fields of meta data about your document, then ask you where you would like to save it, and Walla! a PDF!

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While we are on the subject of games – There is a great Mod out there for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory called True Combat Elite. True Combat Elite (TCE) allows you to enter the roll of a terrorist or a Special Ops (SpecOps) agent. There are currently 2 types of game play – Objective and Body Count (CTF is coming soon). Objective has the Terrorists planting a bomb or achieving a target and the Special Ops agents have to stop the Terrorists. Body count is similar to team death match.

One of the things that sets TCE apart is the fact that in game play has no cross hairs (unless your weapon has a scope) – You have to use the sight on the gun you are using. You also only have one life in Objective mode. This means no Rambo style game play.

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Enough with utilities – Here is something that is 100% fun.

The world of MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) is filled with graphically intense games like the World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies. Enter the Kingdom of Loathing (KoL). KoL is a MMORPG that has great game play and low end graphics. How low end you ask – Stick figures low. Do not be fooled by the low end graphics – This game is entertaining, complex and incredibly creative.

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Here is a nifty utility that adds a nice bit of functionality to Windows XP (XP only) – Visual Task Tips. You know when you mouse over an application on the start bar it gives you a little tool tip that pops up with a description (like “Microsoft Outlook – Your mail program”). These tips are utterly useless. They add no value. Enter Visual Task Tips: This utility replaces the useless text with a picture of the current window.

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Disclaimer: I used to work for this company – Having said that I would HIGHLY recommend this product in any event.

Answers.com is a free web based knowledge retrieval system. It is not search. It Far Far superior to simple web searching. Web Searching always give you a page that contains the search terms – Answers gives you, well, Answers. For example – lets say you wanted to know about Bluetooth and what it does. With search you would put “bluetooth” into google and get 212,000,0000 results. Many of them selling bluetooth devices. Granted – you could probably find what you were looking for in the first ten results – but it is still a pain to get a basic understanding of a concept (Search – Sort – Read) With Answers you get the information you were looking for in one step. You enter the topic “bluetooth” and you get the following page:

It has a definition, examples, pictures, the wikipedia entry and more.

Now with the Windows client – things got even better! – Answers.com has truly provided information at the user’s fingertips. (more…)