At work we had a problem with a pc where somehow the local administrator account was not accessible anymore, we didn't know the right password or something else was up.
Luckily I found this application: Offline NT password and registry editor, which is a very cool linux bootdisk which can edit your registry, either to reset passwords, or to make other changes.
When changing a user, it offers good documentation and nice menus, which in our case found that the admin account had been locked, and it offered to unlock it and to reset all counters for it, and some other nice automated tricks.
Be aware of the catch that encrypted files for that user are not readable after this trick, but other then that it's a very useful tool.

Today its the 'Day against DRM.
Please take action if you can, to avoid having to go through alot of (illegal) hoops to be able to play your media on your mediadevice or software of choice.
(Yes, this is also googlebombing which the defectivebydesign folks ask to do in one of their action items, please bomb along)

Going to be following this page to see how my former collegue does. If he makes it to millionaire, at least I can say I helped him ;-)
[back to the regular transmission]

When we left home today, I left my frontdoor key on the inside of the frontdoor. We have 2 sets of keys, so I expected no trouble opening the door. Wrong..

The doorlock seems to be of the type where if you have a key on the inside, the one on the outside cant be put in far enough, and it won't open. Problem... We have a balcony door as the only other door to enter our appartement, but a quick investigation at the neighbours balcony told us that that door has no lock on the outside.

After trying to open the door with an old creditcard, which was kinda hopeless as it is a very modern solid door, we decided to call the lockmaker but to also try our last hope of getting in without needing the lockmaker....our Pussycat.

Lotje, as we called her, has a hobby of opening doors. She can open almost any door that isn't locked, and she did open the frontdoor on several occasions.

We sat at the other side of the door, whistling, calling her, trying to draw her attention, and yes, after ten minutes or so she finally got interested enough to open the door to see what all the fuss was about. We finally got in...

We called the lockmaker who returned home without any complaint, and he didn't sound surprised at all that a cat opened the door for us.

lotje on an earlier occasion, opening the door at my parents' house

Rejoice all ye people, for thou are not longer bound to MSN messenger, AIM or whatever other proprietary protocol to talk to your friends.
Google has announced yet another of their 'beta' services, http://talk.google.com.
It is a jabber based service, which makes it easy to talk with people on every platform. Google also launched their own client for Win32 only so far, which, as an extra, has real voice support, a'la Skype etc. Hopefully clients supporting the voice part on other platforms will appear soonish too. If you want to talk to me, I'm datadevil on gmail.com.